It All Began in Greensboro

Alexander Cockburn gives his take on the beginnings of social change in the sixties:

Half a century ago, a new decade ushered in the rebirth of the American left and of those forces for radical change grievously wounded by the savage cold war pogroms of the Fifties. If you want to draw a line to indicate when history took a great leap forward, it could be February 1, 1960, when four black students from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, , sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The chairs were for whites. Blacks had to stand and eat. A day later they returned, with 25 more students. On February 4 four white women joined them from a local college. By February 7, there were 54 sit-ins throughout the South in 15 cities in 9 states. By July 25 the store, part of a huge national chain, and plagued by $200,000 in lost business, threw in the towel and officially desegregated the lunch counter. (Last week here on our site we had a piece by one of the participants in that sit-in, Cecil Brown, about the new museum in Greensboro honoring that event, and Obama’s letter doing the same.)

Three months later, the city of Raleigh, NC, 80 miles east of Greensboro, saw the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. SNCC’s first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the "sullen, angry and determined look" of the protesters, qualitatively different from the "defensive, cringing" expression common to most photos of protesters in the South.

That same spring of 1960 saw the founding conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor Michigan, the organization that later played a leading role in organizing the college-based component of the antiwar movement. In May the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was scheduled to hold red-baiting hearings in San Francisco. Students from the University of California at Berkeley crossed the Bay to jeer the hearings. They got blasted off the steps of City Hall by cops with power houses, but the ridicule helped demolish the decade-long power of HUAC.

Within four short years the Civil Rights Movement pushed Lyndon Johnson into signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 1965 the first big demonstrations against the war were rolling into Washington. By the decade’s end there had been a convulsion in American life: a new reading of America’s past, an unsparing scrutiny of the ideology of “national security” and of Empire. The secret, shameful histories of the FBI and CIA were dragged into the light of day, the role of the universities in servicing imperial wars exposed; mutinies of soldiers in Vietnam a daily occurrence; consumer capitalism under daily duress from critics like Ralph Nader. By 1975 the gay and women’s movements were powerful social forces; president Nixon had been forced to resign. The left seem poised for an assertive role in American politics for the next quarter century.