After 1965: Movements, Divergence, and Backlash
- Explain why the movement's focus shifted north and toward economic questions
- Compare Black Power, Chicano, American Indian, women's, and gay liberation movements
- Analyze the emergence of the New Right and the Silent Majority
What changed after the legislative victories
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled legal segregation and disfranchisement in the South, and their effects were immediate and enormous — Black registration in Mississippi rose from under seven percent to nearly sixty within three years. What they did not touch was de facto segregation in Northern housing, schools, and employment, none of which rested on statute. So the movement turned north and toward economic questions, and found the going far harder: King's Chicago campaign (1966) met violent white resistance in neighborhoods that had no Jim Crow laws to strike down, and busing fights in Boston in the 1970s were as bitter as anything in the South. King's late work — the Poor People's Campaign, opposition to the Vietnam War, support for the Memphis sanitation strike where he was killed — reflected the judgment that legal equality without economic power was insufficient. The urban uprisings of 1965–68 and the Kerner Commission's finding of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal" framed the problem as national rather than Southern.
Divergence: many movements, shared methods
The mid-1960s produced a cluster of movements that borrowed tactics and diverged in aims. Black Power — Malcolm X, SNCC under Carmichael, the Black Panther Party — emphasized self-determination, self-defense, cultural pride, and community programs such as free breakfast, and rejected integration as the sole goal. The Chicano movement organized farmworkers under César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in the UFW grape boycott, and students in the East LA blowouts. The American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, pressing treaty rights and self-determination; the Indian Self-Determination Act followed in 1975. NOW (1966) pursued legal and workplace equality and the ERA, which passed Congress in 1972 and fell three states short of ratification. Stonewall (1969) launched the modern gay rights movement. And the environmental movement — Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, the EPA and Clean Air and Water Acts — belongs in the same list, since it used the same repertoire of litigation, mass mobilization and media pressure.
Backlash and the New Right
The reaction was as consequential as the movements. Nixon's "Silent Majority" appeal addressed Americans who felt unrepresented by protest and unsettled by disorder, and the Southern Strategy courted white Southern voters as they left the Democratic Party — a realignment visible in Wallace's 1968 third-party run and complete by the 1980s. The New Right assembled several distinct constituencies: economic conservatives against taxes and regulation, whose energy showed in California's Proposition 13 (1978); social conservatives mobilized by Roe v. Wade (1973), school prayer rulings, and Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign; evangelical organizing that became the Moral Majority; and Cold War hawks opposed to détente. Add stagflation, the 1973 oil embargo, defeat in Vietnam, and Watergate's destruction of trust in government, and the ingredients of Period 9 are all present by 1980.
Briefly explain ONE reason the civil rights movement had less success addressing conditions in Northern cities than in the South.
- 1.Identify the difference in the target: Southern segregation was written into law and could be struck down by courts or Congress.
- 2.Describe the Northern situation: segregation in housing, schooling, and employment rested on private practice, lending patterns, and residential geography rather than statute.
- 3.State the consequence: there was no law to overturn, so remedies required redistributing resources and altering neighborhoods, which provoked resistance from white Northerners who had supported Southern desegregation.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was effective primarily because it
Do not treat Black Power as simply the "violent" counterpart to nonviolence. Its central commitments were self-determination, political power, cultural pride, and community institutions, and Panther chapters ran free breakfast and health programs. Armed self-defense was one element among several, and describing it as the whole misreads the sources.
The Great Society: what it did and how it was judged
Johnson's Great Society was the largest expansion of federal social provision since the New Deal, and precision about its record matters because it is politically contested. Medicare and Medicaid covered the elderly and the poor and remain in place. Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act targeted opportunity; HUD and housing acts addressed cities; immigration reform in 1965 abolished national-origins quotas and reshaped American demography for the next half century. The official poverty rate fell from roughly nineteen percent in 1964 to about twelve percent by 1969, and elderly poverty fell furthest. Critics on the right argued the programs created dependency and cost too much; critics on the left argued they were underfunded because Vietnam consumed the money — Johnson himself framed the choice as guns or butter and tried to have both, producing the inflation that dominated the 1970s. That fiscal collision is the most defensible single explanation for why the Great Society stopped growing.
Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign contributed to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment mainly by
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