文化分析： 美国1960年代的社会运动是否对社会起了正面积极有效的推动作用？（大意如此，原文不记得了）

Social Movements of the 1960s

On February 1, 1960, 4 freshmen from a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to a store and sat down at a lunch counter.
When they asked for coffee, the waitress said she could not serve people like them. The students, believing the segregation law which kept black and white people from eating together was wrong, did not move.

The manager came and talked to the students. A policeman walked up and down behind them, holding his stick. The students continued to sit at the counter. People crowded into the store to watch what might happen, until the store closed. The next day, a greater number of students came to the store and sat down at the lunch counter. Day after day, additional students came.

This quiet "sit-in" by black students in Greensboro began the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the first of several social movements during that decade.

One American historian, Howard Zinn, describes how the protests spread after the first sit-in in Greensboro in 1960: "In the next twelve months, more than fifty thousand people, mostly black, some white, participated in demonstrations of one kind or another in a hundred cities, and over 3 600 people were put in jail. But by the end of 1960, lunch counters were open to blacks in Greensboro and many other places."
The civil rights movement, and the youth anti-war, and the women's liberation movements which followed, had long roots in United States history. However, many people who worked in the 1960s movements believed they were creating something new and exciting which would make deep changes in American society.

　　"We shall overcome!" black Americans sang, affirming their commitment to fight racial prejudice.

　　"Let it all hang out!" young people advised each other, defying their parents, who controlled their emotions and tried to keep personal matters from becoming public.

　　"Hell, no, we won't go." anti-war demonstrators chanted, refusing government orders to be drafted into the army and fight in Vietnam.
　　"Speak your heart without interruption," women encouraged each other in "consciousness-raising" groups which helped women recognize how they were being held back by a society in which men dominated politics, economics, the family, and even private conversation.
Why Did the Social Movements Begin?
Why did Black Americans risk their lives breaking the law and defying the Ku Klux Klan? Why did young people disobey their parents, school administrators, and civil and military authorities? What brought women out of their homes into public demonstrations for Civil Rights, against the War in Vietnam and for their own liberation from male dominance? And why did these social movements become strong in the 1960s?



During the fifteen years between the end of World War II and the 1960s, many American men worked hard to achieve their dreams. The federal government subsidized education and home ownership for veterans of World War II and the Korean War. They remembered the hard times of the depression of the 1930s and believed they could protect their families by working hard for long hours. Many of them encouraged their wives to stay in their middle-class homes in the suburbs, raising their three or four children. They believed they were living the American Dream.

However, there were some people in the United States who had a different idea of what the American Dream was. In the 1960s, three groups—Afro-Americans, young people and women—were dissatisfied with their lives.

During World War II, many American Negroes had a taste of life outside the South. Some earned good salaries in the war industry and in government jobs; others joined the army or navy. Their children attended high school and college. They knew that life in the segregated South, where Negroes were prevented from working at good jobs and getting a good education, was not the American way of life.

Middle-class white women were well-educated and had the opportunity to work in responsible jobs for good pay during World War II. But when men returned from the war, they were given the good jobs. Women earned less money and had fewer opportunities to advance than men working in the same jobs, or they became housewives, isolated at home with their children.
Many young people resented traditional white male values in U.S. society. They believed their fathers, who worked long hours away from home to earn money for themselves and their families, were selfish. Young women did not want to follow their mothers' examples, staying home doing unpaid work, or working outside the home for low pay. Young people believed they had the right to choose the way they would live their lives. They wanted to work at jobs which were interesting, not just work to make money. They thought that they knew better than their teachers.
When the US army began to fight in Vietnam, many people thought the war was wrong. They did not understand why US troops were fighting in Asia. Young people, black and white, did not want to join the army and fight in Vietnam. Mothers did not want their sons drafted into the army.

Who Worked in the Social Movements?

Many people who believed the government and the society were wrong joined one or more of the social movements. Black and white young people worked in all the movements, as did many middle-class white women and some men.

Those who worked in the civil rights movement included older, usually male, Negro leaders; black and white young people, some white professional men and women, and some white housewives.

Young people who were rebelling against their teachers, parents and government authorities joined the youth movement. There were few older people involved, since many of the young people believed they could not trust anyone over thirty years old. However, many middle class white people, especially women, as well as lower and middle class black Americans, actively supported young people in the anti-war movement. They burned draft cards, held large rallies and marched in protest of the government war policy.
The women who formed the women's movement included professionals; educated women of color; young or middle-aged white housewives and mothers, as well as young activists.

Not only did some of the same people work in several movements, but the movements also used many of the same strategies and tactics, and songs. When the civil rights movement began, nonviolent, direct action tactics like "sit-ins" and boycotts were used to protest segregation laws. Young people also used "sit-ins" at the administration offices of their schools and added "teach-ins" to educate people about the war in Vietnam. The civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the women's movement all used the legal system to test laws and to force changes. In all the movements, workers gathered public support by holding large rallies and marches to educate people about oppression and discrimination, to inform people about the movements, and to recruit new members.


What Is a Social Movement?

There are many definitions of "social movement". One professor argues that "a social movement is a type of behavior in which a large number of participants consciously attempt to change existing institutions and establish a new order of life." In other words, people work together to change government policies and society. Another professor says all social movements have two basic characteristics: "structure and spontaneity." There must be one or more organizations (structure) and people's actions should come from themselves (spontaneity). Other necessary parts of a social movement are:

　　1. a social base of people who can communicate with each other about the same problem such as black church members in the civil rights movement.

　　2. a "message" or ideology that names a problem and shows how to solve it. Nonviolent civil disobedience used in sit-ins, women's rallies demanding equal pay for equal work are such messages.

　　3. the ability to spread the message and get more supporters. Mass rallies and marches are held to attract media coverage for supporting a movement. Therefore, social movements need ideas for social change, collective action to make the change, and organization to direct the action and attract supporters.


The Civil Rights Movement

Segregation laws in Southern states in the US prevented black and white people from sitting together in movie theaters, eating in the same restaurants, drinking from the same water fountain, using the same washrooms or riding together on buses or trains. Black and white children could not go to the same schools, and most Negroes were not allowed to vote. Although these segregation laws were illegal under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, the US government would not declare the Southern laws unconstitutional until there were cases brought in federal courts. The civil rights movement began when black people spontaneously protested segregation laws and created organizations to make the protests successful. Long before the students in Greensboro, North Carolina began their sit-ins, there were many others who protested the segregation laws.


Women Speak up Their Minds

The spontaneous action of one woman, Rosa Parks, was believed to be the true beginning of the civil rights movement, 5 years before the Greensboro students "sit-in."

In 1955, Rosa Parks, tired from working all day, boarded a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. According to Alabama law, only white people could sit in the front of the bus. Since the back of the bus was full, Rosa Parks sat down in an empty seat in the middle of the bus. When the bus driver told her to get up and give her seat to a white man, she refused to do so. Rosa Parks was tired of segregation laws which kept black people from having the same rights as white people. She was arrested by the police for not giving her seat to the white man. From jail, she called the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help.

NAACP members raised money for bail to release Ms Parks from jail. They also informed other organizations about her act of civil disobedience. Black people in Montgomery, Alabama spontaneously began to boycott the bus system, refusing to ride on public buses. They spread the news of the bus boycott to church members at Sunday church services. Ministers and other church leaders organized cars and drivers to take Negroes to work and organized groups to walk together for protection against violence from white racists.

From Rosa Parks' spontaneous action of nonviolent civil disobedience, and from the social base of Negro churches, community and political organizations, grew support for protest against segregation. The civil rights movement began to spread all over the South. As a result, segregation was breaking down in the 1960s.

Organizations

One reason that the sit-ins in Greensboro were successful was that black students had formed a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was the third main organization in the civil rights movement, the others being the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). These three groups provided the leadership, the nonviolent tactics, the network and the people to fight against Southern segregation. . CORE was founded by James Farmer and others who used nonviolent direct action to integrate restaurants in Chicago in the 1940s. In 1947, CORE members, Negro and white, joined other groups in a nonviolent "freedom ride" to integrate buses and bus stations in the South. Freedom rides became an integration strategy in the 1960s. The strongest leadership came from the SCLC, headed by Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. This regional group, organized in 1957 to link Southern Negro churches in the work for civil rights, was begun by church ministers who were the moral and cultural leaders of Negro communities. Ministers, who met regularly in regional meetings, worked together across state lines. It was convenient for the ministers to pass information to their members and organize activities because church members met weekly for meetings of church organizations and for church services.

SNCC was founded by a group of students who wanted to end all forms of racial domination. Ella Baker, SCLC executive director, helped the students organize. SNCC, unlike SCLC, had a collective leadership which followed the principle, "Let the people decide." SNCC taught their members to be nonviolent when they protested segregation laws in Southern states, even when they were beaten and arrested. SNCC moved quickly from being just a "coordinating committee" to organizing direct action in the deep South. At the beginning of the movement, the base of their membership was the large number of black students in the South.

Direct Action Tactics

Civil rights activists first used "sit-in" tactics to fight segregation and later, "freedom rides". Black and white CORE members traveling together on buses to challenge segregation laws were badly beaten by white mobs in South Carolina and Alabama. When CORE decided to end the freedom rides, SNCC workers decided to continue. SNCC Freedom Riders rode buses into Mississippi, where they were beaten and arrested. An increasing number of students joined the freedom rides until the Mississippi jails had no more places for prisoners. In September 1961, the federal government declared segregation illegal in all interstate bus stations which served buses traveling to another state.

The next important direct action of the three civil rights organizations was voter registration. Voting laws in southern states tried to prevent Negroes from voting. As anti-segregation and voting registration work continued in 1962 and 1963, civil rights workers were beaten, jailed and murdered in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

In the summer of 1963, hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators went to Washington, D.C., where Martin Luther King gave the famous speech "I have a dream." That same year, 4 black girls were killed when whites bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama. Northern white students began to go to the South to work with SNCC and other civil rights groups. While civil rights workers were beaten and murdered in the South, news of the assassination of President Kennedy in Texas shocked the country. Americans were further shocked when the man charged with President Kennedy's assassination was murdered in front of TV cameras.

In 1964, hundreds of volunteers from all over the country came to Mississippi to register Negroes to vote. Violence against civil rights workers increased. One white and two black workers were murdered. To improve the racial relations, the Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson in the summer of 1964. In December 1964, Martin Luther King was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Changes

In January 1965, President Johnson began his "war on poverty". As racial violence continued, black people began to question the nonviolent tactics used in the South, and black leaders in other parts of the country spoke in favor of black separatism and against nonviolence in fighting discrimination and racism. One strong black leader was Malcolm X, a black Moslem leader who worked in northern ghettos. He believed that blacks should arm themselves and fight the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorists. Although he and Martin Luther King both worked to end discrimination and raise the self-image of blacks, they disagreed about the means to achieve their goal. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York.

Murders of black and white civil rights workers in the South increased. People continue to see white violence against nonviolent blacks on TV. That summer, black people rioted in the Watts section of Los Angeles in response to white violence.

SNCC was also changing. Many of the members, tired of being beaten and watching their friends beaten, began to think the tactic of nonviolence was wrong. Some members also thought they needed one strong leader rather than collective leadership. They elected a new chairman, Stokeley Carmichae）l, who believed that black people should work to end discrimination without the help of white people. He spoke about "black power" .

In June 1966, the first black student to enter the University of Mississippi, began a "march against fear", walking all alone through Mississippi. He was shot and seriously injured. The civil rights leaders decided to continue the march, under these conditions: no white people would march with them; they would be defended by the Deacons for Defense of Justice, a black, armed organization; and they would organize independent black organizations in the places wherever they marched.

The leaders who did not agree with these ideas left the movement. As the civil rights leaders continued the "march against fear," they were viciously attacked by white police and arrested. When Stokeley Carmichael was released from jail, he told a large crowd, "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested --and I ain't going to jail no more!" He said that from now on, the black people would be shouting, "Black Power!" In 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was organized in Oakland. Their major work was to enforce civil rights laws, telling black people of their rights. Martin Luther King disagreed. Although he understood why black people wanted black power, he thought the idea would be misunderstood by the media, and in the end would defeat the movement. Black power, he said, should come through programs, not slogans.

1968 was another violent year. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Tennessee. Many black people believed the FBI was responsible. Rioting broke out in black communities in 125 cities in 28 states. Robert Kennedy, who was running for president, was also assassinated.

The Youth Movement /Anti-War Movement

After working in the South during "Freedom Summer" 1964, many white students from the North changed greatly, both in appearance and in their attitudes and beliefs. When they returned to their college campuses in September, they continued to wear the same overalls and other farmers' clothing they had worn in the South, and they did not cut their hair. They had lost respect for authority after seeing their friends beaten and arrested by Southern policemen and sentenced to jail for long terms by Southern judges; they had seen Southern mayors and governors refusing to obey federal laws. They gave speeches about the civil rights movement, about nonviolence, and the need to change society and worked to gain support for the civil rights movement.


In October 1964, a CORE organizer sat at a small table on a sidewalk at the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, distributing information and collecting money. The chief of the campus police and two university deans came to his table informing him that what he was doing was against university policy. The CORE organizer refused to stop. He stated that university authorities should not keep CORE from recruiting new workers for the civil rights movement in the South and that the university's rule was illegal under the 1st and 14th Amendments. to the United States Constitution. When the police chief arrested him a large crowd of students gathered, shouting, "Arrest all of us!" A police car came and the CORE organizer was put inside. The crowd of students spontaneously surrounded the car and sat down on the ground, preventing the police car from moving.


Draft Card Burning at an Anti-War Rally

Mario Savio, a student who had just returned from working with SNCC in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, took off his shoes and stood on top of the police car. He demanded that the CORE worker be freed and the rules against free speech be changed.18

The students sat around the car for 32 hours in spontaneous, nonviolent, direct action. Other students "sat-in" at the administration buildings and organized "Free University" classes. The California governor called hundreds of police to the campus. 800 students were arrested. Graduate students organized a strike and closed the university. The teachers and professors voted to change the rule that violated the 1st and 14th Amendments. The young people's "Free Speech Movement" began with success.


Social Movement in the 1960's


As the youth movement spread outside the campuses, some young people formed a "counter-culture." They rejected capitalism and other American principles. They had morals that were different from those taught by their parents. The "Hippies"called themselves the "love generation." Happiness became their only goal in life. Their music was different from any other music, and the words they sang sounded rebellious to older people. Small groups of youth lived together in cities like San Francisco, turning their lives into one big party. They wore long hair, strange and colorful clothes and many of them used drugs. They went in huge numbers to rock music concerts.And they made very interesting news on TV.

College students, and some high-school students, were "dropping out" of school. Some became Hippies and dropped out of society. Others left the country to avoid the army.

The anti-war movement became more organized as a loose coalition of many organizations and leaders was formed under a series of "Mobilization Committees to End the War in Vietnam." The organizations included church groups, SNCC, SDS, and many smaller groups which were formed to protest the war. Their direct action strategies included teach-ins on college campuses, protest marches and rallies, and attacks on federal offices to destroy draft records by radical anti-war groups. Public support for the anti-war movement grew stronger, although most people in the U.S. did not support radical acts of violence. As the U. S. government sent more troops to Vietnam and the number of war death grew, public feeling against government policy grew so strong that President Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968.

The Women's Movement

The women's movement in the 1960s was started by three groups of women and an accident. The first was a group of professional women who were appointed to a Commission on the Status of Women by President Kennedy in 1961. Most were not feminists until they began to investigate the situation for women in the United States. They found that women in the U. S. were not equal with men, and the situation of some women was shocking. So they recommended that Commissions be established in all 50 states, and the number of women working on Commissions soon grew to over 1000.



The second group were mostly white housewives and mothers who read Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963.20 The book changed the way large numbers of women—between 10000 and 20000—thought about themselves and other women.

The third group were young activists in the civil rights and anti-war movements. They believed the male leaders of these movements were discriminating against women in the movement. They became known as the "women's liberation" group, or "women's lib", used radical tactics and received a great deal of bad publicity. This group found strong support among large numbers of young activists from other organizations.

The accident was a word in the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. The law made discrimination in employment based on race or sex illegal, adding women to those groups not to be discriminated against.

From these three groups and the almost accidental word, began the women's movement. There was, of course, a long history of women working for equal rights before this, just as there had been a long history of Afro-American effort for equal rights. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed by the first two groups. Many radical, active
Mrs. Rosa Parks

feminists joined as the movement grew stronger. Many of the radicals were young women, both black and white, who had worked in the civil rights movement and were critical of the leadership for discriminating against women. Women were strong leaders and organizers, they said, but the men only allowed them to cook and do secretarial work.

The changes women worked for included changes in economic practices, such as not only asking equal pay for equal work, but also equal opportunity for jobs in fields such as science and technology, management and politics. Women also wanted changes in social practices and attitudes which would acknowledge that women were not inferior to men in intelligence or ability.

To educate the public and gain support for their objectives, women used many of the same tactics used by the civil rights and anti-war movements and added some of their own tactics. The newspapers and TV made the women in the movement seem to be men-hating women who did not want to be feminine. Women worked hard in the 1970s to change this image.

Conclusion

Legal segregation ended in the South as a result of the civil rights movement. Southern Afro-Americans can vote. However, racism is still an extremely serious social, political and economic problem in the U.S.

By 1971, more than 60% of people in the U.S. thought the war in Vietnam was wrong and wanted the war to end. In 1973 the US signed a peace treaty.

The women's movement continues to gain more rights and opportunities for women. However, in the mid-1990s, the number of women in leadership in government and business corporations is still very low. Many more women work for pay outside their homes, however, and many more men are doing housework with their wives.

The social movements of the 1960s had a strong effect on the way people think and act, and caused changes in many laws. However, many of the same problems they hoped to solve are still major problems in US society.

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