1960's Reforms
The Great SOciety
What was it?
The Great Society was a series of social programs passed in the 1960s by President Lyndon B. Johnson. They covered a broad spectrum of categories, ranging from healthcare to Civil Rights to school lunches. The Great Society was both a continuation of the earlier programs initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal, and an introduction to a variety of new ones. The most controversial program of the Great Society was Medicare, a healthcare institution that some saw as communist. The Great Society also made it possible for people to vote unrestricted regardless of race or gender and immigrate regardless of national origin. It increased regulations on business, instituted greater environmental control, and provided funds for low-income housing and public schools. However, the Great Society was ended with the onset of the Vietnam War, due to the re-appropriation of funds.
Why's It Important?
The Great Society saw the expansion of the American Welfare State and set in stone that the programs of the New Deal were there to stay. Most importantly, a great deal of Great Society programs still exist today (Huh huh huh. Word play). However, the Great Society and its aftermath would culminate in the conservative resurgence and the New Right in which distrust for the government would overstep the benefits of the Great Society programs themselves.
Civil Rights Movement
WHAT Was it?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t read the other pages of this website, you’ll know that minorities, especially Blacks, didn’t have the greatest of times in American history. The Civil Rights Movement was the point at which that began to change. The Civil Rights Movement, while beginning in the 1950s, really took shape during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s. Under the leadership of advocates such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., African-Americans peacefully demonstrated against segregation and discrimination. Their efforts would legally culminate in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. The former outlawed discrimination in public places based on race or sex, and the latter reaffirmed the same for voting rights. However, the de facto side of discrimination persisted, and many became fed up with the true lack of progress from peaceful protests and began to flock to more radical leaders such as Malcolm X and others who advocated the idea of “black power.” Their efforts would result in riots, conflicts, and overall violence. In the end, however, the Civil Rights Movement was engulfed and overstepped by the Anti-War Movement and the matter was never truly unified again.
Why's it important?
The Civil Rights movement marked the first time that minorities (and women) banded together as a centralized force in order to protest for equal rights. It marked a continuation of the mass governmental reforms that dominated the 1960s, as indicated by the notion that the United States could not legitimately fight for democracy abroad while so blatantly and systematically denying it to a number of groups domestically. To put it simply, the Civil Rights Movement saw the end of the fight for de jure equal rights that had been raging for centuries, but also saw the beginning of the fight for de facto.