Democracy: Limitations and Possibilities DBQ

from Columbia University America History Online

During the 1960s, a series of widely disparate protest movements emerged in the
United States. While the antiwar movement directed against U.S. intervention in
the Vietnam War appeared to be the most salient, many of the movements'
leaders and activists expressed discontent with American government and
society. In particular, members of previously underrepresented groups
including students, women, and ethnic minoritiessought a greater role in
determining the goals, values, and policies of the U.S. government. The thread
that tied many of these groups together was a desire to redefine American
democracy to make it more inclusive and responsive to the needs of previously
oppressed or underrepresented groups.
To what extent did various groups seek to redefine American democracy during
the 1960s?
Using the document excerpts (provided below) as well as your knowledge of the period, please
answer the question with respect to three of the following groups:
1. African Americans
2. College and university students
3. Ethnic minorities
4. Government (judges, elected officials, etc.)
5. Women
In answering the question, please be sure to define democracy as widely as possible, keeping
in mind that it encompasses more than voting rights. Pay special attention to how demands for
social and economic justice were added to concepts of democracy that were more traditional.

A. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

Primary source: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, book, 1963.
Background information: In her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty
Friedan (b. 1921) explained that many middle-class women found their roles as wives and
mothers unfulfilling. The book helped to spark a new wave of feminism in the 1960s and
1970s.
[...]
. . . [O]nce she [the American woman] asks herself "What do I want to do?" she begins to find
her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique [the
housewife's perception of entrapment]and realizes that neither her husband nor her children,
nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self
she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated.
[...]
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 338.

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B. Martin Luther King Jr. Addresses March on Washington

Primary source: Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech, 1963.
Background information: A pivotal moment in the civil-rights movement was the March on
Washington in 1963. There the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (192968) expressed the
hopes of millions in his stirring "I Have a Dream" speech.
The text of "I Have a Dream" is available at http://www.stanford.edu/.
Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August
1963, at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/address_at_march_on_washington.pdf.

C. Free Speech Movement

Primary source: Free Speech Movement Newsletter, "For Free Speech 824-115," statement,
1964.
Background information: In 1964 at the Berkeley campus of the University of California,
students, many of them active in the civil-rights movement, protested the university
administration's rule forbidding them to distribute leaflets on the school's campus. Thus began
what came to be known as the free-speech movement. \
[...]
The source of their power is clear enough: the guns and the clubs of the Highway Patrol, the
banks and corporations of the Regents. But what is the source of our power?
It is something we see everywhere on campus but find hard to define. Perhaps it was best
expressed by the sign one boy pinned to his chest: "I am a UC student. Please don't bend,
fold, spindle or mutilate me." The source of our strength is, very simply, the fact that we are
human beings and so cannot forever be treated as raw materialsto be processed. Clark Kerr
[president of the University of California] has declared, in his writings and by his conduct, that
a university must be like any other factorya place where workers who handle raw material
are themselves handled like raw material by the administrators above them. Kerr is confident
that in his utopia "there will not be any revolt, anyway, except little bureaucratic revolts that
can be handled piecemeal."
[...]
"For Free Speech 824-115," in Free Speech Movement Newsletter, no. 5 (December 10, 1964). Full text
available online at http://texts.cdlib.org/dynaxml/servlet/dynaXML?
docId=kt3s2002zf&doc.view=entire_text.

D. Civil Rights Act, 1964

Primary source: U.S. Congress, Civil Rights Act, federal law, 1964.
Background information: Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (190873) succeeded to the
presidency after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (191763) in November 1963.
Drawing on his long experience as a U.S. senator, President Johnson spearheaded
congressional passage of key pieces of civil-rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964, excerpted below, provides for equal access to all public accommodations,
thereby abolishing the federal government's tacit acceptance of or acquiescence to segregation
between blacks and whites.
[...]
. . . All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services,
facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public

accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground

of race, color, religion, or national origin.
[...]
. . . Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that any person or group
of persons is engaged in a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of any of the
rights secured by this title, and that the pattern or practice is of such a nature and is intended
to deny the full exercise of the rights herein described, the Attorney General may bring a civil
action in the appropriate district court of the United States by filing with it a complaint . . .
requesting such preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary
injunction, restraining order or other order against the person or persons responsible for such
pattern or practice, as he deems necessary to insure the full enjoyment of the rights herein
described.
[...]
Civil Rights Act of 1964, U.S. Statutes at Large 78 (1964): 24168. Full text of the act is at Our
Documents, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97.

E. Miranda Decision
Primary source: U.S. Supreme Court, Miranda v. Arizona, Supreme Court decision, 1966.
Background information: In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
law-enforcement officials are required to inform the accused of their legal rights.
[...]
Mr. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court.
The cases before us raise questions which go to the roots of our concepts of American criminal
jurisprudence: the restraints society must observe consistent with the Federal Constitution in
prosecuting individuals for crime. More specifically, we deal with the admissibility of statements
obtained from an individual who is subjected to custodial police interrogation and the necessity
for procedures which assure that the individual is accorded his privilege under the Fifth
Amendment to the Constitution not to be compelled to incriminate himself....
[...]
Our holding . . . briefly stated . . . is this: the prosecution may not use statements, whether
exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it
demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against selfincrimination....
[...]

F. National Organization for Women

Primary source: National Organization for Women, statement of purpose, 1966.
Background information: The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966
and soon became the most prominent organization promoting the causes of the women's
movement.
[...]
Despite all the talk about the status of American women in recent years, the actual position of
women in the United States has declined, and is declining, to an alarming degree throughout
the 1950's and 60's. Although 46.4% of all American women between the ages of 18 and 65
now work outside the home, the overwhelming majority75%are in routine clerical, sales,
or factory jobs, or they are household workers, cleaning women, hospital attendants. About
two-thirds of Negro women workers are in the lowest paid service occupations. Working

women are becoming increasinglynot lessconcentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. As
a consequence full-time women workers today earn on the average only 60% of what men
earn, and that wage gap has been increasing over the past twenty-five years in every major
industry group....
Further, with higher education increasingly essential in today's society, too few women are
entering and finishing college or going on to graduate or professional school....
In all the professions considered of importance to society, and in the executive ranks of
industry and government, women are losing ground. Where they are present it is only a token
handful....
[...]
. . . There is no civil rights movement to speak for women, as there has been for Negroes and
other victims of discrimination. The National Organization for Women must therefore begin to
speak.
[...]
National Organization for Women, "Statement of Purpose" (1966), in America through the Eyes of Its
People: Primary Sources in American History, ed. Bruce Borland, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 336
37, reproduced at http://www.now.org/history/purpos66.html.

G. Robert F. Kennedy Runs for President

Primary source: Robert F. Kennedy, announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic
nomination for president, speech, 1968.
Background information: Many Americans who supported President Johnson's (190873)
domestic policy, which included the War on Poverty, were critical of the president's decision to
escalate U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As antiwar sentiment grew, Robert F. Kennedy
(192568), U.S. senator from New York, announced that he would run against President
Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. In his speech he addressed the
nation's domestic problems and appealed to African Americans, Latinos, women, and the poor.
[...]
I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run
because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I am obliged to
do all I can. I run to seek new policiespolicies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our
cities, policies to close the gaps between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, in this
country and around the world....
[...]
As a member of the Cabinet and a member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly
deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts, young
Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they lack all hope and they feel they
have no future, and proud, able-bodied families to wait our their lives in empty idleness in
Eastern Kentucky. I have traveled and listened to the young people of our Nation and felt their
anger about the war they are sent to fight and the world they are about to inherit....
[...]
Robert F. Kennedy's announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president,
Washington Post, 17 March 1968, p. A6. Full text is at
http://www.rfkmemorial.org/RFK/68_announcement.htm.

H. Black Power
Primary source: Charles V. Hamilton, "An Advocate of Black Power Defines It," essay, 1968.
Background information: Many African Americans grew frustrated with the economic and
social forms of discrimination they still encountered despite passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964. In the face of their increasing restiveness, many black leaders invoked the term black
power. In 1968, Charles V. Hamilton, professor of political science at Columbia, explained that
the term meant different things to different people.
[...]
Black Power is concerned with organizing the rage of black people and with putting new, hard
questions and demands to white America. As we do this, white America's responses will be
crucial to the questions of violence and viability. Black Power must (1) deal with the obviously
growing alienation of black people and their distrust of the institutions of this society; (2) work
to create new values and to build a new sense of community and of belonging; and (3) work to
establish legitimate new institutions that make participants, not recipients, out of a people
traditionally excluded from the fundamentally racist processes of this country. There is nothing
glamorous about this; it involves persistence and hard, tedious, day-to-day work.
[...]
Charles V. Hamilton, "An Advocate of Black Power Defines It," New York Times Magazine, 14 April 1968, p.
2223, 7983.

I. Chicano Liberation
Primary source: Corky Gonzales, "What Political Road for the Chicano Militant?" speech,
1969.
Background information: While some Mexican Americans sought to improve their standard
of living by fighting for greater economic justice under the leadership of Cesar Chavez (1927
93) (founder of the United Farm Workers of America), Corky Gonzales and other Mexican
Americans sought political self-determination for the Chicano people.
[...]
We [Mexican-Americans] have to understand that liberation comes from self-determination,
and to start to use the tools of nationalism to win over our barrio brothers, to win over the
brothers who are still believing that machismo means getting a gun and going to kill a
Communist in Vietnam because they've been jived about the fact that they will be accepted as
long as they go get themselves killed for the gringo captain; who still think that welfare is
giving them something and don't understand that the one who is administering the welfare is
the one that's on welfare, because, about 90 percent of the welfare goes into administration;
and who still do not understand that the war on poverty is against the poor, to keep them from
reacting.
[...]
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, "What Political Road for the Chicano Militant?" The Militant (March 30, 1970),
and reprinted in Readings on La Raza: The Twentieth Century, ed. Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 24647.

J. American Indians Occupy Alcatraz

Primary source: Indians of All Tribes, "Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His
People," statement, 1969.
Background information: In 1968, American Indians claiming a long history of oppression at
the hands of white Americans organized the American Indian Movement (AIM). AIM and other

groups staged a series of actions to further their cause. From 1969 to 1971, the organization
Indians of All Tribes occupied the abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. In the
proclamation excerpted here they explain their reasons.
To the Great White Father and All His People:
We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all
American Indians by right of discovery. . . .
We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as
determined by the white man's own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles
most Indian reservations in that:
1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. The sanitation facilities are inadequate.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health care facilities....
[...]
Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden
Gate [at San Francisco harbor], would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true
history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free
and noble Indians.
[...]
Indians of All Tribes, "Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His People" (November 1969),
reprinted in Troy R. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of
Indian Activism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 535. The full text (with some
differences) is available at http://www.cwis.org/fwdp/Americas/alcatraz.htm.