H4 : THE 1960S IN THE UNITED STATES

Although best associated with its counter-culture and music, the 1960s was a
tremendously turbulent decade both domestically and internationally for the United States. As
historians George B. Tindall and David E. Shi stated : “Many social ills which had been
festering for decades suddenly forced their way onto the national agenda.” The “Sixties” as
they became known, started off as a continuation of the socially conservative and
materialistic 1950s—itself an outgrowth of WWII—but quickly changed as many different
groups pushed for equality.
The Sixties have left a lasting impact on the American imagination, and their memory
has not faded in the United States. Some, like Bill Clinton, have fond memories of that era
(music and marijuana), but many others (conservative Republicans) reject those years and
blame them (racial and urban violence, moral relativism, etc.). In overall, the 1960s were in
the United States a period of intense social and cultural shift.
In 1960, television screens were black and white, the country was entrenched in the Cold
War, and morals remained conventional: President Kennedy wore a suit and top hat during the
ceremonies of his inauguration on January 21, 1961. Racial segregation, challenged since
1954, was still legal in most Southern states, and Blacks—who were not yet claiming the
designation of African-Americans—occupied only subordinate positions in social life and the
professional world. The traditional family was at the heart of society, and the birth rate was
higher than in other developed countries.
Ten years later, this apparent calm had been replaced by an atmosphere of noise and fury.
Political assassination became commonplace: John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King, and Robert Kennedy were the most well-known victims. From 1965, racial riots erupted
in many different cities : LA, Newark, Detroit. Demonstrations against racism, against the
Vietnam War, multiplied, leading the most fearful to believe that the United States was on the
brink of civil war. At the same time, a revolution in customs was underway. The student
youth rejected the heavy conformity of their parents and resonated with the sounds of Bob
Dylan, John Coltrane, or the Beatles ; fashion was disrupted by fantasy and provocation. This
upheaval reached its climax in 1969 on the muddy grounds of Woodstock, New York ; the
music festival brought together more participants than the anti-war demonstrations in the rain
before ending in nights of pleasure and madness.

I. THE US AND THE WORLD

The Vietnam War, formally from 1955 to 1975, but strictly from 1964 to 1975, was rooted
in centuries of imperialism and colonialism, especially from China and France. Nationalist
movements emerged, led by figures like Ho Chi Minh, who founded the Viet Minh to fight
for independence. Following World War II, Vietnam declared independence under Ho Chi
Minh, but France sought to regain control, leading to the First Indochina War. The conflict
escalated, and in 1954, the Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam into North and
South.
The United States, driven by Cold War fears and the domino theory (which believed that the
“fall” of North Vietnam to Communism might trigger all of Southeast Asia to fall, setting off
a sort of Communist chain reaction) intervened to support South Vietnam against communist
forces from 1955 onwards. However, the South Vietnamese government, led by Ngo Dinh
Diem, proved corrupt and unpopular. Despite U.S. efforts, the Viet Cong, backed by Ho Chi
Minh's North Vietnamese forces, gained strength.
After North Vietnamese forces allegedly attacked U.S. Navy ships during the Gulf of Tonkin
Incident in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered intense airstrikes, and the
deployment of nearly 400,000 U.S. troops. U.S. involvement only deepened afterwards.
However, the war became a quagmire, with U.S. strategies failing to defeat the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese Army.
In 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched a massive campaign called
the Tet Offensive. It proved a turning point, eroding public support for the war and fueling
antiwar protests. Richard Nixon pursued a policy of Vietnamization, gradually withdrawing
U.S. troops in favor of local troops while expanding bombing campaigns into neighboring
countries.
In 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, leading to the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
However, fighting continued between North and South Vietnam. With the Watergate scandal
engulfing Nixon, North Vietnamese forces seized Saigon (present-day Ho-Chi Minh-Ville) in
1975, reunifying Vietnam under communist rule and ending the war. The Fall of Saigon
remained a shocking visualization of the failure of the US involvement : scenes of chaos and
desperation unfolded as US diplomatic members, South Vietnamese civilians and military
personnel attempted to flee the city in haste, by helicopter.

II. POLITICS AND ECONOMY

THE KENNEDY PROMISE (1960-1963)
The arrival of the Kennedys in the White House seemed to signal a new age of youth,
optimism, and confidence.
The son of Joseph P. Kennedy, a wealthy Boston business owner, former ambassador to
Great Britain, and appointed by F.D. Roosevelt as the first head of the SEC in 1934, John
F. Kennedy graduated from Harvard University and went on to serve in the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1946. Even though he was young and inexperienced, his reputation as a
war hero who had saved the crew of his PT boat after it was destroyed by the Japanese helped
him to win election over more seasoned candidates, as did his father’s fortune.
Kennedy’s popular reputation as a great politician undoubtedly owes much to the style and
attitude he personified. After decades of sheltered presidents of significant age, symbolizing
times of crisis (FDR, Eisenhower), he and his wife Jacqueline conveyed a sense of optimism
and youthfulness. Kennedy was the second-youngest president ever elected to the office, and
the first one to be born in the 20th century. “Jackie” was an elegant first lady who wore
designer dresses, served French food in the White House, and invited classical musicians to
entertain at state functions. “Jack” Kennedy, or JFK, went sailing off the coast of his family’s
Cape Cod estate and socialized with celebrities.
Nowhere was Kennedy’s style more evident than in the first televised presidential debate held
on September 23, 1960, between him and his Republican opponent Vice President Richard M.
Nixon. Seventy million viewers watched the debate on television; millions more heard it on
the radio.
Kennedy spoke of a “new frontier”, promising at a 1962 speech at Rice University that
American astronauts would set foot on the moon before the end of the decade – a moved
intended to make up for the US backwardness in the Space race compared to Soviet space
programs.
He promoted the expansion of programs to aid the poor, protect African Americans’
right to vote, and improve African Americans’ employment and education
opportunities.
However, despite promises, Kennedy focused for the most part on foreign policy and
countering the threat of Communism —especially in Cuba, where he successfully defused the
Cuban Missile Crisis, and in Vietnam, to which he sent advisors and troops to support the
South Vietnamese government. To counter Soviet influence in the developing world, he
founded the Peace Corps in 1961, which recruited idealistic young people to undertake
humanitarian projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He hoped that by augmenting the
food supply and improving healthcare and education, the U.S. government could encourage
developing nations to align themselves with the United States and reject Soviet or Chinese
overtures.
The tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas brought an early end to the era, leaving
Americans to wonder whether his vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson, would bring
Kennedy’s vision for the nation to fruition.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy (Dallas, TX, November 21, 1963

Although his stance on civil rights had won him support in the African American
community and his steely performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis had led his
overall popularity to surge, Kennedy understood that he had to solidify his base in the
South to secure his reelection. On November 21, 1963, he accompanied Lyndon
Johnson to Texas to rally his supporters. The next day, shots rang out as Kennedy’s
motorcade made its way through the streets of Dallas. Seriously injured, Kennedy was
rushed to Parkland Hospital and pronounced dead.
The gunfire that killed Kennedy appeared to come from the upper stories of the Texas
School Book Depository building; later that day, Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee at
the depository and a trained sniper, was arrested. Two days later, while being
transferred from Dallas police headquarters to the county jail, Oswald was shot and
killed by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner who claimed he acted to avenge the
president.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate regarding the Kennedy assassination,
and conspiracy theorists, pointing to the unlikely coincidence of Oswald’s murder a few
days after Kennedy’s, began to propose alternate theories about the events. To quiet the
rumors and allay fears that the government was hiding evidence, Lyndon Johnson,
Kennedy’s successor, appointed a fact-finding commission headed by Earl Warren,
chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to examine all the evidence and render a
verdict. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone
and there had been no conspiracy. The commission’s ruling failed to satisfy many, and
multiple theories have sprung up over time. No credible evidence has ever been
uncovered, however, to prove either that someone other than Oswald murdered
Kennedy or that Oswald acted with co-conspirators.
 AN UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND POWER
The America of the 60s was a society quite divided by class—the economic basis of life and
life choices. Gabriel Kolko surveys the distribution of wealth in the United States and
discovers that the vast majority of wealth was concentrated at the very top of the economic
scale and that this process must continue for the economy to remain stable. In “Trends in the
Distribution of Income” Kolko makes a crucial distinction between income and wealth. He
explains that at the beginning of the 60s there was an apparent increase in the redistribution of
wealth based on an analysis of income distribution. However, this was misleading because
these statistics ignored the growing number of ways made available to the rich to hide their
wealth.
Michael Harrington on the other hand “rediscovered” the vast extent of poverty in the United
States in 1963. The Other America , published in 1963, shocked many Americans because it
too documented that the economic distribution in this country was extremely unequal.
Harrington found that one fourth of the American population was living below the official
government poverty line—below subsistence. In this excerpt, “The Invisible Land,” he
discusses the process by which the poor of the 60s were being made “invisible.” This new
poverty in the midst of an expanding “Affluent Society” was being denied any place through
the process of automation which replaced the need for much labor power. He suggests that
one must reassess the American priorities for economic growth before a significant sector of
the society is destroyed.

III. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

PROTESTS AND POLITICAL FIGHTS : CHANGE FROM THE BOTTOM UP
Up until 1964, the Jim Crow Laws, as well as the “separate but equal” policy,
enforcing racial segregation in a lot of US states, were still very much a reality.
However, in 1954, the milestone Brown v. Board of Education decision by the
Supreme Court established that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. This
allowed for a renewal of the fight for racial equality which has been constant since the end of
the Civil War in 1865. In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Rosa Parks
concluded with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is
unconstitutional. Many were inspired by these decisions. Some thought that the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the traditional African-
American defense organization was being too moderate. Pastor Martin Luther King Jr.’s
inspirational appeal for peaceful change in the city of Greensboro – the former capital of
the Confederacy – in 1958 planted the seed for a more assertive civil rights movement.
- On February 1, 1960, four students at the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical
College in Greensboro, entered the local Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter.
The lunch counter was segregated, and they were refused service as they knew they
would be : the Greensboro sit-ins were the first important civil right action of the
60s. Over the next few days, more protesters joined the four sophomores. Hostile
whites responded with threats and taunted the students by pouring sugar and ketchup
on their heads. The successful six-month-long Greensboro sit-in initiated the student
phase of the African American civil rights movement and, within two months, the sit-
in movement had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states.
- The students in Greensboro wanted more than a hamburger; the movement they helped
launch was about empowerment. Activist Ella Baker pushed for a “participatory
 Democracy” that built on the grassroots campaigns of active citizens instead of
deferring to the leadership of educated elites and experts. As a result of her actions, in
April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed to
carry the battle forward. Within a year, more than one hundred cities had
desegregated at least some public accommodations in response to student-led
demonstrations. The sit-ins inspired other forms of nonviolent protest intended to
desegregate public spaces. “Sleep-ins” occupied motel lobbies, “read-ins” filled public
libraries, and churches became the sites of “pray-ins.”
- Students also took part in the 1961 “freedom rides” sponsored by the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC. The intent of the African American and white
volunteers who undertook these bus rides south was to test enforcement of a U.S.
Supreme Court decision to prohibit segregation on interstate transportation and to
protest segregated waiting rooms in southern terminals. Departing Washington, DC,
on May 4, the volunteers headed south on buses that challenged the seating order of
Jim Crow segregation. Whites would ride in the back, African-Americans would sit in
the front, and on other occasions, riders of different races would share the same bench
seat. The freedom riders encountered little difficulty until they reached Rock Hill,
South Carolina, where a mob severely beat John Lewis, a freedom rider who later
became chairman of SNCC. The danger increased as the riders continued through
Georgia into Alabama, where one of the two buses was firebombed outside the town
of Anniston. The second group continued to Birmingham, where the riders were
attacked by the Ku Klux Klan as they attempted to disembark at the city bus station.
The remaining volunteers continued to Mississippi, where they were arrested when
they attempted to desegregate the waiting rooms in the Jackson bus terminal.

FREE BY 63 ?
These grassroots movements came in time for the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, which gave rise to the slogan “Free by ’63” among civil rights
activists. Student and small-scale actions were replaced, by 1963, by a massive national
movement.
Perhaps the most famous of the civil rights-era demonstrations was the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held in August 1963, on the one hundredth
anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Its purpose was to
pressure President Kennedy to act on his promises regarding civil rights. As the crowd
gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial and spilled across the National Mall (Figure), Martin
Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech. In “I Have a Dream,” King called for an
end to racial injustice in the United States and envisioned a harmonious, integrated society.
The speech marked the high point of the civil rights movement and established the legitimacy
of its goals. However, it did not prevent white terrorism in the South, nor did it permanently
sustain the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. In the same year of 1963, for example, a
bombing by the Ku Klux Klan on a Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, killed 4 young
girls, and shocked the nation : John Coltrane’s famous jazz composition Alabama, was
composed as a memorial to the victims.
Other gatherings of civil rights activists ended tragically, and some demonstrations were
intended to provoke a hostile response from whites and thus reveal the inhumanity of the Jim
Crow laws and their supporters. In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) led by Martin Luther King, Jr. mounted protests in some 186 cities throughout the
South. The campaign in Birmingham that began in April and extended into the fall of 1963
attracted the most notice, however, when a peaceful protest was met with violence by police,
who attacked demonstrators, including children, with fire hoses and dogs. King himself was
jailed on Easter Sunday, 1963, and, in response to the pleas of white clergymen for peace and
patience, he penned one of the most significant documents of the struggle—“Letter from a
Birmingham Jail.” In the letter, King argued that African Americans had waited patiently for
more than three hundred years to be given the rights that all human beings deserved; the time
for waiting was over : however, he stills deeply rejected violent actions of any kind.
The vision of whites and African Americans working together peacefully to end racial
injustice suffered a severe blow with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis,
Tennessee, in April 1968. King had gone there to support sanitation workers trying to
unionize. In the city, he found a divided civil rights movement; older activists who supported
his policy of nonviolence were being challenged by younger African Americans who
advocated a more militant approach. On April 4, King was shot and killed while standing on
the balcony of his motel. Within hours, the nation’s cities exploded with violence as angry
African Americans, shocked by his murder, burned and looted inner-city neighborhoods
across the country.
PROGRESS AND DOUBTS
President Lyndon B. Johnson made civil rights one the political priorities of his “Great
Society” program. Johnson drove the long-awaited civil rights act, proposed by Kennedy in
June 1963 in the wake of riots at the University of Alabama, through Congress. Under
Kennedy’s leadership, the bill had passed the House of Representatives but was stalled in the
Senate by a filibuster. Johnson, a master politician, marshaled his considerable personal
influence and memories of his fallen predecessor to break the filibuster. The Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the most far-reaching civil rights act yet passed by Congress, banned
discrimination in public accommodations, sought to aid schools in efforts to desegregate,
and prohibited federal funding of programs that permitted racial segregation. Further, it
barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, national origin,
religion, or gender, and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Protecting African Americans’ right to vote was as important as ending racial inequality in
the United States. In January 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, prohibiting the
imposition of poll taxes on voters, was finally ratified. Poverty would no longer serve as an
obstacle to voting. Other impediments remained, however. Attempts to register southern
African American voters encountered white resistance, and protests against this interference
often met with violence. On March 7, 1965, a planned protest march from Selma,
Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery, turned into “Bloody Sunday” when
marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge encountered a cordon of state police,
wielding batons and tear gas.
Deeply disturbed by the violence in Alabama and the refusal of Alabama Governor George
Wallace to address it, Johnson introduced a bill in Congress that would remove obstacles for
African American voters and lend federal support to their cause. His proposal, the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, prohibited states and local governments from passing laws that
discriminated against voters on the basis of race (Figure). Literacy tests and other barriers to
voting that had kept ethnic minorities from the polls were thus outlawed. Following the
passage of the act, a quarter of a million African Americans registered to vote, and by 1967,
the majority of African Americans had done so. Johnson’s final piece of civil rights
legislation was the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in housing on
the basis of race, color, national origin, or religion.
TIME FOR VIOLENT ACTIONS ?
 Despite this sense of progress, the permanence – and even the radicalization – of
violence against African-Americans, as well as Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1964,
pushed a new generation of activists to chose violent actions to help the cause.
Disillusioned, many African Americans turned to those with more radical ideas about how
best to obtain equality and justice and supported Black Power. Black Power meant a variety
of things. One of the most famous users of the term was Stokely Carmichael, the chairman
of SNCC, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture. For Carmichael, Black Power was
the power of African Americans to unite as a political force and create their own
institutions apart from white-dominated. Carmichael became an advocate of black
separatism, arguing that African Americans should live apart from whites and solve their
problems for themselves. In keeping with this philosophy, Carmichael expelled SNCC’s white
members. He left SNCC in 1967 and later joined the Black Panthers.
Long before Carmichael began to call for separatism, the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930,
had advocated the same thing. In the 1960s, its most famous member was Malcolm X, born
Malcolm Little. The Nation of Islam advocated the separation of white Americans and
African Americans because of a belief that African Americans could not thrive in an
atmosphere of white racism. Indeed, in a 1963 interview, Malcolm X, referred to white people
as “devils” more than a dozen times. Rejecting the nonviolent strategy of other civil rights
activists, he maintained that violence in the face of violence was appropriate.
In 1964, after a trip to Africa, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to found the Organization
of Afro-American Unity with the goal of achieving freedom, justice, and equality “by any
means necessary.” On February 21, 1965, he was killed by members of the Nation of Islam.
Stokely Carmichael later recalled that Malcolm X had provided an intellectual basis for Black
Nationalism and given legitimacy to the use of violence in achieving the goals of Black
Power.
Many violent actions took place, inspired by such a conception of political fight:
- The Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, erupted after a confrontation between a white
California Highway Patrol officer and an African American motorist named Marquette
Frye. The arrest of Frye triggered six days of unrest characterized by widespread
looting, arson, and clashes between protesters and law enforcement, causing 34 deaths.
It served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.
- Newark riots, 1967 : After the arrest and beating of John William Smith, an African
American taxi driver, by two white police officer in July 1967, the city of Newark,
New Jersey, erupted : the Newark riots, also known as the Newark Rebellion,
brought national attention to issues of racial discrimination, economic inequality, and
police brutality.
A FIGHT FOR MANY COMMUNITIES
Other communities benefited from the fight for equality. Like African-Americans,
Mexican-Americans had been legally discriminated against or otherwise denied access to
economic and educational opportunities ; they began to increase efforts to secure their rights
in the 1960s.
The highest-profile struggle of the Mexican American civil rights movement was the fight
that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta waged in the fields of California to organize
migrant farm workers. In 1962, Chavez and Huerta founded the National Farm Workers
Association (NFWA), and organized an extremely well-publicized strike to help the cause of
migrant farm workers.
The equivalent of the Black Power movement among Mexican Americans was the Chicano
Movement. Proudly adopting a derogatory term for Mexican Americans, Chicano activists
demanded increased political power for Mexican Americans, education that recognized their
cultural heritage, and the restoration of lands taken from them at the end of the Mexican-
American War in 1848.

IV. COUNTERCULTURE
THE NEW LEFT
Left‐wing politics in the 1960s attracted primarily middle‐class college students. The
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded at the University of Michigan in 1960, was
the organizational base for the New Left. The term “New Left” was coined in the group's
1962 Port Huron Statement, which criticized the lack of individual freedom and the power of
bureaucracy in government, universities, and corporations and called for participatory
democracy. Leaders of the SDS believed that colleges were a natural base from which to
promote social change. Before opposition to the Vietnam War mushroomed, issues that
touched on student freedom, such as dress codes, course requirements, discrimination by
sororities and fraternities, and minority admissions, were hot topics on campus. When the
administration tried to control political activity at the University of California at Berkeley in
the fall of 1964, the Free Speech Movement was formed. The tactics the Berkeley students
used at the time — sit‐ins and taking over college buildings — became common forms of
antiwar protest. In the spring of 1965, SDS supported a nationwide campaign against the
draft. On campuses, demonstrations included draft card burnings, confrontations with military
recruiters, and sit‐ins to protest ROTC programs. Additionally, companies that were closely
involved with the war effort, such as Dow Chemical (which manufactured napalm), were
targeted when they came to a university to recruit. Off campus, antiwar protestors
demonstrated at Army induction centers with picket lines and sit‐ins.
HIPPIE CULTURE
Hippies were mostly middle‐class whites but without the political drive. Their
hallmarks were a particular style of dress that included jeans, tie‐dyed shirts, sandals, beards,
long hair, and a lifestyle that embraced sexual promiscuity and recreational drugs, including
marijuana and the hallucinogenic LSD. The sex and drug culture were reflected in the rock
music of the time by such groups as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and performers
like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Although some young people established communes in
the countryside, hippies were primarily an urban phenomenon. The Haight‐Ashbury section of
San Francisco and the East Village in New York were the focal points of the counterculture
for a brief period from 1965 to 1967.
A landmark counterculture event was the Woodstock Festival, held in upstate New York in
August 1969. Billed as “three days of peace, music, and love,” the promoters expected a large
crowd but not the 300,000 to 400,000 people who actually attended. In spite of the large
numbers, there were no serious problems; adequate medical care was available — mainly for
drug‐related emergencies — and the police decided not to try to enforce drug laws. A Rolling
Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in California a few months later did not go as well.
With the police unable to provide adequate security because they did not have enough notice
of the event, Hell's Angels were hired for crowd control. The bikers beat one person to death,
and several more deaths resulted from accidents and drug overdoses.
SEXUAL POLITICS
While the general permissiveness of the counterculture encouraged sexual freedom, other
factors also contributed to the change in attitudes toward sexuality. Oral contraceptives
became available, and by 1970, 12 million women were “on the pill.” The use of other means
of birth control, such as diaphragms and IUDs, also increased. Many states had already
legalized abortion, and the new women's movement was committed to making the procedure
even more widely available. Throughout the sexual revolution, which lasted until the onset of
the AIDS crisis in the mid‐'80s, the birth rate declined and the number of abortions, unwed
mothers, and divorces rose.
The starting point for contemporary feminism was the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women should be allowed to find their own
identity, an identity not necessarily limited to the traditional roles of wife and mother. The
number of women attending college skyrocketed during the 1960s, and many became
involved with both the New Left and the civil rights movement. Even these organizations
remained dominated by men, however. During the takeover at Columbia University, for
instance, women were assigned duties such as making coffee and typing. Consequently,
although the political activism of the 1960s was a catalyst for women's liberation, feminism
became most effective when it created its own groups. In 1966, the National Organization
for Women (NOW) was formed to address such issues as allotting federal aid for day‐care
centers for working mothers, guaranteeing women the right to an abortion, eliminating
gender‐based job discrimination, and ensuring equal pay for equal work.
Women, however, were not the only group that began to demand equality in the 1960s. Laws
against homosexuals were common, and groups like the Mattachine Society and the
Daughters of Bilitis had campaigned for years with little effect against gay discrimination. In
June 1969, the attempt by the New York City police to close down the Stonewall Inn, a gay
bar in Manhattan, led to days of rioting and to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. The
treatment of homosexuals and lesbians gradually became a national civil rights issue.