1960s & 1970s
As the decade of the 1960s began, the United States had the "highest mass standard of living" in world history. The strong American postwar economy of the late 1940s and 1950s continued into the 1960s.
The 1960s ushered in a new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His inaugural address on a cold January afternoon, brought the country into a new era.
Also, during the address, Robert Frost read his poem, "The Gift Outright."
But the promise of Kennedy's administration would not last because on November 23rd, 1963, while driving through downtown Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was shot twice in the head.
The assassination would set an ominous tone for the remainder of the decade, and help bring to the surface the simmering tensions hidden within the American public. Conspiracy theories abound and have yet to abate. Of course, the conspiracy theories went wild after Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald while Oswald was being transported to jail.
Jailed during the Birmingham campaign, King wrote a famous letter to a group of clergy that had publicly criticized King's coalition for moving too quickly for social change.
King believed public pressure generated from the Birmingham demonstrations contributed greatly to the Johnson Administration's passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act promoted black voting rights by outlawing poll taxes and literacy tests. It also called for desegregation of public facilities and prohibited employment discrimination in organizations receiving federal money.
The Civil Rights Movement of the '60s helped to rekindle the Women's Movement of the 1970s. Women have often been empowered to organize around their own specific issues by prior involvement in other social movements. Women were very active in the Civil Rights Movement just as they were in the Abolition Movement, the Temperance Movement, and the Antipauper Movement.