Tumult, Turmoil, And Tears The Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1968, an event that did much to raise morale (at least, temporarily) in Detroit. Detroiters were still depressed following a week of terrible riots in 1967 and the assassination of their hero Martin Luther King, Jr. In Memphis, Tennessee on April 4,1968. The whole country was shocked when King was killed, even whites who had opposed civil rights. They wondered fearfully what would happen now and realized that in some respects Martin Luther King, Jr. had been their friend because he was opposed to violence and sought peaceful change. Now, they worried, they would be at the mercy of Black Power advocates, people like Malcomn X who was much more militant than King had been, Bobby Seales, and H. Rapp Brown who advocated violence. President Lyndon Johnson's response to King's assassination was to push through the 1968 Civil Rights Act (Fair Housing), which was an amendment to the first 1964 Civil Acts Act. It banned racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination in the sale, rent, financing, or advertising of housing (History 1968 website, 2005).

On February 8, 1968, the civil rights movement took a violent blow in Orangeburg, South Carolina when 27 black students were shot and three of them died. They were demonstrating against a bowling alley that wouldn't allow blacks. The police claimed afterwards that the students were to blame, but none of the students were armed, and the patrolmen had not followed riot procedures. They were pardoned, however, which was par for the course in southern courts in 1968 (History 1968 website). Another blow came on June 6, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy, an active and vocal civil rights supporter, was assassinated in California. It is hard to imagine why the poorest and least powerful people in America engendered such fear on the part of their fellow white Americans. Historian...

If all 25 million black Americans were to be ranked by their incomes, every single individual on that list would have less money than his white counterpart of parallel ranking (Hacker, 1971,
p. 117).

President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty was designed to meet the needs of impoverished people, black and white, and help them on their way to economic independence. Thirty-five million people (about 25% of the population) lived below the poverty line. Half of all U.S. mothers of school-age children were working, 80% of them full-time, to pay bills for basic necessities. Many were single mothers who formed the bulk of the "working poor"(History 1968 website, 2005). By 1968 many social programs were in place such as the Job Corps, Operation Head Start, Volunteers to Service to America (VISTA), Medicaid, and Medicare. The War on Poverty was part of his vision of The Great Society, where there would be clean air, pure water, expanded educational opportunities, and less poverty and disease (Caro, 1990). The Office of Economic Opportunity had been established as part of the Great Society, and its goal was not simply to raise the income of poor people but "to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community" (Answers.com, 2005). Unfortunately, the programs were never fully funded because of the cost of fighting the Vietnam War.

Out of the Civil Rights movement emerged the Women's Liberation Movement. In 1968 the first Women's Liberation conference took place in Chicago, and Shirley Chisholm, a black woman, was elected to the House of Representatives. Rosenfeld v. Southern Pacific Company was settled in favor of women so that women…