1968: Tumult, Turmoil, and Tears

The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Its Aftermath

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 next 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, many worried, they would be at the mercy of Black Power advocates—people like Malcolm X, who was much more militant than King had been, Bobby Seale, 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, also known as the Fair Housing Act, which was an amendment to the first 1964 Civil Rights Act. It banned racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination in the sale, rent, financing, or advertising of housing. This legislation represented a significant federal effort to address housing segregation in the wake of King's death.

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 would not 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 typical in southern courts in 1968.

Violence and Civil Rights: The Orangeburg Massacre and Robert Kennedy's Death

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 Andrew Hacker describes the social conditions of blacks at the time:

The majority of black Americans are poor: the poorest Americans are black, and even the most prosperous blacks are still poorer than great numbers of whites. 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)

Economic Inequality and Johnson's War on Poverty

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 percent of the population—lived below the poverty line. Half of all U.S. mothers of school-age children were working, 80 percent of them full-time, to pay bills for basic necessities. Many were single mothers who formed the bulk of the "working poor."

By 1968, many social programs were in place such as the Job Corps, Operation Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Medicaid, and Medicare. The War on Poverty was part of Johnson's vision of the Great Society, where there would be clean air, pure water, expanded educational opportunities, and less poverty and disease. 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" development. 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 could work overtime and lift weight in the workplace over the limits previously prescribed by law. This opened up many new "non-traditional" jobs for women.

The Emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, a book that criticized restrictive roles for women and triggered second-wave feminism, was re-elected president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW had been founded in 1966 to take action against discrimination in nearly every aspect of life and to "bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in full equal partnership with men." NOW had organized demonstrations and protests, and by 1968 membership had risen to 1,200.

Contrary to public opinion, there is no real evidence that women ever burned their bras during these demonstrations. It is a myth that sprang up later. Feminist historian Jane Johnson Lewis theorizes the myth came from linking women's rights demonstrations to draft card burning and somehow a vivid memory emerged that never really happened. Some members of NOW were lost later in 1968 due to NOW's stand for abortion rights and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1968, radical feminists in New York protested the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City and gained much attention in the media, and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) was founded that year.

The author of The End of the American Era observed that "most women find themselves in a dialectical quandary between their traditional conditioning and modern expectations. Rather than risking unrecoverable years in an attempt to scale male-held battlements, most get married when an early opportunity arises and settle for a pseudo-career of housekeeping and child-raising. But they no longer do so uncomplainingly." (Hacker, 1970)