The Stormy Sixties 1960-1969
Fidel Castro - 1959
Bay of Pigs - 1961 1400 CIA trained Cuban exiles… JFK cancelled air support…. Almost all killed or captured …
Berlin Wall - 1961
Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962
Thirteen Days in October… JFK blockades Cuba… “Hot Line”…
“New Frontier”
“Bobby Kennedy”
November 22, 1963
Lyndon Baines Johnson: 1964-1969
Election of 1964
LBJ “Great Society” “War on Poverty” Medicare Medicaid Education/Head Start “War on Poverty”
Tent Cities of Fayette & Haywood Counties
Greensboro, NC - 1960
1960 –Nashville Lunch Counters Began at Walgreens…. Protestors are verbally and physically abused then arrested yet…
Diane Nash Chicago Native – went to college at Fisk University (Nashville)… Nashville Lunch Counters Founder of SNCC Freedom Riders Selma March
1961 – Freedom Riders CORE…
1962 – Ole Miss James Meredith
Birmingham Police – Eugene “Bull” Connor
Martin Luther King Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail 1963 Demonstrations in Birmingham, AL Southern Christian Leadership Conference
1963 – Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church KKK planted bomb went off just before Sunday School 4 killed, 22 wounded
1963 – George Wallace
1963 “I Have a Dream” March on Washington 200,000
Civil Rights Act - 1964
24th Amendment
Selma to Montgomery - 1965
“Bloody Sunday”
Voting Rights Act - 1965
Stokely Carmichael – “Black Power”
Malcom X – Black Muslims
Bobby Seale – Black Panthers
Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis – 1968 Led to Civil Rights Act of 1968
Alex Haley
Counterculture “Hippies” Protest Vietnam War
Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War
1st Phase – Colonial Independence French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos)…. Ho Chi Minh
France was defeated by Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel Geneva Accords… Ngo Dinh Diem claimed control of the South The settlement reflected the U.S. policy of “containment”
2nd Phase – American Involvement This phase originated with “Ike” and JFK but was intensified under Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Who Did We Fight? Viet Minh - (NVA) Ho Chi Minh’s communist North Vietnamese Army Viet Cong – (VC) South Vietnamese communist guerrilla fighters – commonly called “Charlie” by U.S. soldiers Farmers by day and guerillas at night grossly underestimated by the U.S. commanders
Ho Chi Minh Trail
A “Living Room War” Americans watched the war unfold on their TV each night… Body counts…
American atrocities at My Lai … Weapons like napalm and Agent Orange, which devastated the environment