The 1960s, and especially 1968, were a tumultuous time in U.S. culture and history. In the middle of the Vietnam War, there were continual protests and flag burning and draft card burnings across the country. Students attacked nearly 200 ROTC buildings on college campuses, and there were violent protests against the war at more than 250 colleges. There were protests everywhere, especially in Washington, D.C. At one protest at Kent State, actually in 1970, National Guardsmen shot student protesters, killing four and wounding nine others. Between 30,000 and 40,000 young men fled to Canada, rather than be drafted into the army and fight in Vietnam.
There were more political killings and attempts than at any other time in U.S. history. President Kennedy was killed; Texas Governor John Connally was wounded in the same attack; Senator Robert Kennedy was killed while running for the Presidency. George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was assassinated. Numerous black leaders were killed: Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and James Chaney are the most notable, but the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, lists 41 civil rights workers who were killed because of their efforts to obtain civil rights.
After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, riots erupted across the nation in more than 100 cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, Louisville, New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati. More than 40 people died, and over 1500 were injured, with more than 15,000 people being arrested.
The beating of an African American motorist by LAPD officers in August 1965 set off riots in the Watts area of LA that lasted six days, with 34 deaths, over a thousand serious injuries, more than 3,400 arrests, and property damage in excess of $40 million [roughly $300 million in today’s dollars].
When my wife the professor brings this up to her students, most of them look blank. When she pointed out to her female students out that little more than a century ago women were essentially property and couldn’t vote in most of the U.S. until 1920, or that women couldn’t get credit cards without the approval of husband or father until the late 1950s, they didn’t believe her initially. Then they just shrugged.
The other day, I got an email from a young woman, an educated young woman in her late twenties, who asked me why I’d said the 1960s were as more turbulent time than the present. So I started asking other educators I know about this, wondering if what we’d seen was just an outlying oddity. It might still be, but the half-dozen other educators I talked to had similar stories.
From what I’ve seen, it’s almost as if the younger generation doesn’t know recent U.S. history, and, to me, at least, this seems to be a recent phenomenon. I was taught about World War I, the Great Depression, and other historic events that occurred in the generation before I was born. What bothers me about this is that there seems to be an assumption on the part of the younger generation that progress is a given. A study of history shows it’s not, but those who don’t know history won’t see what can and has happened. Rome did fall. So did the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, not to mention the British Empire (although it didn’t fall so much as was relinquished because of economic and political pressures), and a lot of others. Germany went from being a comparatively open and free nation into Nazism. For centuries, Europe was racked by wars and uncounted deaths because religion dominated politics.
In some ways, there’s nothing new under the sun, that is, if you know what came before. If not, you’ll get what you deserve. The problem is that so will those of us who saw what could happen and were ignored because the majority believed progress would continue without work and without an understanding of the past.
