Gains in the 1960s Made Obama's Election Possible

It was a decade of extremes, of transformational change and bizarre contrasts: flower children and assassins, idealism and alienation, rebellion and backlash. For many in the massive post-World War II baby boom generation, it was both the best of times and the worst of times.

There will be many 50-year anniversaries to mark significant events of the 1960s, and a big reason is that what happened in that remarkable era still resonates today. This is Part 2 of a four-part series. Read Part 1 here.

Massive social change fueled a profound surge forward by the civil rights movement in the 1960s, one of the most important developments in American history. "World War II was a watershed in African-American history, raising the hopes of people who, with their children, would build the massive black freedom movement of the 1960s," wrote historians Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. "The urgent need for soldiers to fight abroad and for wage earners to forge an 'arsenal of democracy' at home convinced a flood of African-Americans to leave the South." Between 1940 and 1960, 4.5 million blacks moved out of the South to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This migration continued throughout the Sixties.

"The black freedom movement arose at different times and unfolded at different paces in thousands of communities across the South," wrote Isserman and Kazin. "Only a few of these could be sighted, sporadically, on TV screens during the '60s. But its remarkable local presence gave the movement the power to transform the nation's law and politics—and to catalyze every other social insurgency that followed it through that decade and into the next."

In fundamental ways, the gains of the decade made Barack Obama's election to the presidency possible in 2008. He was born in 1961.

Six months after the Greensboro, N.C., sit-in of February 1960, the Woolworth's lunch counter where the first protests had occurred was desegregated. But the road toward equality would remain difficult and dangerous as demonstrations increased and tensions intensified. In 1963 alone, four black girls were murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., and civil-riots pioneer Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson, Miss.

On Aug. 28, 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech to more than 200,000 people on the Washington Mall to demand equal rights for African-Americans. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," King declared in words that many find inspirational today.

Under incessant pressure from President Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Right Act and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Thurgood Marshall was appointed by President Johnson as the first black justice of the Supreme Court in 1967, the same year that Carl Stokes of Cleveland was elected the first black mayor of a major American city.

Yet at the same time, black anger and frustration at the relatively slow pace of change continued to build. There was a riot—some called it an insurrection—in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and civil unrest in many other places. In 1966, the radical Black Panther Party was formed and Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began popularizing the term "black power." In 1967, riots erupted in the black areas of Newark and Detroit. Protests proliferated in the North.

By the end of the decade, the optimism of the early Sixties seemed a quaint bit of history as the civil rights movement splintered between peaceful protesters in King's mold and a new wave of angry leaders who tolerated and in some cases fomented violence. Whites felt things were getting out of hand, and a white backlash swept Richard Nixon into office and led to a deepened racial polarization in the Seventies.

• Send us your photos from important events of the 1960s.
• Read Part 1 of A Decade of Promise.
• Read Part 3 of A Decade of Change for Women.
• See a slide show of the 10 youngest presidents.
• See a slide show of the 10 worst presidents.