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| President of Cuba. After commanding the revolution that overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, he held the title of Prime Minister of Cuba until 1976, when he became president of the Council of State as well as of the Council of Ministers. Castro became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965, and led the transformation of Cuba into a one-party socialist republic. |
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| refers to the revolutionary war in Cuba culminating in the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s government on July 26, 1959 by the 26th of July Movement and other revolutionary elements in the country. The Cuban Revolution also refers to the ongoing implementation of social and economic programmes by the new government since the overthrow of the Batista government, including the implementation of Marxist principles. |
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| in 1961, an unsuccessful United States-planned and funded attempted invasion by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba. An attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, this action accelerated a rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations worsened by the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. |
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| confrontation during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States regarding the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The missiles were ostensibly placed to protect Cuba from further planned attacks by the United States after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and were rationalized by the Soviets as equivalent to the U.S. placing deployable nuclear warheads in the United Kingdom, Italy, and, ultimately most significantly, Turkey. The crisis began on October 16, 1962 when U.S. reconnaissance data revealing Soviet nuclear missile installations on the island were shown to U.S. President John F. Kennedy and ended twelve days later on October 28, 1962, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the installations would be dismantled. The Cuban Missile Crisis is often regarded as the moment when the Cold War came closest to escalating into a nuclear war |
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| initiated by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 aimed to establish economic cooperation between North and South America. The aid was intended to counter the perceived emerging communist threat from Cuba to U.S. interests and dominance in the region. |
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| a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion in the United States that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. The term derives from U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin. The period of McCarthyism is also referred to as the Second Red Scare, and coincided with a period of increased fears of Communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents.During this time people in a variety of situations were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies |
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| gets its name from its builder, the firm of Levitt & Sons, Inc., which built it as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. Levittown was the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country |
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| - Labor-Management Relations Act, is a United States federal law that severely restricts the activities and power of labor unions. The Act, still largely in effect, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr.. U.S. President Harry S. Truman described the act as a "slave-labor bill" and vetoed it, adding that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society". The Senate followed the House of Representatives in overriding Truman's veto on June 23, 1947, establishing the act as a law. The Taft-Hartley Act amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act), which Congress had passed in 1935. |
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| Alien Registration Act of 1940, made it a criminal offense for anyone to "knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association". It also required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government; within four months, 4,741,971 aliens had registered under the Act's provisions. |
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| a U.S. State Department official involved in the establishment of the United Nations. He was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Although new evidence has added a variety of information to the case, Hiss's guilt or innocence remains a controversial issue. |
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| Ethel and Julius Rosenberg |
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| were American Communists who received international attention when they were executed for passing nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. |
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| an American author of crime novels. He was known for the series of novels featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer, among other works. Literary critics hated Spillane's writing, citing high content of sex and violence. |
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| a United States Supreme Court case that reversed a decision first made by a Texas trial court which found that a newly-established state law school for African Americans met the separate but equal provisions of the Plessy v. Ferguson, court decision. The trial court decision was affirmed by the Court of Civil Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court denied writ of error on further appeal. The case was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which, after hearing the arguments of Robert L. Carter of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, reversed the lower court decision. |
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| Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas |
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| a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities (legal establishment of separate government-run schools for blacks and whites), ruling so on the grounds that the doctrine of "separate but equal" public education could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans. A companion case dealt with the constitutionality of segregation in the District of Columbia, (not a state and therefore not subject to the Fourteenth Amendment) |
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| a California district attorney of Alameda County, the 30th Governor of California, and the 14th Chief Justice of the United States (from 1953 to 1969). As Chief Justice, his term of office was marked by numerous rulings affecting, among other things, the legal status of racial segregation, civil rights, separation of church and state, and police arrest procedure in the United States. |
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| a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson's poem, The Hound of Heaven. Some supporters of the earlier decision (Brown vs. Board of Education) were displeased with this decision. The language “all deliberate speed” was seen by critics as too ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste for compliance with the court's instruction. |
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| In 1970 Byrd broke with the Democratic Party because they asked him to sign an oath of loyalty to the party, which would have required him to support any and all Democratic nominees, from the president to the local clerk. Instead of signing the restrictive contract, Byrd ran as an independent. Byrd was widely popular in the state and became the second senator in history to win as an independent. |
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| a policy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. in1956 to unite other white Virginian politicians and leaders in taking action to prevent school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. |
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| an African-American teenager from Chicago, Illinois who was brutally murdered in a region of Mississippi known as the Mississippi Delta in the small town of Money in Leflore County. His murder was one of the key events that energized the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects for the crime--both white men--were acquitted, but later admitted to committing the crime. Till's mother had an open casket funeral to let everyone see how her son had been brutally killed. |
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| a political and social protest campaign started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. The ensuing struggle lasted from December 5, 1955 to December 21, 1956 and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses unconstitutional.The protest was triggered by the arrest of African American seamstress Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955. She was charged for violating racial segregation laws in Montgomery, Alabama after refusing to give her seat on a bus to a white man. |
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| was the most famous leader of the American civil rights movement, a political activist, and a Baptist minister. In 1964, King became the youngest man to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (for his work as a peacemaker, promoting nonviolence and equal treatment for different races). On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. |
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| Southern Christian Leadership Council |
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| a civil rights organization founded in January 1957. One of its founders was MLK Jr. and had members like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The SCLC was involved in many events during the Civil Rights Movement, including the Albany Movement between 1961 and 1962, the Birmingham, Alabama Campaign and the March on Washington in the Summer of 1963. Also Viola Gregg Liuzzo was in the SCLC and she was in most of the marches. The Ku Klux Klan killed her for helping the movement and associating with African Americans. |
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| Central High, Little Rock |
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| - the site of a major event during the American Civil Rights Movement. On the morning of September 23, 1957, the nine black high school students faced an angry mob of over 1,000 whites protesting integration in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police, violence escalated and they were removed from the school. The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 1,200 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell to escort the nine students into the school |
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| a six-term Democratic Governor of Arkansas, infamous for his 1957 stand against integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court rulings |
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| League of United Latin American Citizens |
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| a political advocacy group for Latinos in the United States. Founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas, LULAC is the nation's oldest Hispanic organization. LULAC was the lead plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case Hernandez v. Texas. In its landmark decision, the Warren court decided that Mexican Americans were a distinct ethnic group and were thus guaranteed equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. |
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| a Hispanic private in the United States Army. Seven months after going to the Philippines for a volunteer mission during World War II, he was killed. His remains were not returned to the United States for some time, and the only funeral home in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas wouldn't allow him to lay in state there because "the whites would not like it". With the help of the newly formed American GI Forum, Senator Lyndon B Johnson arranged for him to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. |
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| a Congressionally-chartered Mexican American veterans and civil rights organization. Its motto is "Education is Our Freedom and Freedom should be Everybody's Business". AGIF currently operates chapters throughout the United States, with a focus on veteran's issues, education, and civil rights. Its two largest national programs are the San Antonio-based Veterans Outreach Program, and the Dallas-based Service, Employment, Redevelopment-Jobs for Progress, Inc. (SER). The current president is Antonio Gil Morales |
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| he succeeded to the presidency following President John F. Kennedy's assassination. He was a major leader of the Democratic Party and as President was responsible for designing his Great Society, comprising liberal legislation including civil rights laws, Medicare (health care for the elderly), Medicaid (health care for the poor), aid to education, and a major "War on Poverty". Simultaneously, he escalated the Vietnam War, from 16,000 American soldiers in 1963 to 550,000 in early 1968, of whom over 1,000 were killed every month. He was elected President in his own right in a landslide in 1964, but his popularity steadily declined after 1966 and his reelection bid in 1968 collapsed as a result of turmoil in his party. He withdrew from the race to concentrate on peacemaking. Johnson was renowned for his domineering personality and arm twisting of powerful politicians. His long-term legacy is hard to judge, as advances he made in civil rights and his "Great Society" are claimed by some to be offset by the Vietnam War. |
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| a civil rights leader, author, and the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in the American South and organized armed resistance against white supremacy. |
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| African Americans and most of them were war veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II. In some cases, they had a symbiotic relationship with other civil rights groups that advocated and practiced non-violence: the willingness of the Deacons to provide low-key armed guards facilitated the ability of groups such as the NAACP and CORE to stay, at least formally, within their own parameters of non-violence. Nonetheless, their willingness to respond to violence with violence, led to tension between the Deacons and the nonviolent civil rights workers whom they sought to protect. Moreover, the tactics of the Deacons attracted the attention and concern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which ordered an investigation of the group. However, with the advent of the militant Black Power Movement, the involvement of the Deacons in the civil rights movement declined, with the presence of the Deacons all but vanishing by 1968. |
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| form of direct action that involves one or more persons nonviolently occupying an area for protest, often political, social, or economic change. Sit-ins were first employed by Mahatma Gandhi in Indian independence movement and were later expanded on by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others during the American Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s students used this method of protest during the student movements such as the protests in Germany. |
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| Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC |
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| was one of the primary institutions of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged in April of 1960 from student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. SNCC began with an $800 grant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Some of the original student members were organizers of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the southern United States. Its purpose then was to coordinate the use of nonviolent direct action to attack segregation and other forms of racism. SNCC played a leading role in the Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. In the later part of the 1960s, led by fiery leaders like Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on Black Power, and then fighting against the Vietnam War. |
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| Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) |
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| a U.S. civil rights organization that played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Membership in CORE is stated to be open to "anyone who believes that 'all people are created equal' and is willing to work towards the ultimate goal of true equality throughout the world." |
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| a series of nonviolent, direct demonstrations performed in 1961 as part of the US civil rights movement. Volunteers, African American and White, many of whom were college students, called Freedom Riders, rode in interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) 364 U.S. 454, which outlawed racial segregation in interstate transportation facilities, including bus stations and railroad terminals |
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| a police official in the Southern U.S. state of Alabama during the American Civil Rights Movement, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a staunch advocate of racial segregation. Connor became a symbol of the fight against integration for using fire hoses and police attack dogs against unarmed, nonviolent protest marchers. The spectacle of this being broadcast on national television served as one of the catalysts for major social and legal change in the South and helped in large measure to assure the passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; thus, Connor's tactics helped to bring about the very change that he was opposing. |
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| an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi. He was involved in a boycott campaign against white merchants and was instrumental in eventually desegregating the University of Mississippi when that institution was finally forced to enroll James Meredith in 1962. He was assassinated by a KKK member |
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| a large political rally that took place in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. It was organized principally by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. During this March, King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial |
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| was landmark legislation in the United States that outlawed, under certain circumstances, discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Originally conceived to protect the rights of Black people, the bill was amended prior to passage to protect the civil rights of everyone, and explicitly included women for the first time. |
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| SNCC activists proposed the organization sponsor a network of Freedom Schools. The concept of “Freedom Schools” had been utilized by educators and activists prior to the summer of 1964 in, for instance, Boston, New York, and Prince Edward County, Virginia, where public schools were closed in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision or, in the case of Boston, as acts of protest against discriminatory school conditions |
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| Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party |
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| an American political party created in the state of Mississippi in 1964, during the civil rights movement. It was organized by black and white Mississippians, with assistance from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to win seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention for a slate of delegates elected by disenfranchised black Mississippians and white sympathizers. It ultimately failed, but was said to succeed in dramatizing the violence and injustice by which they claimed the white power structure governed Mississippi. It was also said to have helped the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. |
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| civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Selma was a focal point for voting rights. Half of the city's residents were black but only one percent were registered to vote because the registration board only opened doors for registration two days a month, arrived late and took long lunches. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later, on March 9, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. Then, civil rights leaders sought court protection for a third, full-scale march from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery. Federal District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson, Jr., weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of the demonstrators. |
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| was a Trinidadian-American black activist, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later prime minister of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, he later became a black separatist and a Pan-Africanist |
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| Voting Rights Act of 1965 |
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| outlawed the requirement that would-be voters in the United States take literacy tests or pay a poll tax to qualify to register to vote, and it provided for federal registration of voters — instead of state or local voter registration which had often been denied to minorities and poor voters — in areas that had less than 50% of eligible minority voters registered. The act also provided for Department of Justice oversight to registration, and the Department's approval for any change in voting law in districts whose populations were at least 5% Black. |
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| a large-scale riot which lasted five days in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in August 1965. During the riots, 34 people were officially reported killed, 1,100 people were injured, 4,000 people were arrested, 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and an estimated $35 million in damage was caused. |
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| was a Black Muslim Minister and National Spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was also founder of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. One of the most prominent black nationalist leaders in the United States; he was considered by some as a martyr of Islam and a champion of equality. As a militant leader, Malcolm X advocated black pride, economic self-reliance, and identity politics. He ultimately rose to become a world-renowned African American/Pan-Africanist and human rights activist. |
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| racist ideology which holds the belief that black people are superior to other races. More generally, the term refers to a conscious choice on the part of blacks to nurture and promote their collective interests, advance their own values, and secure their own well-being and some measure of autonomy, rather than permit others to shape their futures and agendas. The focus of black power advocates was not integration or any other single strategy. Rather, it was improving the status of black people |
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| was an African American civil rights and self-defense organization, active within the United States in the late 1960s. While firmly grounded in black nationalism and begun as an organization that accepted African American membership exclusively, the party reconsidered itself as it grew to national prominence and became an iconic representative of the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s. The Black Panthers ultimately condemned Black Nationalism as "black racism", and became more focused on socialism without exclusivity, instituting a variety of community programs to alleviate poverty and illness among the communities they deemed most needful of aid, or most neglected by the American government. |
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| Huey Newton and Bobby Seale |
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| co-founders and inspirational leaders of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a black nationalist/racial equality organization that began in October 1966. |
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| Fred Hampton and Mark Clark |
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| a radical African American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Both were killed in an infamous Chicago police raid on December 4, 1969. |
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| 1960 Presidential Election |
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| marked the end of the eight years of Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. Richard M. Nixon, who had transformed the office of Vice President into a national political base, easily won the Republican nomination. The Republican Party had been a minority party for 30 years, giving a strong advantage to the Democrats, who had solid control of Congress. The Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. He was only the second Catholic nominee in history. Kennedy charged that America was slipping behind in the Cold War, both militarily and economically. The vote was the closest in any presidential election dating to 1916 |
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| worked closely with the president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His contribution to the African-American Civil Rights Movement is sometimes considered his greatest legacy. |
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| first introduced by Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. Legislation proposed by Johnson was designed in response to the poverty of over 35 million Americans that year and followed difficult economic conditions associated with a national poverty rate of around 25%. The War on Poverty speech led Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, a law that established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administrate the local application of Federal funds targeted against poverty. |
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| was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–87) and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. He is the American politician most often credited for sparking the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. Goldwater lost the 1964 Presidential election in a landslide to incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. The Johnson campaign and other critics painted him in 1964 as a radical reactionary, while supporters praised his crusades against the federal government, corrupt labor unions, and the welfare state. His defeat allowed American liberals to pass their Great Society programs |
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| a set of domestic programs proposed or enacted in the United States on the initiative of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969). Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and of racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal |
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| health insurance program administered by the United States government, covering people who are either age 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. It was originally signed into law on July 30, 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as amendments to Social Security legislation. At the bill-signing ceremony President Johnson enrolled former President Harry S. Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and presented him with the first Medicare card |
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