It Was The Stultifying 1950s That Provoked The 1960s Rebellions

[Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] not a whole lot of good you talk about it sydney oh i love the 60s what was so wonderful about the 60s the 60s we had some of the most prominent wonderful people in the world killed we had vietnam what was so wonderful you got smoked grass what was so wonderful about the 60s 60s were good for america i know some of the pressure cooker that existed uh that conformity was dangerous that cold war conformity the 60s really started to question these things the 60 said you can be anything you want to be you can go out and have free sex you can go out and have free drugs you can go out and not have to fight battles and stay free people you can have free free free i certainly think there were excesses in the 60s now if america thought we could get out of racism in a nice measured way could overturn segregation and without some excesses then i think it underestimated the force and effect of segregation people ended lied to about everything all right we've been lied to about everything we're going to have to test everything and we did some pretty stupid things i took a hit of ozly white lightning acid and i became an instant hippie instantly because of that acid these kids got nothing to do with running around the streets and then go home and have a lot of free love and smoke dope here i am you know scratching my head wondering how i'm gonna both pay both the light bill and the gas bill this month you know because i've got four kids all you can do is walk around the street sandals they would always say go slow and do it decoratively there was always this sense of great politeness and decorousness and you must understand that we felt dropping carpet bombings on people was not very decorous i was at wisconsin when some students bombed one of the buildings and i said let's go down to the student union and i will bet you fifty dollars that within five minutes we will be able to find someone who will argue that that kid deserved to die because he was in that building and i won that fifty dollars we meant to be intolerable america and the american people were intolerable to us and we were in opposition to them and we meant to ignore them and we meant to get them angry and we meant to confront them we should have done more we should have valued the time there were a lot of mistakes made that you know if we'd known what we were doing we wouldn't have made them the 60s will never level out maybe it's just that in every 60s decade 18th century 19th century 20th century we have to go through some crisis like this but there was certainly uh certainly we had us a time and we're still trying to figure out what it was all about the 1960s was the most tumultuous confusing and controversial decade of the 20th century it still inspires passionate debate but there's no debate about this the 1960s was an era of rebellion most of those who rebelled were young and although they were a minority of their generation their numbers were sufficient their beliefs so strong and their behavior so challenging that many mainstream americans saw them as a significant threat to the nation's morals manners and values [Music] the result was a period of almost continuous conflict making sense of all this is very much a matter of understanding who rebelled what triggered their rebellions how the rest of the country reacted to them and what happened to america as a result these young people didn't suddenly begin to rebel at the stroke of midnight on january 1st 1960. the seeds of the 60s were planted earlier [Music] and the first of these seeds was an enormous increase in the american birth rate that began in 1946 known as the baby boom by the 60s their sheer numbers 76 million in all would give this generation unprecedented power and influence [Music] those of us who brought the baby boom into being the returning world war ii veterans we didn't know what the hell we were doing we really didn't know we all came home and we all had children there was no advice really dr spock had a book out but we didn't know anything about child rearing in other words let me try to say it this way there were certain things that you just did today is a high point in the romance of bob and mary for them the future looks bright we didn't know anything about relationships communication between husband and wife there was very little communication children child rearing how do you raise children no one knew in other words it was supposed just to happen george leonard and other members of his generation may not have known how to raise their children but they did know that they wanted to protect them from the tough times they had experienced the parents of the 1950s were i think the most unusual generation of the 20th century these are the people who had grown up in the depression they had experienced real tough times when they were children and when they were teenagers and then world war ii hit as many of them were just reaching adulthood and they had the trauma of the war and then after all that they reached the 1950s at a time when the us was tremendously prosperous when the economy was booming as we've never seen it before and i think they reacted to that prosperity and they think i think they reacted strongly to all of the trauma of the depression and the war by turning inward a bit by marrying young by emphasizing home and family as if that was something they couldn't get back in the 30s and 40s and now valued all the more [Music] and this is levittown here you can own your own home complete with its own refrigerator television set and clothes dryer you can raise your children far from the city's dirt crowding and crying in comfort and safety growing up in the suburbs nearly 70 percent of white middle-class baby boomers spent their childhoods in these totally new communities for these young people and their older brothers and sisters this environment would have an enormous impact on how they would behave in the sixties it was a perfect setting in which the youth culture in a certain sense could could blossom uh life in the suburbs was organized organized around the kids again uh they were the center of attention a rat endless round of little league games and pta meetings etc so it was in the suburbs in a certain sense that this message about the importance and the uniqueness and the generational potency associated with these kids i think was delivered with real force in the average american family today children are the object of more concentrated thought and concern than the young of any previous generation or out of an increasing understanding of child psychology has come an awareness that children are real people with individual personalities which must be respected and encouraged this was a distinctly new way to be raised in the world and it allowed um for a whole generation that i suppose we would now call spoiled spoiled kids which from another point of view simply meant kids who had very high expectations in life with respect to freedom and happiness they thought life was about being free and about being happy and they carried those expectations forward into high school and into college uh and brought with them a kind of um a level of expectation that was simply unprecedented in i would say in world history [Music] these kids felt no worries about money but their parents grew up at a time when insecurity was a fact of life and deprivation a daily experience they could never quite convince themselves their escape from poverty was permanent we found out in the 50s that if you got up in the morning and went to work and did a good day's work the things got better you got promoted or you got more money uh you were able to buy furniture you could have more children the children could have better clothes and life just improved we knew it was because you went to work but i'm not sure our children realize that they saw simply that the clothes got better the house got bigger this the neighborhood got nicer and i have a strong suspicion that what happened in the late 60s was that the kids who rebelled took it for granted that life would improve automatically now here's a major seat of the 60s because of their profoundly different life experiences kids had trouble understanding why their fathers worked so hard the way many of them saw it their fathers were engaging in the single-minded pursuit of material comforts my dad was always above board in all his business dealings but i would say money and getting ahead and and and and making a lot of bucks was his goal and i think what it was was dad meant well dad wanted to love us but dad was so busy at work he would work till two three in the morning doing artwork artwork for the business he'd get up early and be gone i hardly ever saw him everything young boys saw at home and on tv told them that if they did as they were supposed to they would be quote lucky enough to follow in their father's footsteps the cub scout program helps the boy's adjustment both to the family and to the group this son of yours has been fighting again look at this shirt can i tell you about his pop look he's proud of it please pop not now jerry i'm tired i had a hi kelly said you didn't have the guts to stand up for yourself so i took a poke at him that was all right what tv showed you was a world in which men were essentially impotent didn't have any right to say that about you did he pop go to your room and get a decent shirt this minute did he pop there were no chance for risk there was no place for excitement there was no place for no challenges being offered whatsoever and the other kind of show you could watch were the westerns which showed what a real man could do measuring himself against other men especially with a gun [Music] and i think that anybody who was a red-blooded american boy in the in the 1950s knew that they wanted to be more like matt dillon or more like the paid gun fighter and have gun will travel than they wanted to be uh beaver cleaver's father is it wonderful how this washer does all these heavy things and what did girls feel was in store for them a life just like their mothers judy it isn't as bad as all that fear sorry mother i was just thinking about work oh you know thinking of how awful they used to be for you before you had the electric water heater and the washer so now i add the person educational films like this one reflect society's belief that women could find fulfillment only as housewives and mothers now i let it come to a full rolling boil again it won't take long you like to cook don't you think oh it's not just liking the cook it's it's more well it's accomplishing something it's me cooking me susan douglas and not just cooking but we're creating something special oh i wish miss holland could talk to you she could say it so much better than i can who's miss holland she's my home economics teacher not enough of anyone means soup instead of jelly even girls who were sent to college often majored in what were called the domestic sciences well there's one nice thing about it happening in class here is part of our learning and homework would be a minor tragedy there was a song when i went to college at smith college which they don't sing anymore i know that had a verse that went something like this you're sharp as a pinpoint your grades are really ten point you are dean's list sophia smith but when a man wants a kiss kid he doesn't want a quiz kid oh you can't get a man with your brains with your brains with your brain so you can't get a man with your brains and it had verses that went on and on now i sang that in 1957 with a sense of how true it was and how funny it was now of course it makes a shiver run up and down my spine i had four choices of things that i could be when i grew up i could be a teacher a nurse a stewardess or a secretary um i couldn't go into to things that dealt with medicine i couldn't go into law i couldn't go into the real professions it was it was extremely limiting and of course the overall goal was to find a husband get married have children and live with a white picket fence i used to make little stews for my child and used to spit them out and stick them on the wall but i went on doing it i don't know why a doctor spark i i think dr spock ruined everything i really do i mean he's what he's wonderful in the peace movement but this was this whole image of giving your children everything you had and they they have to be satisfied and they have to be content and i think we gave them much too much the adventures of ozzie and harriet starring the entire nelson family here's ozzie here's harriet and here it is the american family of the 1950s as it was seen thousands of evenings on tv happy kids happy father happy mother everyone behaving as they were supposed to you know it's none of my business but don't you think taking riding lessons is a pretty expensive way to meet a girl the message was absolutely unmistakable this was the way your life should be and if it wasn't something must be very wrong everyone watched ozzie and harriet and assumed that everyone they knew lived that life and then they went around pretending that they lived at two but no one really did even ozzie and harriet didn't so on some level there's been a myth all along and part of the plague of the 50s was the incredible personal efforts the incredible pain involved in perpetuating that myth about one's own family about one's own happiness in that family about the health of that family they saw women as feeling very discontented they saw husbands feel pressured harried by the demands of their jobs and families and they saw children as feeling extremely alienated so clearly i think many of the roots of the 60s explosions were planted in the supposedly placid family of the 1950s [Applause] this boy and girl coming home from school look quite content with life they're looking forward to an important date dinner at home with the family though they seem artificial today educational films like this one which were shown to school children all over america accurately reflect the attitudes and values of white middle-class society in the 1950s when real-life documentaries were few and far between doesn't that sound exciting to you their purpose was to teach kids the proper way to behave and to repeat and reinforce a set of rules the rules were were were things you talked about on the telephone with your friends and uh and they were they were imposed by your parents parents talked about it a lot there were high school counselors who told you what the rules were and even if they weren't written down everybody really knew and you could almost read them out cite them and i think looking back on it from the sixties uh what we what what people did in the sixties was self-consciously break every damn one of them the women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed rested and attractive at dinner time brother notices the time and realizes that he must put things in order and clean himself up in time for dinner what were the rules one of them was obey authority don't ask questions in the 60s millions of young people would renounce that one these boys greet their dad as though they are genuinely glad to see him as though they had really missed being away from him during the day and are anxious to talk to him this is the time for pleasant discussion in a thoroughly relaxed mood they don't pick this time of the day to spring unpleasant surprises on dad we are molding our boys the way we feel they should be molded in the fifties i think you have to start molding right away when they're just infants and so that was our influence we tried to make this a very influential time a constructive time through boy scouts through church through cub scouts through little league and not a little late but the little pony leagues or whatever they had you know these little kids it was awfully cute yeah they were fun times with our kids with our boys we had a great time let father and mother guide the conversational trend if they desire after all they made all this possible my impression of that time was that a child was to be seen and not heard and that we were never allowed to express uh anything that was negative we were never allowed to talk back in any way even to question why should i do something or could i do it later we weren't treated as we as if we were people we were another species another rule control your emotions in the 60s masses of baby boomers would reverse this one and quote let it all hang out oh i'm so happy i could be a model or a cover girl hey what's kind of that crazy kid sister oh jeff don't be that way notice how mother seems to become angry herself because of jeff's anger perhaps she shouldn't but anger is a violent emotion and we often see an induction of behavior or spread of emotion to other persons almost like a contagious disease if you misbehaved you weren't normal and and the idea of normal is it is a kind of vegetative state where nothing happens but that's what everybody tried to aspire to but i think i think it's a word that people are constantly using to uh to exhort you to behave better why don't you be normal it's not normal to it's not normal to wear your hair long it's not normal to uh to wear levi's it's not normal to listen to rock and roll it's it's not normal to uh to read comic books it's there's a whole list of of a million things that everybody does that isn't normal well what makes you think to look at your clothes because the other fellas wear sweaters or just shirts not a regular suit like mine well where is sweater there another rule fit in with the group don't stand out conform in your actions and your appearance in the 60s great numbers of young people would quote do their own thing pick out the most popular boys and girls in school keep an eye on them try to figure out why people like them not that you'll ever be just like any of them but you might learn something well see you there many young people found these restrictions painfully repressive but they struggled to obey them anyhow because if they didn't they knew there'd be unpleasant consequences from society or from their peers jenny thinks that she has the key to popularity parking in cars with the boys at night when jerry brags about taking jenny out he learns that she dates all the boys what about jenny does that make her really popular do the boys and girls like her is she welcome to join this group before class hi betty ellie you can rest your play here jimmy for a minute thanks say wally how's the play coming along oh okay jenny here jenny no girls who park in cars are not really popular not even with the boys they park with not when they meet at school or elsewhere nothing like being miss popularity yeah yeah i think that there was this sense that yeah well sure they're using sex to be popular now but you know what about in the future they're going to be like thrown in the rubbish pile and i and i think that that did happen because i think that that boys did maintain an attitude of you know they wanted to get laid but they wanted to marry a virgin yes isn't that eileen it sure is save me and all see i haven't seen her since she left school and maybe this was the biggest rule of all don't even think about having sex in the sixties young people all over the country would proclaim if it feels good do it in the height of emotion it's not always easy to stop and think things through but if you if you just slow down the rush and pressure of your feelings a little then judgment has a better chance to take hold and guide you away from wrong behavior it was sort of a nightmare looking from the outside i'm sure it didn't seem that way to observe her but for me i felt so lonely i was popular and i didn't have those problems i wasn't a nerd or anything like that but there just wasn't anybody from my planet is the way that i kind of described it i felt like i had so much bottled up inside of me most kids trying to behave properly did keep it all bottled up inside but a minuscule number began to rebel it was a preview of coming attractions what startles me when i look back at my yearbook photos now they all look so old everybody looks so old i mean they look like little adults you know they don't it's startling to me how how old how already getting into the groove all of these people look with their flat top crew cuts and and then every so often you know you turn the page and you see the guy with the duck tail and you know uh here's the rebel [Music] being a rebel by slicking your hair back and wearing a black leather jacket seems harmless now but in the 1950s many adults saw this as the first sign of teenagers going bad [Music] many teenagers are as concerned as their parents with the public's conception of today's youth these students are portraying what we consider bad taste in school attire and behavior this student is wearing an extremely tight skirt improper dress was an innocent way to defy adult restrictions but a growing number of young people were turning against society's rules in more significant ways no split levels no cadillac no commuters falling away like i mean what are they doing with their lives some were inspired by the beatniks a small but conspicuous group of young adults in the big cities who dabbled in marijuana wrote poetry and won scores of imitators in high schools all over the country cellophane wrapped in the black nightmare of the endless factory my soul squeezed in the hydraulic press of eternal drip drip drip we started a bunch of us putting out a poetry magazine and suddenly it was banned because of one little poem and so we had our first publication suppressed and i the poem i still remember to this day was i'd like to kiss just left of center of the valley of her breasts and then i'd try the other side or something they also they banned the magazine and we went outrageous the banning of quote unacceptable ideas provoked certain politically aware students to begin questioning the values the motives and the judgment of school officials and others in authority and then one day the principal came into the class and had us all pass up our copies of catcher in the rye and told us to forget that we'd ever seen this book we learned fairly quickly that the book had been banned by the school board this turned out to be a real learning experience for all of us because far we learned a lot more than we would have learned if we'd just been allowed to read the book because this way of course not only did we read the book but everybody in the school suddenly wanted to read the book books could be censored but now something came along that was much harder to stop something that millions of young people would seize and use as a means to further separate themselves from adult [Music] society the arrival of rock and roll in my life was like something that came from another planet we hadn't heard anything like that sound before we hadn't heard people making that kind of noise breaking all limits my father had a sort of breakthrough once as i recall where he realized that they had their fads too when he was a young man maybe a little older than 13 but oh everything's upside down when the music goes round and round and it comes out here well i heard this and he said this was a wild song that we had when i was a kid and i said you know that's wild you know [Music] [Music] that was the first integrated setting i was ever in but many many parents and many children were scared of the words the style and the racial implications of black music and then this godsend arrives on the horizon if you were white elvis presley [Music] it was an extraordinary godsend because soul music had really raised tremendous concerns among our parents elvis presley comes and gives us rock and roll that's white [Music] the irony is the adults who thought of rock and roll as an act of rebellion well the kids said it's not it's just music those adults were right hey they mad are they that's the way kids are dancing nowadays they call it rocks and rolling or pop or something like that there's a rebellion against suburbia the rebellion for me against uh against all of the conventions that seem to make life so stifling and uh rock and roll along with along with the beatnik movement along with kerouac and ginsburg and things like that it really uh it helped to punch a hole in 60 in the 50s conformity [Music] however we feel based upon the experiences throughout the country that this rock and roll rhythm has been the seed of trouble and we've had to keep travel out of jersey city down rock and roll has got to go and go it does that's the best way i know to get rid of them [Music] the older generation was accusing rock and roll of encouraging everything from poor study habits to juvenile delinquency from drug taking to sexual [Music] 25 of the immorality goal corrupt american young people how through movies and music that two-beat pattern is the music brought to the united states of america by the communist conspiracy to corrupt teenagers and it's in every rock and roll number one communism i mean i mean the idea that rock and roll has anything to do with communism rock and roll is sort of the ultimate flower of capitalism in a lot of ways it's inconceivable that a music that's based so deeply in in hustling in let's get rich in one hit wonders you know could have anything to do with a planned economy and concepts are you know monumentally different there was clearly no connection between rock and roll and communism but communism was an important seat of the 60s because of the fear it generated americans feared communism because the soviet union had swallowed up country after country after world war ii and it seemed determined to swallow up america as well about the age of 13 i and my friends became convinced that the russians were actually going to take over the united states this year and we formed a guerrilla army out in the that would uh wage uh partisan warfare out in the woods and we had we dug caves into hillsides and stockpiled our pathetic you know ammunition and things but we were ready let the russkies come we were ready each day in school kids were told that war could break out at any moment an atomic war in which millions would die [Music] in the 60s the fear of instant annihilation convinced many young people that they should live for today not the future while the suit is made of this material inside this slayer is a shredded lead a resistance against atomic race okay richard on your way to there right each of us were dispensed a dog tag which we were told by this old teacher somewhat tactlessly could withstand the heat of a thousand degrees centigrade made not to melt unfortunately our skin disintegrated about 900 degrees before but we we had the comfort of knowing we could be identified in the event we were burned beyond recognition the nuclear holocaust she actually put it that way attention attention this is an official civil defense warning this is not a test the united states is under nuclear attack [Music] [Music] bam it's going to happen duck and cover and everybody puts their heads like this and you scramble under the desk and then we get up after it and we resume our social studies and nobody talks about it nobody talks the teachers don't say hey this is crazy what we're doing to the kids you know this is not how we want this is not how we want you to grow up to be you know no the teachers just went through this stuff in some kind of numb trance because if they said no why god who could say no but a lousy commie pinko sap because immediately the reactionaries were on the school board get that person out of here we can't have pinkos teaching our kids gone americans reacted to communism by developing an almost religious conviction that communism and everything connected to it was evil and immoral and everything about america was perfect that america was the shining beacon of liberty and freedom there's something about america that makes me shout with joy there's a land of opportunity for every girl and boy there's something about our president that makes me southern in america we all might be the president someday we as a group were taught that the world was uh consisted of right and wrong good and evil the free world and the iron curtain we were in the free world we were the leaders of the free world uh if the united states did things then we were right this teaching which combined indisputable truth with obvious exaggeration was repeated over and over again in thousands of schools from thousands of pulpits and by many national leaders communism in reality is not a political party it is a way of life an evil and malignant way of life it reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic and like an epidemic a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation there are these evil people and i remember seeing movies a movie where they they you went home one day and your home wasn't yours anymore it was most distressing i i think it was like really evil what what people told young children about communism we learned in school that home life does not encourage the growth of the collective character which the party wishes to develop in its young people it's your fault you should have spent more time training as to think along party lines as a member of the young pioneers it will be my duty to report you you better listen to me all of you i want to hear any more talk about state schools and party lines and collective character and deviationism there's going to be a family again and i know just where to start people [Music] during this period the belief that america was good and communism was evil became one of the nation's chief articles of faith and one of the most important seeds of the sixties because millions of america's children accepted it and based their faith in their country on its truth i believed that this was reality this was the united states of america that anybody no matter what color your skin no matter what religion you were what country your ancestors came from none of that was supposed to matter and that's what was that's what we were told and i believed strongly there's something about america that's wonderful to me and do you know what that something is we are really [Music] free we are really free that's what the 60s generation had been taught from birth but they were seeing contradictory images on television disturbing images from places like little rock arkansas what led to the violence was black parents wanting to give their children the same good education white children were getting this was an important part of a larger black civil rights struggle against prejudice and discrimination for southern black people and for the millions of young whites who had been taught to believe in american justice and freedom this struggle and what it said about america may be the most significant seed of the sixties [Music] [Music] in the south black people were kept down not just by unwritten rules but by laws backed by the full force of state and local government the jim crow laws [Music] while white parents were telling their kids to obey the rules so that prosperity and happiness would be theirs black people had a very different vision of the american dream the american dream for my particular family was survival they did not want to do something that was going to rock the boat and interfere with the status quo i think that for them to have a job and to do anything or to have your kids do anything that would threaten the family livelihood was ridiculous and so we stayed in our proper place you guys don't understand the connection that we have with the colored people in other words people we work with them and they work with us and we're not going to take him and push him off somewhere just because we could do it the idea was that you must go to the white man that was the statement to get everything you need he controls everything and if you fight him he's going to fight back and he's going to hurt you and he's going to win and we've been your friends for years yes have we worked more than anybody in this country yes go ahead in a strange almost perverse way it was the institution of segregation that gave black people the strength and the solidarity they needed to fight for equality segregation meant not only the hardships and it meant not only the terrible anxiety but it was also a sharing time it was also a sense of community and a sense of collective accomplishment in the face of just terrible odds [Music] people who experience a kind of holistic oppression find ways to develop an enclave find ways to develop values that nurture young children so that they are not given the message and internalize the message that we are nobody they're given a message that your life has value that what you're about is respected by by us even if it's not by the outside world and they're also given one other value a sense of dignity and a sense of mission the mission that was being given to young black people as they were growing up was crystal clear get a good education and use it to better yourself and society education was an absolute must because we learned early that the one thing no one could take from you was what was in your head so you tried to acquire as much knowledge and education was just so important i'm gonna tell you reading the white folk story tell us to go to school and see to us going to school that you learn yourself some sense you might be just a little knocked out of them if you have to lick that for your children wash your clothes at night if they want them education for being taught reading writing and arithmetic and values that in a few years would give a generation of young black people the skills and the commitment to sustain the greatest social movement of 20th century america i can remember in high school teachers saying to you that you're going to learn everything i know about this before you leave my class you know and because these teachers were also from the community they could whoop you they could they could do anything your parents did you know i mean it was you could you could expect the same treatment that you would get at home even with these efforts southern black communities felt they were facing terrible limitations in their ability to educate their children black schools and white schools were separate and supposed to be equal but everyone knew they were not the school that we went to we called them tall paper shacks they were really wooden buildings with tar paper on the outside and a wood stove inside the stoves had gotten big holes in them uh when they made fires and then the hot coals would jump out whoever sat behind stove it was your job to get the coals back in so the building wouldn't burn and at the time you know when you flip the coals back in you think it's funny but we could see that this was no no condition for learning and um we knew that we we deserved something better it was very obvious to us that what we had was not equal and i never really realized how unequal things were until i came back here and had a chance to tour the old white school which was then closed and see they had all the stuff stored over there i mean they even had uh they had like an open area in the center of the school they had a garden know when i went to college first biology course i took they handed us a microscope and slides and told us to you know to draw amoebas and i drew dust particles for a couple of weeks because i didn't want anybody to know i didn't know how to use a microscope because we didn't have one so [Music] in their struggle to give their children equal educational opportunities black communities seized upon a revolutionary concept school integration when i first heard about integration and heard that it may possibly one day be the you know the way things would go i had very mixed feelings about it i was no more anxious to mingle with white people then i'm sure many of them were anxious to mingle with me i felt the same reservations the same um prejudices i guess i may i may as well say that any of them felt you know um so i was not at all thrilled over the prospect but um as time went on i began to realize that possibly this was after all the only way that the terrible injustices could be somewhat alleviated we have been on the outside of the mainstream of america's life we have been on the outside of society we have been on the outside of education in their attempt to integrate the schools frustrated black communities sued southern school boards and in may 1954 in the case brown versus board of education the supreme court announced its decision separate schools were inherently unequal school segregation was outlawed but there was no guarantee the white south would accept that negro decision walks into the school every decent self-respecting loving parent should take his white child out of that parochial school and it's not right they have schools just as good as us at a church but we don't have a choice like they do see they can go to eyes or they go to their own but after the brown decision things did not change very quickly in terms of school desegregation across the south so matter of fact in many places after several years things began to move in the opposite direction schools shut down across the south particularly in virginia you began to see a racist backlash in the development of the white citizens councils the rebirth of the ku klux klan in many parts of the south and finally the emergence of a series of very opportunistic white politicians who used the issue of school desegregation as a bloody flag which they waved before an outraged white electorate saying segregation now and segregation forever we shall not submit to nick dominion another day another hour to see just how far white communities went to sabotage school integration consider the case of prince edward county virginia where the local white dominated government shut down the entire public school system and white residents built private schools for their children when the schools finally closed it was like you know shock disbelief this can't be happening you know how how can it happen and it was just like somebody everybody had died everybody had died in the community nobody knew what to do the kids have been locked out of school it was a nightmare you don't close schools to to stop people from getting an education in the 1950s in the united states of america they the the country that that that advocates democracy for everyone all over the world and you're going to close schools to keep from integrating i mean that it doesn't make sense it doesn't jail that's you know that's how i felt that's where i still feel it was white resistance to a supreme court ruling to the law of the land to what black people saw as the surest path to equality that inspired the southern black community and especially young black people to fight back and that battle played a major role in making the 60s what they were the only thing out there in the society that gave one any hope that that that gave me any hope that i could do anything with the feelings that were mined and so different from anything else and that couldn't exist in a gray final suit was the negros okay these people way over there down they were down south they were in my county but on the television comes these pictures of these black kids in the compounds down south with the dogs at them with the hoses on them you know good god it was just it was unbelievable here were people standing up for something that was vital to them that was right for them as citizens moving saying no to what they had been and yes to what was promised them what was inside them and it just it sliced across the face of the american reality we grew up in a time when none of the adults would take a chance oh [Music] [Music] hmm uh [Music] [Music]

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 247,122

Rating: 4.8053823 out of 5

Keywords: 1950s, 50s, 60s, 1960s, the American dream, American dream, civil rights, American history, PBS documentary, 60s documentary, making sense of the 60s, suburbs, baby boomers, David Hoffman filmmaker, 60s documentary series, baby boom, Levittown, Berkeley, Documentary, David Hoffman, the 60s, boring 1950s, nuclear family, the Joneses, the sixties, hippies, 50s family, fifties family, family friendly, partisan divide, maga, trump, 2020

Id: ohJ6T1pFalI

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Just watched this a few days ago. Found it really interesting. There are other 60s and 50s documentaries on that YouTube channel.