Unit 9 · Postwar America

When World War II ended in 1945, more than 12 million Americans were in uniform. Almost all of them came home within about two years. They needed jobs, homes and a chance to rebuild their lives. Many leaders worried the country would slide back into a depression, like the hard times of the 1930s.

Congress had already passed a law to help. It was called the GI Bill. GI was a nickname for American soldiers. The law paid for veterans to go to college or learn a trade. It also helped them get home loans with low payments. Millions of veterans used it. Colleges filled up, and many families became the first in their line to own a home or earn a degree.

Not everyone shared equally. Banks and local offices ran much of the program. In many places, especially in the South, Black veterans were turned away from loans and from colleges. This was discrimination, treating people unfairly because of their race or another group they belong to. Women who had worked in war factories were often pushed out of those jobs so returning men could have them.

Still, the GI Bill changed the country. It helped create a large middle class, a group of families who earned enough to own homes, buy cars and save a little money. Many historians see it as one of the most important laws of the twentieth century.

During the Great Depression and the war, many couples waited to start families. Once peace came and jobs were plentiful, they stopped waiting. Births in the United States jumped in 1946 and stayed high until the mid-1960s. This huge rise in births is called the baby boom.

The children born in these years are called baby boomers. There were so many of them that they changed almost everything they touched. Towns rushed to build new schools and hire teachers. Classrooms were packed. Companies sold more diapers, toys, cereal and bicycles than ever before.

Doctors and scientists helped these children grow up healthier. In 1955, a vaccine made by Dr. Jonas Salk was approved to protect against polio. Polio was a disease that had paralyzed thousands of children each year. Parents lined up to get their kids the shots, and cases dropped quickly.

The baby boom kept shaping the nation as the boomers grew. In the 1960s they became teenagers and college students, and many joined protests and new movements. Much later, as they grew old, they changed health care and retirement plans. One big generation can move a whole country.

Harry S. Truman became president in April 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died. Truman was a plain-spoken man from Missouri. He faced hard problems right away. Prices rose quickly after the war, a problem called inflation. Millions of workers went on strike for higher pay. Many voters were unhappy.

In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. The law limited some of the things labor unions could do during strikes. Truman and the unions were angry about it. Congress, controlled by Republicans at the time, blocked many of Truman’s ideas.

Almost everyone expected Truman to lose the 1948 election to Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York. Truman’s own Democratic Party split three ways. Truman traveled the country by train and gave hundreds of short speeches. On election night, the Chicago Daily Tribune printed the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” before all the votes were counted. Truman won. A famous photo shows him grinning and holding up that wrong headline.

Truman called his plan the Fair Deal. Congress raised the minimum wage, expanded Social Security and paid to build housing for low-income families. But Congress turned down his plan for national health insurance. The Fair Deal kept much of the New Deal alive, even as the nation’s attention turned to a new rival overseas.

The United States and the Soviet Union fought on the same side in World War II. Once the war ended, their friendship fell apart fast. Both countries came out of the war as superpowers, nations with huge armies and great influence around the world. But they believed in very different ways of life.

The United States had capitalism and democracy. People and companies owned businesses, and voters chose their leaders in free elections. The Soviet Union had communism under a dictator, Joseph Stalin. The government owned farms and factories, allowed only one political party and jailed people who spoke against it.

Soviet armies had pushed the Germans out of Eastern Europe. After the war, they stayed. Stalin helped communists take power in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other countries. In 1946, Britain’s former leader Winston Churchill spoke at a college in Fulton, Missouri. He said an “iron curtain” had fallen across Europe, cutting the East off from the West.

This struggle became known as the Cold War. It was “cold” because the United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other directly in a full war. Instead they competed for allies, built weapons, spied on each other and backed opposite sides in wars in other countries. The Cold War lasted more than 40 years.

American leaders asked a big question: how do we stop communism from spreading without starting another world war? An American diplomat named George Kennan offered an answer. He said the United States should firmly block Soviet power wherever it tried to grow. This idea was called containment, which means keeping something inside its limits.

In 1947, Greece and Turkey were in danger. Communist fighters were at war with the government in Greece, and the Soviets were pressing Turkey. Truman asked Congress for money to help both nations. His promise to help free peoples resist communist takeovers became known as the Truman Doctrine. Congress agreed.

Western Europe had another problem: it was in ruins. Cities were bombed, factories were broken and people were hungry. Hungry, desperate people might turn to communism. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a giant aid program. Under the Marshall Plan, the United States sent about 13 billion dollars to help rebuild Europe.

The Marshall Plan worked. Western European countries grew strong again and stayed democracies. They also became good trading partners for American businesses. The Soviet Union refused the aid and did not let the countries it controlled accept it either. Europe was now split into two camps.

After the war, Germany was split into four zones. The United States, Britain and France controlled the western parts. The Soviet Union controlled the east. Berlin, the capital, sat deep inside the Soviet zone. It was also split, with West Berlin run by the Western allies.

In June 1948, Stalin cut off every road, railroad and canal into West Berlin. He hoped to force the Western allies out. More than two million people there could soon run out of food and coal. Truman did not want to start a war by forcing his way in. He also did not want to give up the city.

The answer came by air. American and British pilots flew cargo planes into West Berlin day and night. At the busiest times, a plane landed every few minutes. They carried flour, milk, medicine and coal. One pilot dropped candy on tiny parachutes to children. This Berlin Airlift lasted almost a year. In May 1949, Stalin gave up and lifted the blockade.

The crisis pushed Western nations closer together. In 1949, the United States, Canada and ten European countries formed NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Members promised that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. In 1955 the Soviet Union formed its own alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Germany stayed divided into West Germany and East Germany.

In 1949, two shocks hit Americans. First, the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb. Second, communists led by Mao Zedong won a long civil war in China, the world’s most populous country. China’s old government fled to the island of Taiwan. Many Americans asked, “Who lost China?” Fear of communism grew.

Korea, a peninsula next to China, had been split after World War II at a line called the 38th parallel. The north had a communist government backed by the Soviets. The south was backed by the United States. In June 1950, North Korea’s army invaded South Korea. The United Nations voted to defend South Korea. Most of the troops sent were American, led by General Douglas MacArthur.

The war swung back and forth. MacArthur’s forces pushed the North Koreans almost to the Chinese border. Then hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers poured in and drove them back. MacArthur wanted to attack China itself. Truman feared that could start a third world war. When MacArthur criticized the president in public, Truman fired him in 1951. In the U.S., the Constitution puts elected leaders, not generals, in charge of the military.

After two more years of hard fighting, both sides signed an armistice in July 1953. Korea stayed divided near where it started. More than 36,000 Americans died, along with many hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Chinese. The war ended in a stalemate. Korea is still divided today.

Communists were often called “Reds,” after the color of the Soviet flag. In the late 1940s and 1950s, a wave of fear called the Red Scare swept the country. Some real spy cases made the fear grow. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets and were executed in 1953.

The government began checking the loyalty of millions of workers. A committee in Congress called HUAC questioned writers, actors and teachers about their political beliefs. Hollywood studios put hundreds of people on a blacklist, a list of people who would not be hired. Many lost their careers even though they had broken no law.

In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin claimed he had a list of communists working in the State Department. He never proved it. For four years he made more and more charges, and many people were afraid to stand up to him. Attacking people with unfair charges and no evidence came to be called McCarthyism.

In 1954, McCarthy went after the U.S. Army in hearings shown on television. Millions watched him bully witnesses. His support collapsed, and the Senate voted to censure, or officially criticize, him. The Red Scare faded, but it left a lesson: fear can lead a free country to trample people’s rights.

Once the Soviets had the atomic bomb in 1949, an arms race began. Each side rushed to build more and stronger weapons than the other. In 1952, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. The Soviets soon tested one too. Both sides built long-range bombers and, later, missiles that could cross oceans.

Ordinary Americans lived with the fear of nuclear war. Schools held drills where children practiced ducking under their desks and covering their heads. A cartoon turtle named Bert taught kids to “duck and cover.” Some families built fallout shelter rooms in their backyards or basements and stocked them with canned food and water.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, into orbit around Earth. Americans were stunned. If the Soviets could launch a satellite, they could launch a missile. Many people worried the United States had fallen behind in science.

The government acted fast. In 1958, Congress created NASA to run the American space program. It also passed a law that paid for more science, math and foreign language classes in schools and colleges. The space race had begun, and classrooms were part of it.

In 1952, voters elected Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who had led the D-Day invasion. People called him “Ike.” He was a Republican, but he kept most New Deal programs like Social Security. He wanted to balance the budget and keep the country calm and steady.

As a young army officer, Eisenhower had crossed the country in a slow truck convoy on muddy roads. In Germany during the war, he saw its fast highways. In 1956 he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. It paid to build about 41,000 miles of interstate highways, wide roads with no stoplights linking cities across the country.

Highways helped create the suburbs, neighborhoods of houses outside a city. In 1947, builder William Levitt began Levittown on Long Island, New York. His workers built houses like an assembly line, one step at a time, so they were cheap. With GI Bill loans, a veteran could buy one for a small payment each month. Similar suburbs grew around Chicago and cities across the country.

But many suburbs were closed to Black families. Levittown’s rules at first said homes could not be sold to anyone who was not white. Banks and the government often refused loans in Black neighborhoods, a practice called redlining. As white families left for the suburbs, many cities lost money and jobs, while Black families were kept out.

The 1950s were a time of prosperity. Wages rose, and many families had money to spend. They bought cars, refrigerators, washing machines and television sets. Businesses used ads on TV to sell even more. Buying on credit became normal. This way of life is called a consumer culture.

The car shaped daily life. Families drove to new shopping centers, drive-in movies and fast-food restaurants. In 1955, Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, near Chicago. Soon there were McDonald’s all over the country.

Teenagers had more free time and spending money than young people ever had. They bought records and radios. A new music called rock and roll mixed rhythm and blues, gospel and country. Its roots were in Black music. Chuck Berry made hit records for Chess Records in Chicago. Little Richard and Elvis Presley made teens scream and dance.

Many parents did not like the loud new music. Some said it was a bad influence. Rock and roll also brought Black and white teens to the same concerts and dance floors at a time when much of the country was still segregated. The music helped blur lines that the law was still drawing.

TV shows made it look as if every family had a new house and a new car. That was not true. In 1959, about one in five Americans lived in poverty, meaning they did not have enough money for basic needs. Poor families lived in rural areas like Appalachia and the Deep South, and in crowded neighborhoods in big cities.

Black Americans faced segregation in the South and discrimination in the North. In Chicago, many Black families who had come north in the Great Migration were crowded into a few neighborhoods. Landlords charged high rents for poor housing. Good jobs and new suburbs were often closed to them.

Mexican Americans and Mexican workers also struggled. Under the Bracero Program, millions of Mexican workers came to work on American farms for low pay and in hard conditions. In 1954, a harsh government campaign sent huge numbers of people back to Mexico. Some who were sent away were American citizens.

The government also changed its policy toward Native Americans. A plan called termination tried to end federal recognition of some tribes. Another program encouraged Native people to leave reservations for cities such as Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Many found low-paying jobs and felt cut off from home. Many tribes fought to keep their land and their nations alive.

After Reconstruction ended, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws. These laws forced segregation, the separation of people by race. Black and white Americans had to use separate schools, restaurants, bathrooms, water fountains and train cars. The places for Black people were almost always worse.

Southern states also blocked Black citizens from voting. Some charged a poll tax, a fee to vote that many poor people could not pay. Others gave hard, unfair reading tests that white officials graded however they wished. People who tried to register could lose their jobs or be threatened with violence.

Millions of Black Southerners left in the Great Migration. They moved to cities in the North and West, like Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, looking for better jobs and more freedom. Chicago’s Black population grew very fast. But in the North, Black families still faced discrimination in housing, jobs and schools, even without Jim Crow signs.

World War II gave the struggle new energy. About a million Black Americans served in the war. A Black newspaper called for a “Double V”: victory over enemies abroad and victory over racism at home. Veterans who had fought for freedom overseas came home determined to have it themselves.

For decades, Major League Baseball was closed to Black players. They played in the Negro Leagues, where many stars never got the chance to play in the majors. On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He became the first Black player in the modern major leagues.

Robinson faced insults from fans and other players. Some opponents tried to hurt him with their spikes. He had promised Dodgers leader Branch Rickey that he would not fight back in his first years. He answered with his play instead and won Rookie of the Year. Other teams soon signed Black players. Millions of Americans saw that integration could work.

The armed forces were also segregated. Black soldiers served in separate units, often led by white officers. In 1948, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981. An executive order is a rule from the president that has the force of law for the government. It ordered equal treatment in the military.

Changing the military took years. By the Korean War, however, Black and white soldiers were fighting side by side in the same units. Truman also asked Congress for civil rights laws, but Southern senators blocked them. Still, these early steps gave hope and showed what was possible.

The NAACP, a civil rights group founded in 1909, decided to fight segregation in the courts. Its top lawyer was Thurgood Marshall. His plan was to show judges, case by case, that “separate but equal” schools were never truly equal. Black schools often had old books, crowded rooms and less money.

Mexican American families fought too. In California, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez’s children were sent to a separate “Mexican school.” The Mendez family and others sued. In Mendez v. Westminster, a federal court ruled in 1946 that this segregation was illegal, and a higher court agreed in 1947. That same year California ended school segregation by law.

Then came the big case. In Topeka, Kansas, a Black girl named Linda Brown had to travel far to a Black school, though a white school was much closer. Her family and families in four other places sued. Marshall argued the cases together before the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that segregated public schools broke the Constitution. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that separate schools are unequal by their nature. It overturned the idea of “separate but equal” in schools. But the Court did not set a firm deadline, and many Southern leaders promised to resist. In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.

Many Southern leaders fought the Brown decision. They closed schools, passed new laws and promised “massive resistance.” In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was supposed to admit nine Black students. They became known as the Little Rock Nine.

Governor Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to block the students. On the first day, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford arrived alone because she had not gotten word of a plan to go together. A shouting mob followed her. Photos of her calm face surrounded by angry adults spread around the world.

President Eisenhower had not strongly supported the Brown ruling. But he believed a governor could not defy a federal court. He sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. They walked the nine students into Central High and guarded them. Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas NAACP, advised and supported the students throughout.

Inside, the students were insulted, pushed and threatened for the whole year. They stayed. In 1958, Ernest Green became the first Black graduate of Central High. The crisis showed that the federal government would, when pushed, use its power to enforce the Constitution.

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago’s South Side. In August 1955, he traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives. At a small store, he was accused of speaking to or whistling at a white woman. Days later, white men kidnapped him from his great-uncle’s home and murdered him.

His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, brought his body home to Chicago. She made a painful, powerful decision: she held an open-casket funeral so people could see what had been done to her son. Thousands of mourners came to the church. A Black magazine called Jet printed photographs, and people across the nation saw them.

Two men were put on trial in Mississippi. An all-white jury found them not guilty in about an hour. Later, the men admitted to the killing in a magazine interview, but they could not be tried again. The case showed that in much of the South, the justice system did not protect Black Americans. This is called injustice.

Emmett Till’s death moved many people to act. Rosa Parks later said she thought of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her bus seat. In 2023, the church in Chicago where his funeral was held became part of a new national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother.

In Montgomery, Alabama, city buses were segregated. Black riders had to sit in the back. If the white section filled up, they had to give up their seats. On December 1, 1955, a bus driver told Rosa Parks to stand for a white man. She refused and was arrested.

Parks was not just a tired seamstress, as some stories say. She was a longtime leader in the local NAACP. And she was not the first. Months earlier, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin had also refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Parks’s arrest became the spark for action.

Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council printed thousands of flyers overnight calling for a boycott, a refusal to use or buy something as a protest. Black residents stopped riding the buses. They walked miles, shared rides and organized car pools. Leaders chose a 26-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to lead them.

The boycott lasted 381 days. The bus company lost money. Some leaders’ homes were bombed, and many boycotters were arrested. At the same time, a lawsuit went to court. In 1956 the Supreme Court agreed that bus segregation was unconstitutional. In December 1956, Black riders took any open seat. The boycott showed the power of people acting together.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister from Atlanta. He believed in nonviolence, protesting without ever using violence, even when attacked. He learned from Christian teachings about loving your enemies and from Mohandas Gandhi, who led India’s struggle for independence from Britain.

Nonviolence did not mean doing nothing. Protesters broke unfair laws on purpose and accepted arrest. This is called civil disobedience. When peaceful protesters were beaten or jailed, people who saw it on TV or in newspapers often felt shocked and angry. That pressure pushed leaders to change laws.

In 1957, King and other ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. It used churches as meeting places and organized protests across the South. Churches were at the heart of the movement. People sang hymns and freedom songs to stay brave.

Nonviolence took great discipline. Groups held training sessions. Some volunteers pretended to shout insults and push the others, so they could practice staying calm. Not everyone agreed with this approach, and some later argued Black Americans had the right to defend themselves. But nonviolence became the main strategy of the movement in these years.

On February 1, 1960, four Black college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They politely asked for coffee. They were refused, but they stayed seated. The next day they came back with more students. This kind of protest is called a sit-in.

Sit-ins spread to dozens of cities across the South. In Nashville, students such as Diane Nash and John Lewis led sit-ins at downtown stores. Protesters were yelled at, had food poured on them and were arrested. Many stores finally agreed to serve everyone. In April 1960, student leaders formed SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, often called “Snick.”

The Supreme Court had ruled that bus stations for travel between states could not be segregated. But the South ignored it. In May 1961, a group of Black and white volunteers called Freedom Riders rode buses into the South to test the ruling. In Anniston, Alabama, a mob set one bus on fire. In Birmingham, riders were badly beaten.

The Nashville students refused to let the rides stop and sent new riders. Hundreds were arrested in Mississippi. The Kennedy administration sent federal marshals to protect them. In the fall of 1961, the federal government issued new rules banning segregation in bus stations. The young activists had won.

Many famous speeches in the movement were given by men. But much of the daily work was organized by women. They ran meetings, planned protests, taught classes and kept people going when times were hardest. Many were not given credit until much later.

Ella Baker had worked for the NAACP and the SCLC for years. In 1960 she invited the student sit-in leaders to a meeting, where they formed SNCC. She told young people they did not need one famous leader to follow. She believed ordinary people could lead themselves. This is called grassroots organizing.

Fannie Lou Hamer grew up in a family of sharecroppers in Mississippi. In 1962, when she was in her forties, she tried to register to vote. She was fired from her job and forced off the farm where she lived. She did not quit. She became an organizer and a powerful singer and speaker, and she later helped challenge Mississippi’s all-white delegation at a national political convention.

Other women led, too. Daisy Bates guided the Little Rock Nine. Jo Ann Robinson launched the Montgomery boycott. Diane Nash helped lead the Nashville sit-ins and kept the Freedom Rides going. Septima Clark taught adults to read so they could pass voting tests. Without these women, the movement could not have succeeded.

Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most segregated cities in America. So many bombs had hit Black homes and churches that some people called it “Bombingham.” In the spring of 1963, King and local leaders began protests to end segregation in downtown stores.

King was arrested and put in jail. There, he wrote a long letter answering white ministers who had told him to be patient and wait. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he explained why Black Americans could not wait any longer for rights they should already have.

In May, thousands of children and teenagers joined the marches. This became known as the Children's Crusade. The city’s police chief, Bull Connor, ordered officers to spray them with fire hoses and use police dogs. Television and newspaper pictures shocked the nation and the world. Soon, city business leaders agreed to end segregation in stores.

On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the nation on TV. He called civil rights a moral issue and asked Congress for a strong new civil rights law. That night, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was killed outside his home in Mississippi. In September, a bomb at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church killed four young girls. The country was being forced to choose.

On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. They came by bus, train and car from all over the country. They were Black and white, young and old. Their event was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was one of the largest protests the nation had ever seen.

The march was planned by A. Philip Randolph, a longtime labor leader, and Bayard Rustin, a skilled organizer. They wanted Congress to pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill and to create fair jobs for all. Marchers walked to the Lincoln Memorial, where speakers and singers took the stage. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who lived in Chicago, sang for the crowd.

John Lewis of SNCC, just 23, gave a fiery speech. Near the end of the day, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. He left his written notes and began talking about a dream. He described a future America where people would be treated as equals. His words are among the most famous in American history.

The march was peaceful and hopeful, and millions watched on TV. It showed that the movement had wide support. But the struggle was far from over. Weeks later came the Birmingham church bombing, and in November, President Kennedy was assassinated. The civil rights bill still had to get through Congress.

In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts ran for president against Vice President Richard Nixon. For the first time, the candidates debated on live TV. The first debate took place in a Chicago TV studio. Kennedy looked calm and confident. Many voters who watched thought he won. He won the election by a very small margin. At 43, he was the youngest person ever elected president, and the first Catholic president.

Kennedy called his plans the New Frontier. He wanted to fight poverty, improve schools and send Americans to help other nations. In 1961 he created the Peace Corps, which sends American volunteers to teach, build and help with health care in poorer countries around the world. Thousands of young Americans signed up.

The Soviets were winning the early space race. In April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth. A month later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Kennedy then set a bold goal: land an American on the Moon and return him safely before 1970.

NASA grew fast. Thousands of scientists and engineers went to work. Katherine Johnson, a Black mathematician at NASA, checked the math for John Glenn’s flight, which made him the first American to orbit Earth in 1962. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 walked on the Moon. Kennedy did not live to see it.

In 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. He soon became allied with the Soviet Union. In April 1961, about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow him. The invasion failed within days. It embarrassed Kennedy and pushed Castro closer to the Soviets.

Berlin was still a problem. Thousands of East Germans were escaping to the West through West Berlin. In August 1961, East Germany built a wall across the city, first with barbed wire, then with concrete. The Berlin Wall split families and neighborhoods. Guards shot at people who tried to cross. It became the symbol of the Cold War.

In October 1962, American spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba. From there, missiles could reach most U.S. cities in minutes. Kennedy ordered a quarantine, a ring of Navy ships around Cuba to stop more weapons from arriving. For thirteen tense days, the world waited to see if nuclear war would begin. This was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Finally, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. The United States promised not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey. Both sides were shaken. In 1963, they set up a direct “hotline” between Washington and Moscow and signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the air, in space and underwater.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Americans were stunned. Schools closed, and families gathered around their TVs. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office on the president’s plane that same day.

Johnson was a Texan who had served many years in Congress. He knew how to win votes. He told Congress the best way to honor Kennedy was to pass the civil rights bill. Southern senators tried to block it with a filibuster, giving long speeches to stop a vote. The filibuster lasted for weeks, but it was finally broken.

On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. It banned segregation in public places like hotels, restaurants, theaters and parks. It also banned job discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It was the strongest civil rights law since Reconstruction.

That same summer, about a thousand volunteers, many of them college students from the North, went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. They helped Black residents register to vote and taught in “Freedom Schools.” In June, three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered. The nation saw that voting rights were still not safe.

Even after the Civil Rights Act, many Black Southerners still could not vote. In Selma, Alabama, about half the people were Black, but only a tiny share of Black adults were registered. Officials used unfair tests and long delays. In 1964, the 24th Amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections, but other barriers remained.

On March 7, 1965, about 600 marchers set out from Selma to walk to the state capital, Montgomery. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers attacked them with clubs and tear gas. John Lewis of SNCC was badly injured. TV showed the attack to the nation. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.

A week later, President Johnson spoke to Congress. He asked for a law to protect voting rights and ended with the words of the movement’s anthem: “We shall overcome.” Later that month, with federal protection, thousands of marchers walked the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery.

On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. It banned literacy tests in places with a history of discrimination and sent federal officials to register voters. In Mississippi, the share of Black adults registered to vote jumped from under 10 percent to about 60 percent in just a few years. Black citizens were soon elected to local offices across the South.

In 1964, Johnson won the presidential election in a landslide, a very large victory. He had a dream he called the Great Society, a nation where no one would be poor, hungry or without a good education. He declared a “War on Poverty.”

Congress passed many new programs. Head Start helped young children from poor families get ready for school. The Job Corps trained young people for work. In 1965, Medicare began paying for health care for Americans 65 and older, and Medicaid helped low-income people pay for care. A new law also sent federal money to public schools with many poor students.

In 1965, Congress also passed a new immigration law. It ended the old quota system that had favored immigrants from northern and western Europe since the 1920s. After the law, many more immigrants came from Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world. America’s population became much more diverse.

The number of Americans in poverty fell from about 22 percent in 1959 to about 11 percent in 1973. Supporters said the programs worked and gave people a fair chance. Critics said they cost too much and made the federal government too big. Meanwhile, the growing war in Vietnam took more and more of the money and attention Johnson had hoped to use at home.

Not every Black leader agreed with nonviolence. Malcolm X, a minister in the Nation of Islam, spoke about Black pride and the right to defend oneself. He criticized the goal of integration at first. After a trip to Mecca in 1964, he began to speak of cooperation among people of all races. He was assassinated in New York in February 1965.

By 1966, some young activists, like Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, called for Black Power. It meant Black communities controlling their own schools, businesses and politics, and taking pride in Black culture and history. In Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party formed. It carried guns to watch the police and also ran free breakfast programs for children.

The movement moved north, too. In 1966, King lived for a time in an apartment on Chicago’s West Side and led marches for fair housing. White crowds threw rocks at the marchers. Summer after summer, frustration over poverty, police treatment and discrimination exploded into riots in cities like Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit.

A commission appointed by President Johnson studied the riots. Its 1968 report said the main cause was racism and unequal conditions in cities. That April, King was assassinated in Memphis. A week later, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in buying and renting homes.

Farmworkers picked much of America’s food, but they were among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Many were Mexican American or Filipino American. They worked long days in the hot sun, often without clean water, bathrooms or protection from pesticides. They moved from farm to farm and had little power.

César Chávez had worked in the fields since he was a boy. In 1962, he and Dolores Huerta started a union for farmworkers. In 1965, Filipino American grape pickers led by Larry Itliong went on strike in Delano, California. Chávez and Huerta’s union joined them. Together they became the United Farm Workers.

Like King, Chávez believed in nonviolence. The strikers marched and asked Americans to stop buying grapes. Millions joined the boycott. Chávez also went on long fasts, refusing food for weeks, to draw attention to the cause. In 1970, many grape growers finally signed contracts giving workers better pay and conditions. Huerta’s rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” means “Yes, it can be done.”

Other Latino Americans also pushed for change. In 1968, thousands of Mexican American students in Los Angeles walked out of their high schools to demand better schools and classes that taught their history. In Chicago, young Puerto Ricans in a group called the Young Lords organized to fight for better housing and services in their neighborhoods.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, many women were expected to stay home as wives and mothers. Women who worked often earned much less than men for the same job. Many colleges, medical schools and law schools accepted few women. Newspapers listed jobs under “Help Wanted—Male” and “Help Wanted—Female.”

In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique. It described women who felt unhappy and unfulfilled with lives limited to the home. The book sold millions of copies. The same year, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which required equal pay for men and women doing the same work. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also banned job discrimination based on sex.

In 1966, Friedan and others formed the National Organization for Women, or NOW, to push for equal rights. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first Black woman elected to Congress. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, which banned sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money. Girls’ sports teams grew quickly as a result.

Congress also passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and sent it to the states. Supporters said it would guarantee equality for women in the Constitution. Opponents, including many women, argued it could take away protections women already had. Not enough states ratified it by the deadline, so it did not become part of the Constitution.

Native Americans had faced termination and relocation in the 1950s. In the 1960s, many young Native people pushed back. In 1968, activists in Minneapolis formed the American Indian Movement, or AIM. They fought police mistreatment and demanded that the U.S. honor its treaties.

In 1969, a group called Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for more than a year and a half. They said it should become a Native cultural center. In 1973, AIM members occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre, for 71 days. In 1970, President Nixon ended termination and supported self-determination, the right of tribes to govern themselves.

People with disabilities also began to organize. Many were shut out of schools, jobs and buildings with stairs and no ramps. Starting in the late 1940s, the University of Illinois became a leader in opening college to students who used wheelchairs. It added ramps and accessible buses, and it started wheelchair sports teams.

In the 1960s, Ed Roberts, who used a wheelchair and a breathing machine, fought to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He helped start the independent living movement. In 1973, Congress passed a law banning discrimination against people with disabilities in programs that receive federal money. In 1975, another law promised children with disabilities a free public education. That law is the root of today’s IEPs.

Vietnam, in Southeast Asia, was a French colony for many years. After World War II, a communist leader named Ho Chi Minh led a war for independence against France. In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French at a battle called Dien Bien Phu. A peace agreement split Vietnam in two, with a communist North and a non-communist South.

The agreement called for an election in 1956 to reunite the country. The South’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold it, fearing Ho Chi Minh would win. The United States backed Diem. Communist fighters in the South, called the Viet Cong, began a war against his government with help from the North.

American leaders believed in the domino theory. They feared that if Vietnam fell to communism, nearby countries would fall one after another, like a row of dominoes. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent money, weapons and military advisers to South Vietnam. By 1963, about 16,000 American advisers were there.

Many Vietnamese saw the war differently. To them, it was a long fight for independence from foreign control, first from France and then from the United States. This difference in how each side saw the war helps explain why it was so hard for the U.S. to win.

In August 1964, the U.S. said North Vietnamese boats had attacked American Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress quickly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It allowed the president to take all necessary steps to defend U.S. forces. Johnson used it to widen the war without a formal declaration of war.

In 1965, the U.S. began heavy bombing of North Vietnam and sent combat troops to South Vietnam. This growth of the war is called escalation. The number of American troops rose year after year. Many were drafted, and young men from poor and working-class families served in large numbers.

The fighting was hard. The Viet Cong used guerrilla warfare: small groups who attacked by surprise and then disappeared into jungles, villages and tunnels. It was hard for American soldiers to tell friend from enemy. Bombing and chemicals like Agent Orange harmed the land and many civilians.

Night after night, TV news showed the war. In January 1968, the Tet Offensive struck cities across South Vietnam. U.S. forces pushed the attackers back, but Americans were shocked. Leaders had said the war was nearly won. Many people began to believe the government had not told the truth. This lack of trust was called a credibility gap.

As the war grew, so did protest. College students held teach-ins and marches. Some young men burned their draft cards. Boxer Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted and lost his title for years. Other Americans supported the war and saw protesters as disloyal. People who backed the war were called hawks, and those who opposed it were called doves.

Even students in junior high took a stand. In 1965, Mary Beth Tinker, age 13, and other students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school to mourn the war’s dead. They were suspended. In Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to peaceful free speech at school.

President Nixon promised to end the war. His plan, called Vietnamization, was to train South Vietnam’s army to take over the fighting while American troops came home. But in 1970 he also sent troops into neighboring Cambodia. Protests erupted. At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guard soldiers fired on students, killing four. Days later, police killed two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Many said that if 18-year-olds could be drafted, they should be able to vote. In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. In January 1973, a peace agreement was signed, and the last U.S. combat troops left that spring. In 1975, North Vietnam conquered the South. More than 58,000 Americans and well over a million Vietnamese died in the war.