Political Issues In The 1960s

First, in the 1960s there was a variety of political issues. ¨At the beginning of the 1960s, many Americans believed they were standing at the dawn of a Golden Age¨. On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal, a package of laws and reforms that sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in the United States. But the New Frontier ran into problems instantly. The Democrats Congressional majority depended on a group of Southerners who loathed the plan’s interventionist liberalism and all they tried to block it. Then on November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In 1964 Lyndon B.

Their movement spread. Hundreds of demonstrators went back to that lunch counter every day, and thousands clogged segregated restaurants and shops across the upper South. During this time everything was segregated from drinking fountains to hotels. They were all whites only or blacks only. The federal government stayed out of the civil rights struggle until 1964, when President Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited discrimination in public places. In order for African Americans to survive in these times they had to stay away from whites. For example, they had to sit at the back of the buses. Also if they saw a white on the sidewalk they would have to step off and look down. The Ku Klux Klan killed thousands of blacks to prevent them from voting in politics or interacting in social aspects of life. Therefore, if blacks wanted to survive they simple had to stay away from whites and participate in nothing. The Ku Klux klan was a group of white terrorist who would kill blacks to promote whites. They were founded in 1865 and are still around