Sputnik – unmanned Soviet satellites ignited the Space Race.

Sputnik woke the nation up, serving as a “focusing event” that put a spotlight on a national problem.

In this case, he said, the problem was education.

Congress responded a year later with the National Defense Education Act, which increased funding for education at all levels, including low-interest student loans to college students, with the focus on scientific and technical education.

The Eisenhower Doctrine (5 January 1957) Any Middle East country that suspected

communist takeover could apply for U.S. assistance

The U-2 disaster 1960. Soviets shot down an American spy-plane 1000

miles inside Soviet Border. Americans deny incident. Soviets produce the pilot (Francis Gary Powers)

Imprisoned by Soviets by released in 1962 in a spy exchange

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954.

His application was rejected, Evers became the focus of an NAACP

campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education 347 US 483 that segregation was unconstitutional.

In December of that year, Evers became the NAACP's first field officer in Mississippi.

Evers was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmitt Till murder case, which brought national attention to the plight of African Americans in the South.

Emmitt Till Murder Case?

No Need To Write While visiting family in Money, Mississippi,

14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier.

His assailants–the white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes.

The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.

On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of “not guilty.”

Why? Because they believed the state had

failed to prove the identity of the body.

Milam and Roy Bryant struck a deal with Look magazine in 1956 to tell their story to journalist William Bradfor Huie for between $3,600 and $4,000.

The interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys who had defended Bryant and Milam. Huie did not ask the questions; Bryant and Milam's own attorneys did. Neither attorney had heard their clients' accounts of the murder before.

According to Huie, the older Milam was more articulate and sure of himself than the younger Bryant. Milam admitted to shooting Till and neither of them thought of themselves as guilty or that they had done anything wrong.

On June 12, 1963 he was assassinated in his driveway.

Just hours before, President John F. Kennedy gave nationally televised speech in support of civil rights.

Key Events: The Civil Rights Movement

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 1954 Overturned Plessy v. Ferguson – the notion of “separate

but equal.” The case did little to ease tensions

Some white schools closed rather than admit blacks.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott African Americans began to challenge Jim Crow Laws 1st action was to boycott the bus services of Montgomery,

Alabama after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man in December of 1955.

Gave rise to a charismatic preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little Rock Nine 1957 Angry white prevented a group of nine African Americans

from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. Eisenhower sent troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to

class.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929-1968 Prominent leader of the Civil Rights movement

“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

MLK Jr

Malcolm X “Article number two of the constitutional

amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun…If the white man doesn’t want the black man buying rifles and shotguns, then let the government do its job.”

Malcolm's Name

Malcolm's View

Controversial Statements

KING JR. X

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.

“A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they've taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms, they've traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they're still doing the same thing. And just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound, or resisting the KKK…,

“…by teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th century or modern Uncle Tom, or a religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today, to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of an attack, that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless…”

“The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years. The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to get Negroes to forgive the people who have brutalized them for 400 years by lulling them to sleep, and making them forget what those whites have done to them.”

“[President Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon,”

“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad.”

Chicken coming home to roost?

Chicken = American violence

In early 1965, while King was jailed in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm traveled to Selma, where he had a private meeting with Coretta Scott King.

“I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult,” he assured Coretta. “I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King”

On 21 February 1965, just a few weeks after his visit to Selma, Malcolm X was assassinated.

Martin Luther King Jr called his murder a “great tragedy” because it “occurred at a time when Malcolm X was…moving toward a greater understanding of the nonviolent movement”

President John F. Kennedy

Elected 1960 with a promise of a New Frontier program for the U.S. “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask

what you can do for your country.” Promised changes toward economic equality &

civil rights. The Bay of Pigs

Attempt to have CIA trained expatriate Cubans overthrow Fidel Castro from Cuba in 1961. Cuban revolutionaries were waiting and defeated them. This was a major political embarrassment.

Southeast Asia Sent 30,000 American troops to South Vietnam

as “military advisors.” The Berlin Crisis

The Berlin Wall is erected in 1961 dividing the eastern & western sections of Berlin after relations between Krushchev & Kennedy worsen.

The Berlin Wall

They are watching!

You can’t leave…..

They will kill you if you try…..

Many died trying…….

The Cuban Missile Crisis

10/14/62 – U.S. intelligence photos showed Soviets constructing nuclear missile silos in Cuba

10/22/62 – Kennedy announced a blockade of Cuba & said the U.S. would fire on any ships attempting to enter Cuban waters.

10/24/62 - Soviet ships approach blockade but stop short of entering Cuban waters

10/28/62 – Agreement is reached: Soviets remove missiles, and U.S. promises not to invade Cuba. Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed

in 1963

Peace Corp created to have Americans volunteer to help

under-developed nations. The moon race

After Sputnik, the Americans set a goal to land on the moon. In 1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth

November 22, 1963 President Kennedy is shot & killed in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey

Oswald is charged Oswald is killed

by Jack Ruby while being transported to another jail.

Zapruder Film

Lyndon B. Johnson THE GREAT SOCIETY

Johnsons plan to have a society reformed in which poverty, illiteracy, hunger, & racial discrimination were eliminated.

MEDICARE – helped pay for senior

citizen healthcare expenses.

MEDICAID – helped states pay for the

healthcare of the economically disadvantaged.

Mapp v. Ohio (1961) Court ruled search illegal because of 4th

Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) States must provide a lawyer to the accused if

the accused can not afford one. Miranda v Arizona (1966)

Overturned Miranda’s conviction and said suspects must be made aware of their 5th & 6th Amendment rights

Moon Landing July 20, 1969

America finally sets foot on the moon