The Struggle for Freedom — Civil Rights and the Turbulent Sixties

In the previous episode, America rose to become a superpower bearing one wing of the world after World War II and the Cold War. Against its rival, the Soviet Union, the banner America raised was that of ‘the land of the free.’ Yet when it boasted that banner to the outside world, a question was growing louder day by day inside the country. There were people pushed to the back of the bus because of the color of their skin, forbidden to sit at the same lunch counter as whites or to attend the same schools—could such a country truly be called ‘free’? In this ninth episode, we look at the struggle of those who questioned freedom directed at their own nation, and at the wavering of an ideal that unfolded at the same time.

Resistance That Began from the Back Seat

In many Southern states, the system of racial segregation (Jim Crow) had long persisted. Buses, trains, schools, restaurants, even drinking fountains—the spaces for Black and white people were divided by law and custom. On paper it was called ‘separate but equal,’ but in reality it is said to have been plain discrimination.

Against that wall, one woman quietly thrust out a ‘No.’ In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, an African-American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and was arrested. This sparked Black residents to stop using the city buses in a bus boycott, and the one who stood at the forefront of the movement was a young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr.

Sit-ins, marches that traveled from place to place, drives to register voters—the resistance spread across the entire nation in many forms. And on August 28, 1963, the movement reached one of its peaks.

The 200,000 Who Gathered in Washington

That year marked exactly 100 years since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In protest at the reality that discrimination still remained, about 200,000 people are said to have gathered in the capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a march joined not only by Black people but also by white people who opposed discrimination.

There, King delivered the speech engraved in history, ‘I Have a Dream.’ He hoped that one day this would become a country where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin—those words confronted the people anew with the founding ideal of America, that ‘all men are created equal.’

In response to this rising tide, the law moved too. In July 1964, the Civil Rights Act, broadly prohibiting discrimination by race, religion, sex, and more, was enacted. Then in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, removing the mechanisms that had effectively obstructed Black people from voting. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. At last, the pillars that had legally supported segregation began to crumble.

Yet a change in the law is not the same as a change in people’s consciousness and daily lives. Economic disparity, and the discrimination rooted in the cities of the North, could not be undone by legislation alone. Over the question of ‘what to change next,’ voices calling for a more radical course arose within the movement as well. Victory was also the beginning of new questions.

A Distant Battlefield, and a Wavering Ideal

In parallel with the rising call for freedom at home, America had stepped into a war on the opposite side of the globe that would put that ideal to the test. This was the Vietnam War.

Under the Cold War logic of preventing the spread of communism, America deepened its support for South Vietnam, and from 1965 it began full-scale military intervention, embarking on the bombing of the North and the deployment of ground troops. But against jungle warfare and guerrilla fighting, the supposedly mightiest army in the world struggled. In 1968, the Tet Offensive by the liberation forces greatly shook the assumption of American superiority and is said to have spread doubt about the war all at once.

It was also, in a sense, the ‘first television war,’ with the living-room TV broadcasting images of the battlefield. The daily count of the dead, and the images of devastation. They spread, throughout the country, a questioning of the very cause of the war. An anti-war movement blazed up centered on universities, and it joined with a counterculture—hippies, rock, the search for a free way of living—that challenged existing values themselves, greatly changing the mood of society.

Civil rights, anti-war, and the movement seeking women’s rights. The 1960s, in which various voices calling for ‘more freedom’ overlapped, can be said to have been the era in which America confronted most directly the gap between its ideals and reality.

What the Gunshots Severed

But this turbulent era had another dark face. That was assassination.

In November 1963, the young President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas, and lost his life. The sudden death of a president who had shown a forward-leaning stance on civil rights gave the whole nation a deep shock. The background to the incident is said to have continued to be debated for a long time afterward.

And in April 1968, King, who had upheld nonviolence to the end, fell to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. That a man who had continually rejected violence had his life taken by violence dealt a great blow to the movement, and protests and turmoil are said to have erupted in many places. Two months later, Robert Kennedy, who was running in the presidential election, also fell to a bullet.

The Vietnam War met its end with the withdrawal of American forces in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in 1975—what amounted, for America, to a defeat. It was the first great setback tasted by a superpower that had prided itself on being the mightiest in the world. The difficulty of intervening in the world while upholding an ideal, and the distance between one’s own nation’s principles and reality—in this era, America carved deeply into itself both pride and pain.

Even so, the laws of segregation crumbled, and the freedom to raise one’s voice spread. Bearing its wounds, America was still trying to move forward. Before long, an end would come even to the long confrontation of the Cold War. Beyond the victory in the Cold War, a new trial awaits.