In 1961 I was introduced to the invidious distinctions of race in America at the Sears and Roebuck store in Miami, Florida. I was seven years old when the babysitter took me shopping, spicing up the offer by promising some of those hot cashews whose aroma wafted through the deliciously cool air at Sears. While Myrtle browsed, I spotted a diversion that promised even more variety than the retail behemoth's tentative steps into fashion wear: it was a water fountain. There were two, actually, but the one I set my sights on was labeled “colored.” With thoughts of rainbows and Maypoles whirling through my mind, I headed straight for this ingenious invention that would soon quench all the shades of my thirst. Why hadn't I ever seen multicolored water before? Myrtle's guttural report aborted any further speculation. “Stop,” she boomed from oversized lingerie. Then something very strange happened. Myrtle ran. I had never seen Myrtle move quickly, let alone run. I froze. She grabbed my hand, suspended just inches from the cool silver handle and white porcelain basin. “That's dirty,” she grimaced. “It's for colored people.”

Writing in 1978 about the 1960s, William McLoughlin saw America in the midst of the fourth Great Awakening in our history. Awakenings are “periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.” To put it another way, awakenings are revelatory times when large numbers of people anguish over and eventually search out new self-understandings as individuals and as a society. They are like a convulsive quickening in the cultural womb.

Compounded as it is of contrasting forms, the purely national and the purely federal, federalism in the United States is inherently unstable. The division of power and prerogative between nation and states constantly changes, tending normally to become more national. Sometimes change occurs more swiftly and penetrates more deeply than others, and the 1960s were one of those times. One after another, constitutional thresholds were crossed. By the mid-1970s, American federalism had become something very different from what it had been fifteen years before. The place of place in the American polity had been sharply devalued. Autonomous individuals as political actors had gained at the expense of place-based communities. So had groups identified by such rival attributes as race or gender.

On 4 June 1965, President Johnson, in his famous speech at Howard University, endorsed preferential treatment for black Americans and the idea of equality of results. To justify a departure from the ideal of a colorblind state, Johnson offered an alternative that might be called black exceptionalism. In response to the widely held view that blacks, like immigrants, should receive no assistance from the state in their quest to enter the mainstream of society, Johnson asserted that the oppression suffered by blacks made them unique. At the core of his justification was the plight of the black family in slavery and freedom and its impact on black children. “When the family collapses,” he stated, “it is the children that are usually damaged.”1 With words freighted with importance for the future of liberalism, he articulated a new conception of equality, one enforced by an activist state: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity–not just legal equity but human ability–not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” Toward this end, he called for a conference to chart the future of racial liberalism.

In the 1960s three major sociopolitical movements, the New Left, Black Power, and feminism, arose in the United States. All three represented assaults on older ideas about the nature of authority, especially as expressed in a hierarchical fashion, all attached a premium to a sense of community, which was defined narrowly to include only members of each group, and all actively sought empowerment for themselves. The present essay examines this matrix. It begins by considering briefly the common historical background and early civil rights activity that influenced and to some extent linked all three movements. The essay then traces in turn each movement's beginning, development, and situation at the end of the Sixties. It explores how these movements shared certain values, expressed those ideas in different settings, and were interrelated in myriad, shifting ways. The overall complex interaction of these three movements suggests a common social critique that was greater than the sum of its parts.

The year 1966 is often cited as the start of the “second wave” of the organized women's movement, marked by the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). However, 1966 also marked the formal inception of another, less enduring group of women activists, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), linked to a separate but related social movement focused on welfare rights. From 1966 to 1975, NWRO coordinated welfare mothers' activism to shore up public assistance for the poor and to establish a federally guaranteed annual income. At its height in 1968, NWRO claimed twenty thousand members nationwide and dozens of local chapters from California to New York.

Robert S. McNamara recently raised a stir about America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, his personal apology for his role as Secretary of Defense (1961–68) during the first phase of the war, shot to the top of the best-seller lists. But the author was surely more interested in uncovering some forgiveness, some sympathy for his plight, than he was in royalties. If so, he certainly must be disappointed. What McNamara uncovered beneath the surface of current events were several generations of Americans who still have powerful emotions about the war and still hate the leaders—McNamara included—who guided the nation into that debacle.