The Age of Affluence 1945

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The Age of Affluence 1945

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Title: The Age of Affluence 1945

1

The Age of Affluence 19451960

Explain the record of American prosperity during
the two decades following World War II.
What were the changing roles of cities and
suburbs in American society?
Assess the validity of the fifties as the
historical norm of American life.
Who were the members of the other America and
why did they occupy this status?

Economic Powerhouse
Engines of Economic Growth
The Corporate order

By the end of 1945, war-induced prosperity had
made the United States the richest country in the
world, a preeminence that would continue
unchallenged for twenty years.

At the end of World War II, American economic
hegemony abroad translated into affluence at
home. The weakness of foreign competition enabled
American businesses to exploit foreign markets
when domestic markets were saturated or
experiencing recessions. Millions of new jobs
were created, consumer spending soared, and
inflation was low the nation entered a period of
unprecedented affluence.

A meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,
established the U.S. dollar as the capitalist
worlds principal reserve currency and resulted
in the creation of two global institutionsthe
International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (World Bank) and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF).

The World Bank provided private loans for the
reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for
the development of Third World countries, and the
IMF was designed to stabilize the value of
currencies, thereby helping to guide the world
economy after the war.
U.S. economic supremacy abroad helped to boost
the domestic economy, creating millions of new
jobs the fastest growing sector was white-collar
jobs.
Although the percentage of blue-collar
manufacturing jobs declined slightly during this
period, the power of organized labor reached an
all-time high.

A second linchpin of postwar prosperity was
defense spending. The military-industrial complex
that President Eisenhower identified in his 1961
Farewell Address had its roots in the
businessgovernment partnerships of the world
wars. But unlike after 1918, the massive
commitment of government dollars for defense
continued after 1945.
As permanent mobilization took hold, science,
industry, and the federal government became
increasingly intertwined. According to the
National Science Foundation, federal money
underwrote 90 percent of the cost of research on
aviation and space, 65 percent for electricity
and electronics, 42 percent for scientific
instruments, and 24 percent for automobiles.

The growth of this military-industrial
establishment had a dramatic impact on national
priorities. Between 1900 and 1930, excepting
World War!, the country spent less than I percent
of gross domestic product (GDP) on the military.
By the early 1960s the figure had risen close to
10 percent.
America's annual GDP jumped from 213 billion in
1945 to more than 500 billion in 1960 by 1970,
it approached 1 trillion. To working Americans,
this sustained economic growth meant a 25 percent
rise in real income between 1946 and 1959.
Postwar prosperity also featured low inflation.
Even so, the picture was not entirely rosy. The
distribution of income remained stubbornly
skewed, and poverty stubbornly hung on one in
thirteen families at the time earned less than
1,000 a year

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The Corporate Order
11

For more than half a century, American enterprise
had favored the consolidation of economic power
into big corporate firms. That tendency continued
and even accelerated.
The classic, vertically integrated corporation
of the early twentieth century served a national
market. This strategy worked even better in the
1950s. when sophisticated advertising and the
modern media enabled large corporations to break
into hitherto resistant markets.
National firms now added a new strategy of
diversification. CBS. for example. hired the
Hungarian inventor Peter Goldmark, who perfected
color television during the 1940s, long-playing
records in the 1950s, and a video recording
system in the 1960s.

More revolutionary was the sudden rise of the
conglomerates, giant enterprises comprised of
firms in unrelated industries. Conglomerate-buildi
ng resulted in the nation's third great merger
wave (the first two had taken place in the 1890s
and the 1920s). Because of their diverse
holdings, conglomerates shielded themselves from
instability in any single market and seemed
better able to compete globally.
Expansion into foreign markets also spurred
corporate growth. At a time when "made in Japan"
still meant shoddy workmanship. U.S. products
were considered the best in the world.

In their effort to direct such giant enterprises
managers placed more emphasis on planning.
Companies recruited top executives who had
business-school training. the ability to manage
information, and skills in corporate planning,
marketing, and investment.
To man their bureaucracies. the postwar corporate
giants required a huge supply of white-collar
foot soldiers. They turned to the universities.
which, fueled partly by the GI Bill, grew
explosively after 1945.
Climbing the corporate ladder rewarded men
without hard edges-the "well adjusted."
In The Lonely Crowd (1950), sociologist David
Riesman contrasted the independent businessmen
and professionals of earlier years with the
managerial class of the postwar world. He
concluded that the new corporate men were
"otherdirected more attuned to their associates
than driven by their own goals.

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Labor-Management Accord

For blue-collar workers. collective bargaining
after World War II became for the first time the
normal means for determining how their labor
would be rewarded.

General Motors implacably resisted this "opening
wedge" into the rights of management. The
company took a 1l3-day strike, rebuffed the
government's intervention, and soundly defeated
the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Having made
its point, General Motors laid out the terms for
a durable relationship. It would accept the UA
Was its bargaining partner and guarantee GM
workers an ever higher living standard.
The price was that the UA W abandon its assault
on the company's "right to manage."
On signing the five-year GM contract of 1950 -the
Treaty of Detroit, it was called- Walter Reuther,
leader of the UAW, accepted the company's terms.

In postwar Europe, America's allies were
constructing welfare states. That was the
preference of American unions as well . But
having lost the bruising battle in Washington for
national health care, they turned to the
bargaining table. By the end of the 1950s, union
contracts commonly provided defined benefit
pension plans (supplementing Social Security),
company-paid health insurance, and for two
million workers, mainly in steel and auto, a
guaranteed annual wage (via supplementary
unemployment benefits).

In 1955, the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
merged, creating the AFLCIO, which represented
over 90 percent of Americas 17.5 million union
members.
In exchange for fewer strikes, corporate managers
often cooperated with unions, agreeing to
contracts that gave workers secure, predictable,
and steadily rising incomes.
Consumer spending soared, and inflation was low
yet the boon was marred by periodic bouts of
recession and unemployment that particularly hurt
low-income and nonwhite workers.

The sum of these union gains was a new
sociological phenomenon, the "affluent" worker-as
evidenced by relocation to the suburbs (half of
an workers by 1965), by homeownership, by
increased ownership of cars and other durable
goods, and, an infallible sign of rising
expectations, by installment buying. For union
workers, the contract became, as Reuther boasted,
a passport into the middle class.
The labor-management accord that generated
labor's good life seemed in the 1950s to be
absolutely secure. The union rivalries of the
1930s had abated. In 1955, the industrial-union
and craft-union wings joined together in the
AFt-CIO, representing 90 percent of the nation's
17.5 million union members.

Though impressive, the labor-management accord
was never as durable as it seemed.
Vulnerabilities lurked, even in the accord's
heyday. For one thing, the sheltered markets -the
essential condition- were in fact quite fragile.
The postwar labor-management accord. it turns
out. was a transitory event. not a permanent
condition of American economic life. And, in a
larger sense. that was true of the postwar boom.
It was a transitory event, not a permanent
condition.
II. The Affluent Society

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The Affiuent Society
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The Suburban Explosion

Americans began to leave older cities in the
North and Midwest for newer ones in the South and
West there was also a major shift from city to
the suburbs.

Both processes were stimulated by the dramatic
growth of a car culture and the federal
governments support of housing and highway
initiatives.
By 1960 more Americans lived in suburbs than in
cities because few new dwellings had been built
during the depression or war years, the country
faced a housing shortage.

Arthur Levitt applied mass-production techniques
to home construction other developers followed
suit in subdivisions all over the country,
hastening the exodus from farms and cities.

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Abraham, William, and Alfred Levitt
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Before and after aerials showing Island Trees,
New York, site of the first Levittown
development.

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The first Levittown sprang to life in 1947 on
1200 acres of potato fields on Long Island. To
speed production and cut costs, Levitt offered
just two basic house types. The scale of the
project attracted national attention and made
Levitt and Sons a household name. Veterans and
their families applied by the thousands to rent
and later buy one of Levitts mass-produced
homes.

Many homes were financed with mortgages from the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the
Veterans Administration at rates dramatically
lower than those offered by private lenders
demonstrating the way the federal government was
entering and influencing daily life.

New suburban homes, as well as their funding,
were reserved mostly for whites some homeowners
had to sign a restrictive covenant prohibiting
occupation in the development by blacks, Asians,
or Jews.
Although Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) ruled that
restrictive covenants were illegal, the practice
continued until the civil rights laws of the
1960s banned private discrimination.

New growth patterns were most striking in the
South and West, where inexpensive land,
unorganized labor, low taxes, and warm climates
beckoned California grew the most rapidly.
Automobiles were essential to the growth of
suburbs and to the development of the Sun Belt
the 1950s gas guzzlers became symbols of status
and success.

Highways were funded by federal government
programs such as the National Interstate and
Defense Highway Act of 1956 air pollution and
traffic jams soon became problems in cities.
As Americans began to drive to suburban shopping
malls and supermarkets, downtown retail economy
dried up, helping to precipitate the decay of the
central cities.

Lower Bucks was close to population centers
(Philadelphia and Trenton), improved highways
(including the Pennsylvania Turnpike) and, best
of all, jobs. U.S. Steel broke ground for its new
Fairless Works Division along the western bank of
the Delaware River in early 1951. At the time,
the Fairless Works was the second largest
integrated plant on the East Coast, and the 12th
largest steel mill in the country.

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The new suburbs combined country comforts with
city conveniences. With the help of modern
production and financing methods, builders like
Levitt and Sons made the American dream of
homeownership affordable to millions.

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The Search for Security

There was a reason for Congress calling the 1956
legislation creating America's modern freeway
system the National Interstate and Defense
Highways Act. The four-lane freeways, used every
day by commuters, might some day, in a nuclear
war, evacuate them to safety. That captured as
well as anything the underside of postwar life,
when suburban living abided side by side with the
shadow of annihilation.

The cold war, reaching as it did across the
globe, was omnipresent at home as well.
The nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union was
alarming. Bomb shelters and civil defense drills
provided a daily reminder of mushroom clouds. In
the late 1950s, a small but growing number of
citizens raised questions about radioactive
fallout from above-ground bomb tests.

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By the late 1950s, public concern over nuclear
testing had become a high-profile issue, and new
antinuclear groups such as SANE (the National
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and
Physicians for Social Responsibility called for
an international test ban.

After the depression, Americans yearned for
security and a reaffirmation of traditional this
yearning manifested itself in a renewed national
emphasis on religion and an ecumenical movement
in American churches.

Church membership jumped from 49 percent of the
population in 1940 to 70 percent in 1960. People
flocked especially into the evangelical
Protestant denominations, which benefited from a
remarkable new crop of preachers. Most notable
was the young Reverend Billy Graham, who made
brilliant use of television, radio, and
advertising to spread the Gospel.
The resurgence of religion, despite its
evangelical bent, had a distinctly moderate tone.
An ecumenical movement bringing Catholics,
Protestants, and Jews together flourished, and so
did a concern for the here and now.

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In 1954, the phrase under God was inserted into
the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 Congress
added In God We Trust to all U.S. coins.
Norman Vincent Peales The Power of Positive
Thinking embodied the trend toward the
therapeutic use of religion in order to assist
Americans in coping with the stresses of modern
life.

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Critics suggested that middle-class interest in
religion stemmed not so much from a renewed
spirituality as from a surging impulse toward
conformity however, the revival nonetheless
spoke to Americans search for spiritual meaning
in uncertain times.

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American Life during the Baby Boom

The postwar years are remembered as a time of
affluence and stability, when Americans enjoyed
an optimistic faith in progress and technology
and a serene family-centered culture, reflected
in a booming birthrate known as the baby boom and
enshrined in television sitcoms such as Father
Knows Best.
This powerful myth has some truth to it, but does
not do justice to this complex period of economic
and social transformation, which included
challenges to the status quo as well as
conformity.

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Consumer Culture

In some respects, postwar consumerism seemed like
a return to the 1920s-an abundance of new gadgets
and appliances, more leisure time, the craze for
automobiles, and new types of mass media. Yet
there was a significant difference. In the 1950s,
consumption became associated with citizenship.
Buying things, once a sign of personal
indulgence, now meant fully participating in
American society and, moreover, fulfilling a
social responsibility.
As in the past, product makers sought to
stimulate consumer demand through aggressive
advertising. More money was spent in 1951 on
advertising (6.5 billion) than on primary and
secondary education (5 billion).

Consumers had more free time in which to spend
their money millions took to the interstate
highways, spurring dramatic growth in motel
chains, restaurants, and fast-food eateries.
Perhaps the most significant hallmark of postwar
consumer culture was television, which supplanted
radio as the chief diffuser of popular culture
it portrayed American families as white,
middle-class suburbanites, and nonwhite
characters were usually servants.

The new prosperity of the 1950s was aided by a
dramatic increase in consumer credit, which
enabled families to stretch their incomes
between 1946 and 1958 short-term consumer credit
rose from 8.4 billion to almost 45 billion.

The Diners Club introduced the first credit card
in 1950, followed by the American Express card
and Bank Americard in 1959 by the 1970s, the
credit card had revolutionized personal and
family finances.
Aggressive advertising by corporations
contributed to the massive increase in consumer
spending.

Advertising heavily promoted the appliances that
began to fill the suburban kitchen. In 1946
automatic washing machines replaced the old
machines with hand-cranked wringers, and clothes
dryers also came on the market.
TV's leap to cultural prominence was swift and
overpowering. There were only 7,000 sets in
American homes in 1947, yet a year later the CBS
and NBC radio networks began offering regular
programming, and by 1950 Americans owned 7.3
million TV sets. Ten years later, 87 percent of
American homes had at least one television set.

The Federal Communications Commissioner called
television a vast wasteland however, its
images of postwar family life and society fit
with the social expectations of many Americans.

What Americans saw on television, besides the
omnipresent commercials, was an overwhelmingly
white, Anglo-Saxon world of nuclear families,
suburban homes, and middle-class life.

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"Father Knows Best" (1954) -
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The Baby Boom
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Postwar family demographics changed from previous
years marriages were remarkably stable, there
was a drop in the average age at marriage, and
the birthrate shot up the American population
rose dramatically from 140 million in 1945 to 179
million in 1960, and to 203 million in 1970.

The baby boom prompted a major expansion in the
nations education system, and babies consumer
needs helped to fuel the economy.
To keep all those baby boom children healthy and
happy, middle-class parents increasingly relied
on the advice of experts. Dr. Benjamin Spock's
best-selling Baby and Child Care sold a million
copies a year after its publication in 1946.
Spock urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding
and baby care schedules of an earlier generation.
Coupled with national defense expenditures,
family spending on consumer goods fueled
unparalleled prosperity and economic growth in
the 1950s and 1960s.

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Contradictions in Womens Lives

Parents of baby boomers were expected to adhere
to rigid gender roles as a way of maintaining the
family and undergirding the social order.
Men were expected to conform to an idea that
emphasized their role as responsible
breadwinners, while women were advised that their
proper place was in the home.

. Endorsing what Betty Friedan called the
"feminine mystique" - the ideal that "the highest
value and the only commitment for women is the
fulfillment of their own femininity" -
psychologists pronounced motherhood the only
"normal" female sex role and berated mothers who
worked outside the home.

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Many working-class women embraced their new roles
as housewives, while at the height of the postwar
period more than a third of women held jobs
outside the home and coincided with a dramatic
rise in the number of older, married,
middle-class women who took jobs.
Women justified their jobs as an extension of
their family responsibilities, enabling their
families to enjoy more of the fruits of the
consumer -culture.

Working women still bore full responsibility for
child care and household management allowing
families and society to avoid facing the social
implications of their new roles, departing
significantly from the cultural stereotypes.

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Youth Culture and Challenges to Conformity

The emergence of a mass youth culture had its
roots in the democratization of education and the
increasing purchasing power of teenagers.
Americas youth were eager to escape suburban
conformity, and they became a distinct new market
that advertisers eagerly exploited.

What really defined this generations youth
culture was its music the rock n roll that
teens were attracted to in the 1950s was seen by
white adults as an invitation to racemixing,
sexual promiscuity, and juvenile delinquency.
In major cities, gay men and women founded gay
rights organizations, but many gays were still
perceived as a threat to mainstream sexual and
cultural norms and therefore remained closeted.

Postwar artists,musicians, and writers expressed
their alienation from mainstream society through
intensely personal, introspective art forms.
Jackson Pollock and other painters rejected the
social realism of the 1930s for an unconventional
style that became known as abstract
expressionism, which captured the chaotic
atmosphere of the nuclear age.

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A similar trend developed in jazz, as black
musicians originated a hard-driving
improvisational style known as bebop.
The Beats were a group of writers and poets who
were both literary innovators and outspoken
social critics of middle-class conformity,
corporate capitalism, and suburban materialism,
who inspired a new generation of rebels in the
1960s.

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The Other America
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International and Domestic Migration toCities
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With jobs and financial resources flowing to the
suburbs, urban newcomers inherited a declining
economy and a decaying environmentthe Other
America.
The War Brides Act, the Displaced Persons Act,
the McCarran-Walter Act, and the repeal of the
Chinese Exclusion Act all helped to create an
influx of immigrants into American cities.

The federal government welcomed Mexican labor
under its bracero program but deported those who
stayed illegally 4 million Mexicans were
deported during Operation Wetback.
Residents of Puerto Rico had been American
citizens since 1917, so they were not subject to
immigration laws they became Americas first
group to immigrate by air.
Cuban refugees were the third largest group of
Spanish-speaking immigrants the Cuban refugee
community turned Miami into a cosmopolitan,
bilingual city almost overnight.

Internal migration from rural areas brought large
numbers of people to the cities, especially
African Americans, after the introduction of
innovations like the mechanical cotton picker,
which reduced southern demand for labor.
By 1960, about half of the nations black
population was living outside the South, compared
with only 23 percent before World War II.
After the 1953 Termination programs, many
Indians settled together in poor urban
neighborhoods alongside other nonwhite groups
many found it difficult to adjust to an urban
environment and culture.

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The Urban Crisis

Between 1950 and 1960, the nations twelve
largest cities lost 3.6 million whites and gained
4.5 million nonwhites.
As affluent whites left the cities, urban tax
revenues shrank, leading to the decay of services
and infrastructure growing racial fears
accelerated white flight to the suburbs in the
1960s.

In the inner cities, housing continued to be a
crucial problem urban renewal produced grim
high-rise housing projects that destroyed
community bonds and created anonymous open areas
that were vulnerable to crime.
Postwar urban areas increasingly became places of
last resort for Americas poor once there, they
faced unemployment, racial hostilities, and
institutional barriers to mobility.

Two separate Americas emerged a largely white
society in the suburbs and an inner city
populated by blacks, Latinos, and other
disadvantaged groups.
In the turbulent decade to come, the contrast
between suburban affluence and the other
America, would spawn growing demands for social
change that the nations leaders in the 1960s
could not ignore.

In 1962, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal
(author of An American Dilemma, a pioneering book
about the country's race relations) wondered
whether shrinking economic opportunity in the
United States might not trap the unemployed and
underemployed at the bottom of society.
Myrdal's term underclass-referring to a
population permanently mired in poverty and
dependency-would figure centrally in future
American debates about social policy.

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The Emerging Civil Rights Struggle
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Civil Rights under Truman

Truman offered support for civil rights not only
because he wanted to solidify the Democrats hold
on African American voters but also because he
was concerned about
Americas image abroad.
Lacking a popular mandate on civil rights, Truman
turned to executive action he appointed the
National Civil Rights Commission in 1946, ordered
the Justice Department to prepare a brief for
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which ruled against
discrimination in home buying, and signed an
executive order to desegregate the army in 1948.

The Kraemers were a white couple who owned a
residence in a Missouri neighborhood governed by
a restrictive covenant. This was a private
agreement that prevented blacks from owning
property in the Kraemers' subdivision. The
Shelleys were a black couple who moved into the
Kraemers neighborhood. The Kraemers went to court
to enforce the restrictive covenant against the
Shelleys.
Question Presented
Does the enforcement of a racially restrictive
covenant violate the Equal Protection Clause of
the 14th Amendment?
Conclusion
State courts could not constitutionally prevent
the sale of real property to blacks even if that
property is covered by a racially restrictive
covenant. Standing alone, racially restrictive
covenants violate no rights. However, their
enforcement by state court injunctions constitute
state action in violation of the 14th Amendment.

Southern conservatives blocked Trumans proposals
for a federal anti-lynching law, federal
protection of voting rights, and a federal agency
to guarantee equal employment opportunity.

In 1946 he appointed a National Civil Rights
Commission, whose 1947 report called for robust
federal action On behalf of civil rights. In
1948, under pressure from A. Phillip Randolph's
Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service,
Truman signed an executive order desegregating
the armed forces.

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Challenging Segregation

Legal segregation of the races still governed
southern society in the early 1950s whites and
blacks were segregated in restaurants, waiting
rooms and toilets at bus and train stations, and
all forms of public transportation were rigidly
segregated, with even drinking fountains being
labeled White and Colored.

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Whites Only Waiting Room

A black man is ordered out of a whites only
waiting room. Separate facilities for blacks and
whites were maintained throughout the South from
the end of the 19th century until the 1960s.

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" A rest stop for Greyhound bus passengers on the
way from Louisville, Kentucky to Nashville,
Tennessee, with separate accommodations for
colored passengers."
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With Dwight Eisenhower as president, civil rights
no longer had a champion in the White House. In
the meantime, however, NAACP lawyers Thurgood
Marshall and William Hastie had been preparing
the legal ground in a series of test cases
challenging racial discrimination, and in 1954
they hit pay dirt.

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The first significant civil rights victory came
in 1954. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
(1954), the Supreme Court overturned the
long-standing separate but equal doctrine of
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

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A landmark civil rights case. the Brown v. Board
of Education decision involved Linda Brown. a
black pupil in Topeka. Kansas. who had been
forced to attend a distant segregated school
rather than the nearby white elementary school.
The NAACP's chief counsel. Thurgood Marshall.
argued that such segregation, mandated by the
Topeka Board of Education, was unconstitutional
because it denied Linda Brown the "equal
protection of the laws" guaranteed by the
Fourteenth Amendment.
In a unanimous decision on May 17. 1954. the
Supreme Court agreed. overturning the "separate
but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.

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Does segregation of children in public schools
solely on the basis of race, even though the
physical facilities and other "tangible" factors
may be equal, deprive the children of the
minority group of equal educational
opportunities? We believe that it does.

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Over the next several years, the Supreme Court
used the Brown case to overturn segregation in
public recreation areas, transportation, and
housing.
In the Southern Manifesto of 1956, southern
members of Congress denounced the Brown decision
as an abuse of judicial power and encouraged
their constituents to defy the ruling White
Citizens Councils in the South sprouted up
dedicated to blocking school integration and
other civil rights measures and the ranks of the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) swelled.

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President Eisenhower accepted the Brown decision
as the law of the land. but he thought it was a
mistake and was not happy about committing
federal power to enforce it.

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A crisis in Little Rock. Arkansas, finally forced
his hand. In September 1957, nine black students
attempted to enroll at the all-white Central High
School. Governor Orval Faubus called out the
National Guard to bar them. Then the mob took
over. Every day the nine students had to run a
gauntlet of angry whites chanting "Go back to the
jungle."
As the vicious scenes played out on television
night after night, Eisenhower acted. He sent
1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and
nationalized the Arkansas National Guard,
ordering them to protect the black students.
Eisenhower thus became the first president since
Reconstruction to use federal troops to enforce
the rights of blacks.

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President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne
Division into Little Rock to insure the safety of
the "Little Rock Nine" and that the rulings of
the Supreme Court were upheld.
The Brown decision validated the NAACP's legal
strategy, but white resistance also revealed that
winning in court was not enough. Prompted by one
small act of defiance, southern black leaders
embraced nonviolent protest.

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Little Rock Police work to keep protesters behind
barricades at Central High on Sept. 27, 1957.
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Students wait beside Arkansas National Guard
troops blocking their admission to Little Rock
Central High.

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Rosa Parkss refusal to give up her bus seat to a
white person prompted the 381-day 1956 Montgomery
bus boycott, which ended only when the Supreme
Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional.

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Once the die was cast, the black community turned
for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr., the recently appointed pastor of
Montgomery's Dexter Street Baptist Church. The
son of a prominent black minister in Atlanta,
King embraced the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi
(learned from Thoreau), whose campaigns of
passive resistance had led to India's
independence from Britain in 1947.

130

After Rosa Parks' arrest. King endorsed a plan by
a local black women's organization to boycott
Montgomery's bus system until it was integrated.
Once the die was cast, the black community turned
for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr., the recently appointed pastor of
Montgomery's Dexter Street Baptist Church.

131

The Montgomery bus boycott catapulted King to
national prominence. In 1957, along with the
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, he founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , based
in Atlanta. The black church, long the center of
African American social and cultural life, now
lent its moral and organizational strength to the
civil rights movement.

132

The battle for civil rights entered a new phase
in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February I,
1960, when four black college students took seats
at the "whites-only" lunch counter at the local
Woolworth's. They were determined to "sit in"
until they were served. Although they were
arrested, the sit-in tactic workedthe
Woolworth's lunch counter was desegregated-and
sit-ins quickly spread to other southern cities.
The victories so far had been limited, but the
groundwork was laid for a civil rights offensive
that would transform the nation's race relations.