The Civil Rights Movement Expands

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how groups beyond the African American freedom struggle adopted the legal-and-protest model that the Black civil rights movement had refined between 1954 and 1965 (LO 8.L).
• Compare the women's, Chicano, American Indian, Asian American, gay rights, and disability rights movements on legal strategy, organizational form, federal response, and outcome by 1980 (Skill 5.B; Reasoning: Comparison).
• Identify the major statutes, court rulings, and organizational milestones of the women's movement from the Equal Pay Act of 1963 through the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.
• Account for the convergence of labor organizing and civil rights in the United Farm Workers and the broader Chicano movement, including La Raza Unida, the Brown Berets, and the East Los Angeles walkouts of 1968.
• Explain how the American Indian Movement, the Stonewall Riots and gay liberation, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 each adapted civil rights tactics to specific historical situations.
• Account for the conservative response that produced the Stop ERA campaign and that helped close the postwar liberal expansion of civil rights by 1980.

By 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow. The federal statutes the African American freedom movement had won, the protest tactics it had refined at Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma, and the legal arguments that had carried Brown v. Board of Education across the federal judiciary all became templates that other groups now adopted and adapted. The result, between 1963 and 1978, was a fifteen-year fan-out of civil rights organizing that the College Board CED groups under Topic 8.11 (KC-8.2.II.A, KC-8.2.II.B, KC-8.3.II.B.i).

The first and largest of these parallel movements was the modern women's movement. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) named the discontent that postwar suburban prosperity had produced for college-educated women confined to a domestic role, and the book sold three million copies in three years. The same year, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it a federal violation to pay men and women different wages for substantially equal work. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination on the basis of sex, an addition that had been proposed by southern segregationists hoping to defeat the bill and that liberals kept in the final text. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declined to enforce the sex provision, Friedan and a group of women activists, including the legal scholar Pauli Murray, founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. Murray, an attorney whose earlier brief on race-and-sex analogy had shaped Brown, gave NOW its constitutional theory; Friedan supplied its public voice.

The legal harvest came quickly. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 extended the federal ban on sex discrimination to any educational program receiving federal funds, transforming admissions, athletics, and graduate-school access for women across the next decade. The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973) extended the constitutional right of privacy first articulated in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) to cover abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 by overwhelming majorities, and thirty states ratified it in the first year. By 1977, however, the conservative legal activist Phyllis Schlafly had built a national Stop ERA campaign that argued the amendment would draft women into combat, end alimony, mandate unisex restrooms, and dissolve the legal protections of homemakers. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The amendment fell three states short by the original 1979 deadline and remained three short when the extended deadline expired in 1982 (KC-8.2.II.A).

The second of these parallel movements was the Chicano movement, which combined civil rights organizing with the older tradition of agricultural labor activism. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta cofounded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 and led the Delano grape strike from 1965 to 1970. The strike, organized around a national consumer boycott and the disciplined nonviolent tactics that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had used in Birmingham, produced the first union contracts for migrant farm workers in California history (KC-8.2.II.B). Around the United Farm Workers grew a broader political and cultural movement: La Raza Unida Party, founded in Texas in 1970, ran candidates for school board, county office, and state legislature; the Brown Berets modeled themselves explicitly on the Black Panther Party and organized in barrios across the Southwest; and the East Los Angeles walkouts of March 1968, in which more than fifteen thousand high-school students left class to protest the underfunding of Mexican American schools, established a generation of activist teachers and lawyers who would lead Chicano politics for the next two decades.

The third parallel movement, the American Indian Movement, drew on the cultural language of Black Power and on a much older tradition of treaty-based legal argument. AIM, founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Clyde Bellecourt, demanded tribal sovereignty, treaty enforcement, and an end to the federal termination policy of the 1950s, which had dissolved more than one hundred tribal governments and transferred jurisdiction to the states (KC-8.2.II.B). AIM led the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan to Washington in November 1972 and occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters for six days. In February 1973, AIM and traditional Oglala Lakota leaders began a seventy-one-day occupation of the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the same site where the United States Army had massacred Lakota families in December 1890. The standoff drew international attention and ended with two activists killed and federal indictments against AIM leadership. Federal policy responded with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which transferred administration of many federal Indian programs to tribal governments and is the most consequential piece of postwar Indian legislation.

A fourth parallel campaign, the Asian American movement, took shape around a new pan-ethnic identity. The term Asian American, coined at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 by the graduate students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, replaced the older and externally imposed label Oriental and made common cause across the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean communities that earlier American immigration law had treated as separate. Yellow Power organizing on West Coast campuses produced the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State and at Berkeley in 1968 and 1969, which won the country's first ethnic studies departments. Japanese American activists also began the long campaign for redress, an effort to win a formal federal apology and reparations for the wartime internment of 1942 to 1946; that campaign culminated outside Period 8 with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, but its origins lie in the Asian American organizing of the late 1960s and 1970s (KC-8.2.II.B).

The fifth movement, gay liberation, was the most explicit borrower of the African American protest model. The Stonewall Riots began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village in New York City, fought back against a routine police raid. Six nights of street demonstrations followed. Within a year, activists had founded the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, and on the first anniversary of the raid, June 28, 1970, the first Pride marches stepped off in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, the most consequential professional reversal of the early movement. Local nondiscrimination ordinances followed in dozens of cities by the late 1970s, although the conservative singer Anita Bryant's 1977 Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida, repealed the first of them and previewed the New Right backlash that would close the period (KC-8.3.II.B.i).

The sixth movement, disability rights, took shape around Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the first federal statute to ban discrimination on the basis of disability in any program receiving federal funds. The wording was modeled directly on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. When the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare delayed issuing implementing regulations, disability activists led by Judy Heumann occupied the federal regional office in San Francisco for twenty-five days in April 1977, the longest sit-in at a federal building in American history. The HEW secretary signed the regulations on April 28, 1977. Disability advocates would later use Section 504 as the legal foundation for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Federal employment policy completed the cluster. Affirmative action programs, established by Executive Order 10925 in 1961 and broadened by Executive Order 11246 in 1965, required federal contractors to take active steps to recruit and promote workers without regard to race or sex. The first major Supreme Court ruling on the question, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), struck down the use of fixed racial quotas in medical-school admissions but allowed race to remain one factor among several. Bakke set the constitutional framework that governed affirmative action across the next forty years.

Each of these movements borrowed something from the African American civil rights model, and each adapted what it borrowed. The women's movement borrowed legal strategy (Title VII, Title IX, Roe) and replicated the federal-statute-plus-litigation framework. The Chicano movement borrowed nonviolent direct action (the grape boycott) and combined it with the older traditions of agricultural labor organizing and Mexican American mutual-aid societies. The American Indian Movement borrowed the militant rhetoric and identity politics of Black Power and combined them with treaty-based legal argument that had no parallel in the African American tradition. Asian American organizers built a new pan-ethnic identity from scratch around the model of Black Power. Gay liberation took the language of pride and the tactic of the public march. Disability advocates borrowed federal-statute language word for word. Comparison across these six movements is the historical-thinking work that Topic 8.11 expects students to do.

The four excerpts below sample the four most consequential of the parallel movements covered by Topic 8.11. Each comes from a federal or institutional repository and is in the public domain or available under a clear reuse policy.

1. (Comparison) Compare the legal strategy of the women's movement with the legal strategy of the African American civil rights movement that preceded it. What did the women's movement borrow without changes? What did it adapt to the specific situation of sex discrimination?
2. (Causation) Account for the convergence of agricultural labor activism and civil rights organizing in the United Farm Workers. How did the Delano grape strike of 1965 to 1970 differ from the standard sit-in or freedom-ride model of the Black freedom movement, and how was it the same?
3. (Comparison) Compare the American Indian Movement's claim of treaty sovereignty with the constitutional argument the African American civil rights movement made under the Fourteenth Amendment. Which framework offered each movement the larger range of legal remedies, and on what grounds?
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for the speed with which gay liberation moved from the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 to the first Pride marches one year later. What earlier civil rights organizing made that pace possible?
5. (Causation) Account for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to win ratification by 1982. How did the Stop ERA campaign reshape the conservative coalition that elected Ronald Reagan two years earlier, and what does that tell us about the limits of the civil rights model in this period?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.