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Copy of Homework: Social Movements of the 1970s

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Copy of Lesson 8: American Indian Movement

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Copy of Lesson 8: The Conservative Movement

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Copy of Lesson 8: Anti-Vietnam War Movement

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With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights struggled with an agenda rapidly expanding in scope, complexity, and controversy. The Commission's work took on a national rather than a regional focus and concentrated on affirmative action and federal enforcement efforts. As impressive gains were made in African American civil rights, the Commission addressed claims from an expanding array of newly mobilized social movements and civil rights constituencies for similar protections and remedies.

The Civil Rights Act made the enforcement of school desegregation possible. Faced with the prospect of losing federal funding, school boards and local governments produced plans to integrate schools. Late in the 1960s and early in the 1970s, the Commission investigated African American education as well as the educational isolation of Hispanic schoolchildren, a legacy of segregation dating from the turn of the century, and recommended changes.

The act's equal employment and other economic-opportunity features significantly affected minorities and women. For example, the Mexican farm workers' fight for economic justice and the Chicano Movement for dignity and identity became inexorably linked. The concept and practice of "affirmative action" significantly expanded the black middle class, although success was limited in breaking through "glass ceilings" in corporate ownerships and upper-management positions. In addition, the recurring "backlash" against affirmative action continued to leave most African Americans in a marginal economic position. Members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) urged the formation of a "civil rights lobby" for women analogous to the NAACP for African Americans to implement the act. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, and women active in the civil rights, antiwar, and students' movements also began to raise the issue of women's equality. In government, executive branch remedies for past discrimination included developing a federal contract workforce reflecting the minority and gender makeup of the labor pool.

Even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, minorities continued to face voting restrictions. The Supreme Court had made it clear, at least since 1944, that the Fifteenth Amendment granting citizens voting rights could not be denied or abridged. Yet, it took another twenty years and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to provide the enforcement measures needed to protect African Americans and other minorities. The results were felt most significantly in the nation's urban areas, as well as in the Deep South where voter registration soared and black municipal officials were elected in large numbers. Many blacks gained control of local governments and paved the way for expanded political influence. Similar results were achieved in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of 1965-1975. Throughout the twentieth century, various Hispanic advocacy organizations had openly protested against poll taxes and other tactics that kept Hispanics from registering to vote. Voting rights cases from the 1970s through the 1990s resulted in the election of Hispanics to previously all-white municipal and county councils and boards.

Late in the 1960s, the Black Power Movement advocated black pride, control over black institutions, and self-determination over integration. It began to replace the earlier strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience with a more militant and aggressive approach. Asian Americans continued to advance their civil rights issues. Many Filipino farm workers partnered with César Chávez and the United Farmworkers Union. Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese students at San Francisco State University united in 1968 to call for ethnic studies programs, a movement shared with African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. The burgeoning war in Vietnam eventually resulted in large-scale emigration from Southeast Asia to America, and Congress passed legislation to assist the new immigrants.

Homophile groups throughout the country also became more militant, speaking out against police entrapment, working to educate the public and professionals about homosexuality, and fighting against discrimination in government employment, to counter the earlier McCarthyite linking of Communist subversion and homosexuality. The Stonewall riot during a June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village traditionally marks the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement, although the emergence was in fact more gradual and more complex. In the aftermath of the riot, gay liberation fronts spread like wildfire from New York to other major cities, as well as to college campuses across the country. Women broke away from male dominated organizations to form lesbian feminist groups and collectives. The struggle shifted from the right to public space to education, including the demand for gay and lesbian studies in universities;legal protection for gay, lesbian, bisexual (and, eventually, transgender) people;and equal employment, including in the schools, the military, and government. The modern gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement emerged from this period of activism. In 1974, the first federal civil rights bill for gay men and lesbians was introduced in Congress.

The last of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960s was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing throughout the nation. The emergence of modern suburbia in the mid-twentieth century included rigid racial covenants that left a legacy and reinforced racial barriers to public education and jobs. Private developers refused to allow minorities to rent or own homes and federal agencies insured mortgages with racially restricted provisions, all in support of the whites' fears that integration would lower their p roperty values and quality of life. The Fair Housing Act helped shift the center of the civil rights movement from the rural South to the urban North, where racial concentration in housing was more prevalent. The shift spawned a campaign for residential integration and equal housing there and across the nation.

Content used with permission from Eastern National's Guidebook to The American Civil Rights Experience.

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The Second Revolution, 1965-1980 - Civil Rights (U.S. National Park Service)

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With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights struggled with an agenda rapidly expanding in scope, complexity, and controversy. The Commission's work took on a national rather than a regional focus and concentrated on affirmative action and federal enforcement efforts.

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Three Mile Island is the site of a nuclear power plant in south central Pennsylvania. In March 1979, a series of mechanical and human errors at the plant caused the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, resulting in a partial meltdown that released dangerous radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. Three Mile Island stoked public fears about nuclear power-since the accident, construction has not begun at any new nuclear power plant sites in the United States.

The China Syndrome

Construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant began in 1968, in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, on a small island in the Susquehanna River just south of the state capital in Harrisburg. Construction ended in 1978 when the second of two nuclear reactors at the site came online to produce electricity.

A thriller film, called The China Syndrome, hit theaters in March of 1979. The film, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, dealt with the aftermath of a fictional nuclear meltdown at a reactor outside of Los Angeles.

The nuclear industry, at the time, dismissed The China Syndrome plot as far-fetched. Many experts said nuclear meltdowns-where a nuclear reactor overheats causing radioactive fuel to melt-were almost impossible, calling them "black swan" events.

Three Mile Island Accident

In the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, a mechanical or electric failure set off an unlikely series of events that led to a partial meltdown at the Unit 2 reactor. Water pumps that helped to cool the radioactive fuel in the reactor core malfunctioned.

Plant staff didn't realize the reactor was experiencing a loss of coolant and took a series of actions that made the problem worse. These further starved the reactor core of water flow and caused it to overheat.

The nuclear fuel began to melt through its metal container-about half the reactor core melted. Trace amounts of radioactive gasses escaped into the surrounding community as a geyser of steam erupted from the top of the plant.

The melting fuel created a large hydrogen bubble inside the unit that officials worried might cause an explosion, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material.

Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh advised pregnant women and pre-school-age children within a five-mile radius of the plant to evacuate the area. The crisis ended three days later when experts determined the hydrogen bubble could not burn or explode.

TMI Impact

After the Three Mile Island (or TMI) accident, public support for nuclear energy fell from an all-time high of 69 percent in 1977 to 46 percent in 1979.

An estimated two million people were exposed to small amounts of radiation as a result of the TMI accident. There are no known health impacts. Several government agencies and independent groups conducted studies, but no adverse effects could be found to correlate to these exposures.

Careful analysis of the accident led to sweeping changes in the way nuclear plants are regulated in the United States. Federal requirements for safety controls and emergency response planning became more stringent, and officials imposed a temporary moratorium on the licensing of all new reactors.

Required design changes after the Three Mile Island accident resulted in higher costs and longer construction times for new nuclear plants. As a result, construction of nuclear reactors steeply declined. No entirely new nuclear plants started after 1979 have been completed in the United States.

Three Mile Island Cleanup

The cleanup effort lasted 14 years and cost an estimated 1 billion dollars. The damaged reactor was permanently closed and entombed in concrete after the accident.

Radioactive fuel and water were removed, and workers eventually shipped 15 tons of radioactive waste to a nuclear waste storage facility in Idaho.

Anti-Nuclear Movement

The Three Mile Island incident helped to galvanize the anti-nuclear movement in the United States. The anti-nuclear movement emerged as a social movement against the global nuclear arms race in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War.

High profile protests in response to the events at Three Mile Island took place around the country, including one in New York City in 1979 involving 200,000 people.

Three Mile Island Today

Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station today generates power from its Unit 1 reactor. The Unit 1 reactor is owned and operated by Exelon Corporation.

Exelon announced in 2017 that it would close the plant in 2019. Dismantling the remaining reactor could take up to 10 years.

Sources

Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident. U.S. NRC.
14-Year Cleanup at Three Mile Island Concludes. The New York Times.
A brief history of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant known for 1979 reactor accident. ABC News.

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Three Mile Island - Accident, Nuclear & Meltdown | HISTORY

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Three Mile Island is the site of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania which experienced the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history in 1979.

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On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, armed members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) surrender to federal authorities, ending their 71-day siege of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in 1890.

AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native-American leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had rights to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development.

Their actions were acclaimed by many Native Americans, but on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Oglala Sioux Tribal President Dick Wilson had banned all AIM activities. AIM considered his government corrupt and dictatorial, and planned the occupation of Wounded Knee as a means of forcing a federal investigation of his administration. By taking Wounded Knee, The AIM leaders also hoped to force an investigation of other reservations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and broken Indian treaties. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country's lowest rates of life expectancy.
READ MORE: Remembering the Wounded Knee Massacre
On February 27, 1973, some 200 AIM-led Sioux seized control of Wounded Knee, taking 11 allies of Dick Wilson hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation. The next day, AIM members traded gunfire with the federal marshals surrounding the settlement and fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within rifle range. Russell Means began negotiations for the release of the hostages, demanding that the U.S. Senate launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pine Ridge, and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.

The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents. One federal agent was paralyzed after being shot. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after White House officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government's unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.

Violence continued on the Pine Ridge Reservation throughout the rest of the 1970s, with several more AIM members and supporters losing their lives in confrontations with the U.S. government. In 1975, two FBI agents and a Native-American man were killed in a massive shoot-out between federal agents and AIM members and local residents. In a controversial trial, AIM member Leonard Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

With many of its leaders in prison, AIM disbanded in 1978. Local AIM groups continued to function, however, and in 1981 one group occupied part of the Black Hills in South Dakota. The U.S. government took no steps to honor broken Indian treaties, but in the courts some tribes won major settlements from federal and state governments in cases involving tribal land claims. Russell Means continued to advocate Native-American rights at Pine Ridge and elsewhere and in 1988 was a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. In 2001, Means attempted to run for the governorship of New Mexico, but his candidacy was disallowed because procedure had not been followed.

Beginning in 1992, Means appeared in several films, including Last of the Mohicans. He also had a guest spot on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. His autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, was published in 1997. Means died on October 22, 2012, at age 72.

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American Indian Movement (AIM) ends occupation of Wounded Knee

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On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, armed members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) surrender to federal authorities, ending their 71-day siege of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in 1890.