Earl Warren, former Republican governor of California, is appointed by Eisenhower as 14

October 4 - USSR satellite Sputnik is put into orbit around the Earth. Several weeks later, a dog is also sent into the space. An immense propaganda triumph for the Socialist system, it wounds US self-esteem and launches the country into a “space race” against the USSR. In January 1958, the USA launch a satellite, Explorer 1; later that year, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is created. The space race, a child of the Cold War, is seen as a patriotic enterprise and followed with extreme interest everywhere in the US. It also fuels research in aeronautic engineering, becoming a major source of lucrative contracts for firms and universities.

February 1 - Four black college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, NC sit down at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter, protesting their denial of service. This action caused a national campaign, waged by seventy-thousand students, both white and black, over the next eight months, in boycotts of cheap food chains and sit-ins across the nation for Civil Rights.

Feb 13 - France becomes the fourth nuclear power.

Mar 15 - Lunch-counter sit-ins spread to 15 cities in 5 southern states. The sit-in movement evolves into the SNCC, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which affiliates with ML King’s SCLC.

April 1 - Tiros I, the first weather satellite, is launched by the United States.  Twelve days later, the navigation satellite, Transat 1-b is launched.

May 1 - In the Soviet Union, a United States U-2 reconnaissance plane is shot down by Soviet forces, leading to the capture of the pilot and the eventual cancellation of the Paris summit conference. The pilot would later be sentenced by the Soviet Union to ten years in prison for espionage, and eventually exchanged for a captured Soviet spy in Berlin in 1962.

May 6 - Civil Rights Act of 1960 is signed by Eisenhower.

July 1 - The fifty star flag of the United States is debuted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, reflecting the admission of Hawaii into the union in 1959.

July - A survey of 5,000 individuals who had taken LSD concludes it is safe. The substance, first synthesized in the 1930s and experimented on for military use, in the following years will start being manufactured outside official laboratories and distributed for free as the vehicle to a psychedelic experience that will enlarge the mind and bring new understanding and love.

August 9 – Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, 39, tries psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca. He will become one of the main exponents and “prophets” of psychedelics.

August 10 - Antarctic Treaty creates a peaceful scientific preserve in the Pole.

November 8 - The presidential race to succeed two-term president Dwight D. Eisenhower is won by Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate from Massachusetts, over incumbent Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Kennedy was a narrow victor in the popular vote, by slightly more than 120,000 votes, but won a more substantial victory in the Electoral College tally, 303 to 219. 62.8% of the voting age population took part in the contest.  The 1960 campaign for president had seen the first televised debate, on September 26.

December - Birth Control Pills go on sale in the US, but many states declare their use illegal.

Physicist Theodore Maiman perfects the laser.

In the 1960 census the United States population is 179,323,175, an 18.5% increase since 1950.  For the first time, two states, New York and California, have over fifteen million people within their borders.  

Fashion is still conventional 1950s style: males wear formal suits, women “bouffant” dresses where the top part is tight and the skirt puffs out. Men wear their hair short; the popular hairstyle for women is a beehive, with hair piled high on the head. There is also a minority bohemian beatnik-style look, including black berets, black tight slacks and dark glasses, dark eye makeup and flat shoes for women, and sandals for men.

1961
January - Bob Dylan, aged 19, moves to New York City and starts playing in the Greenwich Village. He visits Woody Guthrie in the hospital.

January 3 - Disputes over the nationalization of United States businesses in Cuba cause the U.S. Government to sever diplomatic and consular relations with the Cuban government.

January 17 - Eisenhower warns of increasing power of “military-industrial complex.”

January 20 - John F. Kennedy moves into the White House. He gives his famous speech – “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” – and launches his “New Frontier” program. This involves both fight against poverty and injustice on the domestic front, and fight against Communism abroad: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose every foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev declares the USSR’s unlimited support to all peoples fighting for their liberation anywhere in the world.

February 18 – British philosopher Bertrand Russell, 89, leads march of 20,000 and sit-down of 5,000 anti-nuke outside U.K. Defense Ministry and is jailed for 7 days.

March 1 - John Kennedy announces the creation of the Peace Corps (an independent federal agency sending young volunteers all over the world, especially in Third-World countries, to convey a positive image of the USA, help mutual understanding, train workers on-site, help with education and health programs). The number of yearly participants would reach 15,000 in 1966. Kennedy simultaneously initiates a 17-billion-dollar nuclear missile program and increases military aid to Indochina, embracing the “domino theory” that the Communist victory in Vietnam would engender the subsequent fall of other pro-western or former colonial contries, widening the sphere of Communist influence worldwide.

April 12 –Yuri Gagarin, on the Vostok I of the USSR, is the first man in space.

April 17 - The “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba: an attempt by CIA-trained Cuban exiles under the direction of the United States government to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro is repulsed by Cuban forces.

May – The first group of Freedom Riders leaves Washington, DC for a southern tour on Greyhound buses to test integration in interstate buses and bus stations. Along their journey they are repeatedly attacked, assaulted, and arrested. In spite of favorable legislation, in December Free Riders are arrested in Albany, Georgia and in the protests that follow, hundreds of demonstrators are arrested, including Dr. King. In February next year, segregated buses and bus facilities will be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

May 5 - The first U.S. manned sub-orbital space flight is completed with Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr. inside a Mercury capsule launched 116.5 miles above the earth from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Twenty days later, President Kennedy announces his intention to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

May 28 - Amnesty International is founded.

July - Ban The Bomb demonstrations start worldwide.

July 19 - First Telstar Satellite live TV transmission across the Atlantic.

July - In response to Soviet threat to end existing arrangements among occupying Allied forces in Berlin, Kennedy asks the Congress to vote a dramatic increase in military spending, while delivering a TV speech repeating the US’s peaceful intentions and recognizing USSR security concerns in central and eastern Europe as legitimate. The USSR leader interprets this military escalation as a direct threat.

August 13 - The construction of the Berlin Wall begins by the Soviet bloc, segregating the German city, previously held in four sectors by Allied forces, including the United States. Kennedy mobilizes the Air National Guard but does not deploy it. The Wall will last until 1989.

September 15 - U.S. starts underground nuclear testing in Nevada test-sites and in the Pacific.

October 6 - President Kennedy advises Americans to build fallout shelters.

December 14 - In response to appeals from Democratic women, JF Kennedy creates a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to investigate issues of job discrimination against women. The PCSW also included Robert Kennedy. It issued its final report in 1963, denouncing inequality and job discrimination of women while simultaneously upholding traditional feminine roles as wives and mothers.

Bob Dylan records his first album, Bob Dylan, with little success.

February 7 - The first sign of a looming Vietnam conflict emerges when President Kennedy admits that the military advisors already in Vietnam would engage the enemy if fired upon.

Feb 16 - First anti-nuclear march on Washington with a few thousand protesters.

February 20 - Lt. Col. John Glenn becomes the first U.S. astronaut in orbit in the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule.  He would circle the earth three times before returning to earth, remaining aloft for four hours and fifty-five minutes. This flight equalized the space race with the Soviet Union.

April 21 - The Seattle Century 21 Exposition, the first world’s fair held in the United States since World War II, opens under the theme of space exploration.  Over 9.6 million visitors would attend the exposition over 184 days.

June - Possibly influenced by Dwight McDonald’s review of M. Harrington’s book, and prompted by his economic advisors, among whom were Keynesian economists Walter Heller and John Galbraith (author of the 1958 book The Affluent Society), Kennedy plans to reduce poverty and increase the GNP by cutting taxes and increasing government spending. Faced with conservative opposition, the President proposes only a federal tax cut (which will not be passed until after his death, in February 1964).

June 15 - SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) meet at Port Huron, Michigan and issue the Port Huron Statement, mainly written by SDS leader Tom Hayden. Originally moderately leftist and based on an advanced democratic platform focusing on students as the agents of progressive social change, SDS will become more radicalized during the decade, with internal strains between different Marxist-Leninist factions.

April 25 - U.S. resumes atmospheric nuclear testing after 3 year moratorium.

August 5 - Marilyn Monroe is found dead at her home in Los Angeles from an overdose of barbiturate. Ruled as a “probable suicide,” her death has never been totally cleared and has given rise to a number of conspiracy theories.

September - Timothy Leary starts taking LSD and founds International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) to promote LSD research and publish The Psychedelic Review.

September - Three thousand troops quell riots, allowing James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi as the first black student under protection by Federal marshals.

October 14 - The Cuban Missile Crises begins.  In response to the Soviet Union building offensive missiles in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy orders a naval and air blockade of military equipment to the island, threatening to retaliate against the USSR if missiles are actualy launched from Cuba aimed at the US. An agreement is eventually reached with Soviet Premier Khrushchev on the removal of the missiles, ending the potential conflict after thirty-eight days, in what was probably the closest the Cold War came to breaking into armed conflict. The Kennedy adminstration develops a new policy of “flexible response” to threats from the USSR and its satellites: instead of the Eisenhower line of “massive retaliation” (involving the use of nuclear power), the US will use conventional weapons and counterinsurgency techniques in local confrontations, excepting cases of direct attack against the US or NATO countries.

November 20 - President Kennedy signs Executive Order 11063 banning segregation in Federal housing.

Andy Warhol exhibits his Campbell’s Soup Can at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles
1963
Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.

January - Alabama Governor Wallace’s “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech at his inauguration.

March 21 - The last twenty-seven prisoners of Alcatraz, the island prison in San Francisco Bay, are ordered to be removed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and the federal penitentiary is closed.

April 3 - SCLC and volunteers stage sit-in in Birmingham, Alabama.

April 12 - Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy are jailed in Birmingham. On April 16, ML King writes his “Letter from Birmingham jail.”

May - To protest the arrest and imprisonment of Dr. King, the “Children’s Crusade” is organized, a march of hundreds of school students. It spans 3 days. Images of police violence, hydrants and dogs in Birmingham appear on TV and induce protest nationwide; in exchange for a stop to mass demonstrations, the most oppressive segregation rules are lifted. Thousands of demonstrators are released from jail; bail is paid by singer Harry Belafonte and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

May - Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is released. It contains several protest songs inspired by Guthrie and Pete Seeger and blending traditional folk forms with topical themes, among which “Oxford Town,” inspired by George Meredith’s fight to gain admittance to University of Mississippi, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” evoking nuclear catastrophe, and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which becomes an international hit.

June 11 – JF Kennedy in a historic speech promises a Civil Rights Bill. A Buddhist monk sets himself on fire to protest the repressive policies of the American-backed South Vietnamese government: the event is televised in the US.

June 12 - Mississippi NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) leader Medgar Evers is assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member.

June 17 - The Supreme Court of the United States rules (8 to 1) in the case of Abington School District v. Schempp that laws requiring the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools is unconstitutional. 

June 26 - Kennedy visits West Berlin and delivers his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.

July 25 - The United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain agree to a limited nuclear test-ban treaty, banning all nuclear testing above ground.

July 26-28 - Newport Folk Festival: it includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger.

August 28 - The Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C. for Jobs and Freedom culminates with Martin Luther King’s famous “I had a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Over 250,000 people, a third of them white, participate in the march to demand that Congress pass legislation advancing racial equality. Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later also known as El Hajj Malik al-Shabazz), one of the most influential leaders of the Nation of Islam, criticizes the demonstration as too compromised with white American establishment. His platform is a separatist one, he rejects non-violence arguing for self-defense, and he advocates Islam as the original religion of black people, repudiating Christianity as the white man’s religion.

August 29 - A peaceful settlement to the 99-year long land dispute between Mexico and the United States is enacted with the signing of the Chamizal Treaty, establishing the boundary in the El Paso Juarez Valley.  

August 30 - U.S.-Soviet hotline is installed to improve communication between the 2 superpowers in future crises.

September 15 - The bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama – a rallying point for civil-rights activities – by members of the Ku Klux Klan kills four girls (one aged 11, 3 aged 14) and injures 22 people. Evidence gathered by FBI against the bombers was not released to prosecutors due to an order from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the murderers only began to be prosecuted in 1978.

September-October - Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is ratified by the Senate and takes effect.

November 9 - New York City Blackout.

November 22 - In Dallas, Texas, during a motorcade through downtown, President John F. Kennedy is mortally wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn into office later that day. Two days later, Oswald was himself killed on live national television by Jack Ruby while being transported in police custody. The President’s violent death, along with his youth and good looks, and his family’s fabulous wealth, transform him into a national hero: prompted by widow Jacqueline, journalist Theodore White writes an article that creates the glamorous myth of “Camelot.”

November 24 - 15,000 US troops are present in Vietnam at this time. LB Johnson escalates US commitment. Agent Orange, a defoliant and herbicide produced by Dow Chemical, begins to be employed in Vietnam. The agent releases dioxin creating severe aftereffects both in the affected population and in the military exposed to its use. Incendiary napalm bombs will also be used during the war, generating extremely high temperatures and burning the skin of its victims.

Pierre Cardin designs the Beatles suits, which become popular for men. The suit has a single breasted collarless jacket and slim pants. British designer Mary Quant starts her own label, and launches mini skirts, worn with colored tights and wet look vinyl fashions.

January 8 - LBJ declares “War on Poverty” in his State of the Union address. The main War on Poverty measure would be the Economic Opportunity Act, passed in July of the same year and administered through a separate ad hoc agency responding directly to the President. Through an innovative approach, it established “Community Action Programs” (e.g. Job Corps for work-training programs, work-study programs of part-time jobs enabling students to work their way to a college degree, loans and guarantees for the unemployed, free legal services, local clinics, 80% funding for plans aimed at meeting the needs of local communities, etc.), designed and administered locally rather than through existing bureaucracies and officials, based on the principle that “local citizens best understand their own problems, and know best how to deal with those problems.” Tax cuts passed by Congress during this year will increase output by 4% and reduce unemployment to 3.5 % by the end of the decade.

January 9-12 - Panama Canal incident over sovereignty in US-occupied Panama, triggered by a dispute over the use of Panamanian flag: a group of Panamanian students engage United States troops in a 3-day riot, leading to the death of 21 Panama citizens and 4 U.S. troops, and $ 2 million of property damage.

January 13 - Beatlemania hits the shores of the United States with the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which becomes the group’s first North American hit.  

January 23 – The twenty-fourth Amendment abolishes the poll tax for Federal elections.

February – The Beatles arrive in New York to 10,000 screaming fans, and appear on Ed Sullivan Show; 74 million people watch, the largest audience in the history of television.

February 25 - 1960 Olympic champion Cassius Clay wins the World Heavyweight Championship in boxing. He immediately after declares himself a member of the Nation of Islam and takes the name Muhammed Ali; this alienates the white public opinion, with which he had been very popular. In 1966, he refused to serve in the Vietnam war declaring himself a conscientious objector (and famously stating that “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ... They never called me nigger.”) He was stripped of his title by the New York State Athletic Commission, convicted by a Court, and sentenced to five years. Only in 1970 was his boxing licence restored; in 1971 his conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court.

March 8 – Malcolm X publicly announces his break from the Nation of Islam, with whose leaders he had had serious disagreements in the previous year, and founds Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. His stance is black nationalism. In April he converts to Sunni Islam and makes a pilgrimage to Mecca. He then visits several African countries and establishes connections with African leaders. In the following months he will be invited to speak in France and UK. Meanwhile, he starts receiving open threats from the Nation of Islam. He criticizes the civil rights agenda as too limited, and, while declaring himself ready to collaborate with civil rights leaders, advocates a shift of focus to human rights, seeking connection with wider liberation struggles in the Third World and globally. As a result of that, he will come to criticize his former separatist positions as racist, admitting that whites can help black liberation struggles.

April 22 - The New York World’s Fair opens in Queens, New York on the site of the 1939 event, one of the largest world’s fairs in United States history. Its theme structure, the Unisphere, is still present, now seen each August outside the U.S. Tennis Open.

May - Bob Dylan’s first visit to England: he meets The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and turns The Beatles on to marijuana. The same year he writes “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

May 22 – LBJ delivers his “Great Society” speech at Graduation Day at Ann Arbor.

“Freedom Summer” in Mississippi: mobilized by liberal militant Allan Lowenstein, a veteran of campus protests in the 50s, volunteer white students from the North roam through the South campaigning for massive registration of black voters to elect the new state legislature.

June 29 - An omnibus legislation in the U.S. Congress on Civil Rights is passed, banning discrimination in employment and accommodations.

June – First (unsuccessful) US tour of the Rolling Stones.

July 2 - LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act.

July - Ken Kesey and the “Merry Pranksters” group gathering around him in communal living (among whom was Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s friend) make their first “Magic Bus Trip” from California to New York.

July 18 - Race riot in Harlem, New York.

July 23 - US Senate passes a $947 million antipoverty bill.

August 4 - Three missing civil rights workers are found dead in Mississippi.

August 10 - The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is passed by the United States Congress, authorizing broad powers to the president to use military force in Vietnam after a minor attack by Vietnamese forces against a US electronic intelligence vehicle (destroyer) in the Gulf of Tonkin (the episode is now believed to have been amplified, with a second attack invented in order to obtain the Congress vote). The Resolution becomes the legal basis for the escalation in Vietnam that will follow, even though no formal declaration of war with Vietnam ever took place.

August 20 - LBJ signs the Anti-poverty program.

August 28 - Race riots in Philadelphia.

August 31 - LBJ signs the Food Stamp bill.

August-September - The first “baby boomers” enter college. By 1965 there will be 5 million students in the US campuses (3 million in 1960, 10 million by 1973).

October - In response to strict regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes within the campus, the Free Speech Movement starts on the Berkeley Campus, under the informal leadership of a group of students (among whom Mario Savio, David Goines, Art Goldman, and others), some of whom had taken part in the Civil Rights Movement. During the fall and winter 1964-5, in response to disciplinary suspension of transgressors by the administration, protest extends from militants to the generality of students; protesters organize massive sit-ins, take over the administration building, and end up being busted by the police, called in by the administration. This action further radicalizes the campus, with younger faculty joining the students, especially in the humanities and social sciences departments, making Berkeley the epicenter of all radical political and cultural discourse and action for over a decade.

November 3 - President Lyndon B. Johnson wins his first presidential election with a 486 to 52 victory over Barry M. Goldwater from Arizona, and with over 15 million surplus in the popular vote.

December 10 - Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Space age clothing starts to become popular. Different materials are used, such as discs of metal or plastic linked together with wire. Leather is also used. Metallic or neon colors are involved. 

February - Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 other protesters are arrested in Selma, Alabama for picketing the county courthouse in an effort to end discrimination in voting rights.

February 7 - President Lyndon B. Johnson orders the continuous bombing of North Vietnam below the 20th parallel, in retaliation for a Vietcong attack on an American airbase at Pleiku..

February 18 - Secretary of  Defense Robert McNamara calls for nationwide network of  bomb shelters.

February 21 - Malcolm X is shot and killed by 3 men, members of the Nation of Islam. There is no certainty as to who bore responsibility for instigating his murder.

March 6 - First American soldier officially sets foot on Vietnam battlefields.

March 7 - Alabama state troopers attack 525 civil rights workers as they prepare to march.

March 8 - 3,500 Marines land to protect Da Nang air base.

March 16 - Quaker Alice Herz, 82, immolates herself in Detroit in protest of the Vietnam war.

March 16-17 - Police break up demonstration of 600 in Montgomery, Alabama; 1,600 people demonstrate at Montgomery courthouse.

March 21 - Martin Luther King Jr. leads march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama joined by 25,000 marchers.

March 24 - SDS organizes the first Vietnam War teach-in at University of Michigan. 3,000 show up.

March 25 - Martin Luther King speaks at a civil rights rally on the courthouse steps of the Alabama State Capitol, ending the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. A civil rights worker is shot and killed by KKK in Alabama.

Mar 28 - Martin Luther King calls for boycott of Alabama on TV.

April - 125,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Vietnam.

April 2 - Ken Kesey is busted for marijuana. During 1965-66 Kesey and the Merry Pranksters conduct a number of “psychedelic parties” in the San Francisco Bay area, that is, experiments based on communal consumption of LSD (=acid) and known as “acid tests.”

April 17 - SDS leads the first anti-Vietnam war march in Washington. 25,000 attend.

July 8 - Chicago school integration protests.

July 10 - Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is #1 in US charts for 4 weeks and launches the band as a major worldwide success.

July 24 - Bob Dylan’s single “Like A Rolling Stone” enters charts.

July 25 - Dylan goes Rock at Newport Folk Festival playing an electric guitar, eliciting outraged responses from the folk music community.

July 30 – LB Johnson signs Medicare bill.

August 6 - The Voting Rights Act is signed into law by President Johnson, outlawing the requirement of potential voters to take a literacy test in order to qualify and other devices routinely employed by Southern administrators to prevent blacks from voting.

August 11 - The Watts race riots in Los Angeles begin a five-day siege, culminating in the death of thirty-four people and over $200 million property destruction. The National Guard is deployed 2 days later. This is the first of four “long, hot summers.”

September 5 - San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon applies the term “hippie” (derived from “hip” and “hipster,” a term originally used for beatniks in the 50s and derived from black jazz culture= to be in the know, to be wide awake) to the new San Francisco counterculture in an article “A New Haven for Beatniks,” dealing with the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, where LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) and the Sexual Freedom League met.

September 15 – African American actor Bill Cosby co-stars in TV series I spy, the first African American featured in a lead role on US TV.

October 1 - Anti-pollution bill sets emission standards for cars.

October 15 - The first public burning of a draft card occurs in protest to the Vietnam War.  It is coordinated by the anti-war group of students, National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

October 16 - 100,000 anti-war protesters demonstrate nationwide in 80 cities. American troops in Vietnam reach the figure of 200,000.

Mini skirts become much shorter. Op art becomes popular both in home design and in fashion: optic trick is created using contrasting colors with black and white. 

Moderate SCLC policies are increasingly challenged by other emerging militant groups influenced by Malcolm X’s thought. New leaders take over the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and proclaim Black Power, whose program is separatism and whose method involves challenge to white society and rejects non-violence; white members are expelled from the two organizations. ML King moves his campaign to Chicago fighting against black poverty, housing segregation, and job discrimination, in an attempt to recover leadership of the movement on an explicitly social agenda. The artistic and cultural branch of Black Power is the Black Arts Movement, founded in Harlem by black writer and activist Leroi Jones, later renamed Amiri Baraka. Other well known figures of the BAM are Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Maya Angelou. One of the most resounding slogans of Black Power is “Black Is Beautiful,” an antidote to the black internalization of white standards of appearance and aesthetics leading them to think of themselves as ugly and try to change their looks. Afro hairstyle becomes popular as a sign of pride for African looks.

January 3 - The Psychedelic Shop opens on Haight Street, San Francisco. By June, the Haight-Ashbury district had drawn an estimated number of 15,000 hippies. “Flower children”’s motto: “Make love not war.”

January 14 - March on Atlanta to protest the ouster of Julian Bond (one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, which expelled him over his endorsement of the SNCC’s opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1966, the Supreme Court in Bond v. Floyd ruled 9-0 that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and required it to seat him again).

February 19 - Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin perform at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

March 3 - GI Bill grants veterans rights to education, housing, health and jobs.

Mar 11 - Timothy Leary is sentenced in Texas to 30 years for trying to cross into Mexico with a small amount of marijuana.

March 25 - Anti-Vietnam war protests in NY bring out 25,000 on 5th Ave.  Other protests in 7 US cities and 7 foreign cities.

April - 30 Mississippi blacks build tent city under President Johnson's window to protest housing conditions in their state.

April 7 - Sandoz stops supplying LSD to researchers.

April 12 - NY Stock Exchange is hit with anti-war leaflets.

May 15 - Antiwar demonstration in D.C., 10,000 attend.

June - James Meredith, the first black student to be admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962, leads the March against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi and is shot at and wounded. SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (later named Kwame Ture) proclaims Black Power: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”

June 29 - United States warplanes begin their bombing raids of Hanoi and Haiphong, North Vietnam.  By December of this year, the United States has 385,300 troops stationed in South Vietnam with 60,000 additional troops offshore and 33,000 in Thailand. Most of these troops are draftees, and a disproportionate percentage are black or Hispanic.

July 1 - Medicare, the government medical program for citizens over the age of 65, begins.

August 18 - Red Guard begins to wipe out western influence and traditional culture in China.

September - Timothy Leary holds press conference at NY Advertising Club announcing the formation of a psychedelic religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, and starts nightly presentations at the Village Theater.

September 8 - Star Trek TV series is first aired.

October - NOW (National Organization for Women) is created in Washington to fight for equality with men. It emphasizes job opportunity.

October 6 - LSD is made illegal in the USA and all but its strictly controlled use for scientific purposes is banned.

October 15 - The National Historic Preservation Act is made law.  It expands the National Register of Historic Places to include historic sites of regional, state, and local significance.

October 15 - Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, a paramilitary group originally aimed at self-defence and fighting police brutality. Inspired by Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism and as well as by Malcolm X’s speeches and the writings of Frantz Fanon, it emphasizes the revolutionary role of the lumpenproletariat and of ghetto street gangs, and sets forth a black nationalism agenda, later to be widened to an overall social justice and international revolution program, seeking ties with other radical groups. By 1968 it had grown to national prominence, with more than 5,000 members in all main US cities, and a circulation of 250,000 for its newspaper.

November 5 - Walk for Love and Peace and Freedom: over 10,000 in New York City.

November 8 - The first black United States Senator in eighty-five years, Edward Brooke, is elected to Congress. Brooke was the Republican candidate from Massachusetts and former Attorney General of that state.

December 26 - The first Kwanzaa is celebrated as a week-long holiday specifically addressed to African Americans and honoring their African heritage. The word comes from Swahili, reflecting a pan-African approach, and means “first fruits.”

 Psychedelic clothing is now a hit. Colors are brighter and bolder and acid colors are much in use. Men begin to dress “fancy.”

February - 25,000 US troops sent to Cambodian border.

February 27 - The Outer Space Treaty, banning nuclear weapons in space, is signed into force by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, to take effect on October 10, 1967.

March 18 - First U.S. supertanker wreck. Torrey Canyon spills 90,000 tons of oil onto English shores.

March 26 - Be-In at Central Park in New York. 10,000 attend.

April 10 - Vietnam Week starts. Draft card burnings and anti-draft demonstrations.

April 15 - Anti-Vietnam War protest. 400,000 march from Central Park to the United Nations. Speeches by Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

May - Paul McCartney announces that all the Beatles have “dropped acid.”

May 19 - First U.S. air strike on Hanoi.

May 20 - Flower Power Day in New York City.

May - Lobbying by NOW leads to public hearings on sex discrimination. Later in the year (October) Johnson will sign Executive Order 11375, forbidding sex discrimination by federal contractors.

June 16-18 - Monterey Pop Festival: commonly regarded as the starting event of the “Summer of Love,” the 3-day concert, held in California, attracted over 200,000 people. Among the singers and groups present were Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who.

June 21 - Summer Solstice Party in Golden Gate Park.

June 23 - A three day summit between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, held at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, culminates in a mutual declaration that no crises between them would lead to war.

June 30 - 448,400 US troops in Vietnam.

June-July-August - The Summer of Love in San Francisco: 100,000 young people converge on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, in a social experiment based on communal living and free sharing of resources with both friends and strangers, merging music, psychedelics, free love, creative individual expression, alternative lifestyles. Free food and drugs, a free store and a free clinic are available.

July - Summer of Rioting in the US. Blacks take to the streets in Chicago, Brooklyn, Cleveland and Baltimore. In Newark, New Jersey, 26 are killed, 1,500 injured and 1,000 arrested from July 12 to 17.  One week later, July 23 to 30, 40 are killed, 2,000 injured, and 5,000 left homeless after rioting in Detroit, known as the 12th Street Riots, decimate a black ghetto. The riots are eventually stopped by over 12,500 Federal troopers and National Guardsmen.

August - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) directed by J. Edgar Hoover establishes a program called COINTELPRO to “neutralize” Black Nationalist groups. The program targeted especially the Black Panthers, defined as “The greatest threat to the internal security of the country”; between 1968 and 1969, a number of actions were taken to discredit its leaders and the leaders of other black organizations, and to foster violence in order to create opportunities for arrest and repression. This led to the imprisonment of Black Panther leaders, such as Huey Newton in 1967 (whose conviction for murder was later overturned), to shootouts and raids, and to the death of several leaders and militants.

July-September – Doors’ Light My Fire and Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale vie for #1; Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” hits the charts; Donovan performs at the Hollywood Bowl.

September - An organization called “Brown Berets,” from the brown berets worn as a symbol of unity and resistance against discrimination, is founded as a development of YCCA or Young Chicanos For Community Action in Los Angeles. Their agenda is to fight police harassment, the lack of political representation, and the Vietnam War and ask for adequate public schools, health care, and job opportunities. It set up branches in Texas, New Mexico, New York, Florida, Chicago, St. Louis and other metropolitan areas with Hispanic populations.

October 2 - Thurgood Marshall is sworn into office as the first black Supreme Court Justice.

October 3 - Woody Guthrie dies.

October 8 - Che Guevara is killed in Bolivia by US-trained troops.

October 20 - Seven KKK members are convicted of conspiracy in 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

October 21-22 - Anti-war protesters storm the Pentagon.

October 21 – “Diggers” exorcise the Pentagon. 35,000 demonstrate, 647 are arrested.

October 26 - Draft deferments are eliminated for those who violate draft laws or interfere with recruitment, thus trying to reduce students’ active opposition to draft.

November - At its first national conference, NOW debates an Equal Rights Amendment (which has not yet been introduce to date), abortion rights and child-care centers. Roughly in the same period the New York Radical Women organization is founded (among its members: Shulamith Firestone, Anne Koedt, Patricia Mainardi, Robin Morgan) and introduces the practice of consciousness-raising (CR) groups, enabling women to share their experience and use it as a shared basis for political analysis and awareness. Radical feminist groups begin to emerge in other cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston, distinguishing themselves both from the middle-class, middle-aged women organizations and the radical student groups led by males. Challenging the sexism of radical male leaders and militants, they argue that sexism is a more oppressive force than capitalism.

November - A “Mobilization”—usually referred to as “The Mobe”—is created to organize anti-war demonstrations in all major cities in the spring and fall of each year.

November 14 - The Air Quality Act provides $428 million to fight air pollution.

November 20 - A National Commission on Product Safety is established.

December - 486,000 American troops in Vietnam; of the 15,000 killed up to that date, 60% died in 1967. “Stop the Draft” movement is organized by 40 antiwar groups; nationwide protests ensue.

Deecember - ML King launches the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a plan for bringing caravans of “poor people” to Washington to campaign for effective anti-poverty measures by camping in “Resurrection City” in West Potomac Park. The plan would be carried out by Ralph Abernathy in 1968 after King’s death and would end in crime and police violence.

December 3 - The first heart transplant is performed by Dr. Christian Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa.

December 5 – 1,000 antiwar protesters try to close NYC induction center.  585 are arrested, including Allen Ginsberg and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

December 31 - Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Dick Gregory, and friends pronounce themselves “Yippies” and create the “Youth International Party,” a youth-oriented, anti-authoritarian countercultural movement. In the next year they start staging theatrical and creative forms of protest, such as the raid on the New York Stock Exchange throwing out dollar bills from the visitors’ balcony. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin will later be among the “Chicago Seven.”

The first hand-held calculator is invented by Texas Instruments, at a cost of $2,500 a piece.

Ethnic fashions, especially Indian- and African-style, begin to spread. Men’s hair are getting longer and longer.

January 22 - B-52 carrying H-bomb crashes in Greenland.

January 23 - The U.S.S. Pueblo incident occurs in the Sea of Japan when North Korea seizes the ship and its crew, accusing it of violating its territorial waters for the purpose of spying. The prisoners are released on December 22.

January 31 - The Tet Offensive is launched: during the religious holiday of the Lunar New Year, the Vietnamese National Liberation front organizes uprisings in all centers of US presence, including a brief occupation of the American embassy. The US troops manage to defeat the offensive through overwhelming military power, but in spite of frightful losses, the uprising sows doubt in the American public as to the actual popularity of the US intervention with the Vietnamese population and reveals that the Vietnamese are far from defeated as the government and General Westmoreland keep repeating. “Credibility gap” begins to create.

February 8 - George Wallace announces his candidacy for President on a law and order platform

March 12 - Eugene McCarthy wins 42% of New Hampshire vote in presidential primary on an end-the-war platform. Many young anti-Vietnam war militants, mostly students, enthusiastically campaign for McCarthy in what comes to be called a “Children’s Crusade.”

March 16 - My Lai massacre: 200-500 Vietnamese villagers, mostly women, children and old people, are savagely killed by a platoon of US soldiers belonging to Charlie Company, led by Lt. William Calley. The massacre is reported by a helicopter pilot who watches it from above, but a cover-up ensues in the military. Only after revelations by the press is Calley tried and convicted by a military court, in 1971; however, thanks to protection by President Nixon, he is soon put out of jail and afforded house arrest.

March 16 - Robert F. Kennedy announces his candidacy for President.

March 31 - President Johnson announces a slowing to the bombing of North Vietnam, and declares that he will not seek reelection as president. Peace talks would begin on May 10 in Paris; all bombing of North Korea halt October 31.

April 4 - Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while standing on a motel balcony by white racist James Earl Ray. The week following his murder sees black uprisings in 125 cities across the U.S.

April 6 - Oakland Police ambush the Black Panthers. Eldridge Cleaver is arrested with a bullet-shattered leg. Bobby Hutton is shot and killed.

April 8 - The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs is established (DEA).

April 11 - Johnson signs a Civil Rights bill banning housing discrimination.

April 11 - Major call-up of reserves for duty in Vietnam.

April 14 - Love-in at Malibu Canyon, California.

April - Spring Mobilization against the Vietnam war: the ties between higher education and the “military-industrial complex” apparatus reveal the role of the university within the larger imperialist and capitalist system and induce campus confrontations, where students get radicalized. At Columbia University (a member of the Institute for Defense Analysis, a consortium of universities testing weapons and performing services for the Pentagon) protest against involvement in Vietnam war is triggered by the construction of gym and pool facilities for university students in Morningside Heights, on Harlem ground, a decision perceived as a white imperialist intrusion in black terrain. SDS students take over 5 buildings for a week; eventually the police is called in and evicts students with indiscriminate violence against both demonstrators and bystanders: 700 arrested. Along with Free Speech, this is the most heated confrontation of the US 60s student movement and the one that receives most media coverage.

April - 300 Black students occupy the administration building at Boston University demanding black studies and financial aid.

April 29 - After its off-Broadway debut the previous October, the countercultural, anti-war rock musical HAIR opens on Broadway at the Biltmore Theater. The first musical with an intregrated cast to be shown on Broadway, it contains multiple allusions to anti-racist struggle, pacifism, drugs, free love and features the story of a hippie “tribe” and a character making up his mind whether to resist conscription.

May 10 - Vietnam peace talks begin in Paris.

June - Black militants and women activists leave SDS separating from the movement’s white male leadership and agenda.

June 3 - Andy Warhol is shot by a woman.

June 5 - Presidential candidate, the Democratic Senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, is shot in Los Angeles at a campaign victory celebration after winning California primary by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian (enraged by his declarations of support for Israel), and dies one day later.

June 14 - Dr. Benjamin Spock is convicted of conspiracy to abet draft evasion.

July 1 - Nuclear nonproliferation treaty is signed by 61 nations. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act becomes effective.

August 1 - 541,000 U.S. Troops in Vietnam.

August 8 – Richard Nixon (with VP Spiro Agnew) nominated by Republican Convention during Miami riots.

August 20 - Soviets invade Czechoslovakia.

August 25-29 - Democratic Convention is held in Chicago amid massive antiwar protests organized by “The Mobe” as well as other groups, such as the Yippies (who arranged a number of theatrical protests such as the nomination of a pig). Riots involve about 10,000 demonstrators, 11,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guard, 7,500 U.S. army troops, and 1,000 FBI, CIA and other services agents. Demonstrators fleeing from a police charge in Grant Park are violently clubbed, dragged into poklice wagons, and arrested. Bystanders and press are also beaten by the police in what will come to be called a “police riot.” The American public watches the violence on TV. The incumbent VP Hubert H. Humphrey is nominated on a platform supporting the war, defeating the “dove” Eugene McCarthy. The demonstration leaders (the so called “Chicago Seven,” originally “Chicago Eight”) are arrested and brought to trial the following year.

September - Radical feminists of the New York Radical Women picket the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.

October 16 - At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos perform the Power to the People salute of Black Power militants on the podium while receiving their medals and listen to the national anthem with their heads bowed. They are expelled from the games and heavily criticized at home, but their political gesture has remained as one of the best known icons of black protest in the 60s.

November 5 - Richard Nixon recaptures the White House from the Democratic party on a “law and order” platform and a promise to Southern whites to slow down the integration process. Less than 1% of popular vote separates him from Humphrey. Nixon captures 301 Electoral College Votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for 3rd Party candidate George Wallace. Shirley Chisholm is America’s first black woman elected to Congress.

November 6 - Student Strike at San Francisco State University.

The first cash dispensing machine is installed by First Philadelphia Bank.

Skirts begin to lengthen out, along with hair. The “Hippie look” becomes popular: the women wear long floor length dresses, long flowing hair, and long skirts called maxies. Men continue to grow their hair longer. Hippies decorate everything, including painting their bodies.

February - Massive strike at U.C. Berkeley for ethnic studies. 33 students arrested at administration building sit-in at University of Massachusetts. Students seize building and start boycott at Howard University. Students occupy Administration building at Penn State. Police charge student picket lines, club and arrest two Chicano leaders at U.C. Berkeley. Thousands rampage through nine buildings at University of Wisconsin, Madison over black enrollments

February - A breakup within the New York Radical Women leads to the creation of the Redstockings (Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis), active on abortion rights during the 1970s with speakouts, street theater protests. They create a number of memorable slogans like “The personal is political.”

March 20 - James Earl Ray sentenced to 99 years for murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

April - Deployment of U.S. troops in Vietnam reaches its zenith at 543,400.

April 9-11 - 300 Harvard students led by SDS seize University Hall and evict eight deans. Police is called into Harvard, 37 are injured, 200 arrested. A 3-day student strike starts at Harvard.

April 22 - Harvard faculty votes to create black studies program and give students vote in the selection of its faculty.

April 22 - City College of New York is closed after black and Puerto Rican students lock themselves inside asking higher minority enrollment.

April 23 - Sirhan Sirhan sentenced to death for the murder of Bob Kennedy.

April 24 - U.S. B-52s launch the biggest attack on North Vietnam. Protests in 40 cities.

May 15 - Hippies in People’s Park in Berkeley are attacked by police and National Guard.

June 18 - At its 9^th annual convention the SDS splits into Progressive Labor, inspired by Mao’s thought and focusing on the primacy of the proletariat, and the Weathermen, led by Bill Ayers and Jim Mellen, denying the primacy of the proletariat as revolutionary class and seeking connections with black militants and the Third World on a platform of urban guerrilla and sensational actions like bank robberies and bombings. Militants organize in small “collectives” and go underground to reject bourgeois lifestyles and spark the revolution from “the belly of the beast.” The name Weatherman is derived from a line in Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which reads “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

June 27-28 - A routine police raid on a gay bar called Stonewal Inn on Christopher St. in Greenwich Village, New York City results in the Stonewall Uprising. Instead of surrendering to police or dispersing, the arrested bartender and drag queens, as well as patrons and bystanders, react fighting the cops and hurling objects, bottles, and cobblestones. 2,000 protesters battle 400 police for 2 days calling for freedom of sexual orientation and asking for places free from the fear of police persecution. The Gay Liberation Front is created immediately after. A march from the Greenwich Village to Central Park will take place on June 28 the following year, the first of what will become Gay Pride marches.

July - Stephen Gaskin starts The Farm commune in Tennessee.

July 8 - Troops withdrawal from Vietnam begins.

July 14 - Easy Rider premieres.

July 20 - The Apollo program completes its mission.  Neil Armstrong, United States astronaut, becomes the first man to set foot on the moon four days after launch from Cape Canaveral. His Apollo 11 colleague, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. accompanies him.

July 25 - President Richard M. Nixon announces his new Vietnam policy, declaring the Nixon Doctrine that expects Asian allies to care for their own military defense. This policy, and all Vietnam war policies, will be heavily protested throughout the remainder of the year.

August 9 - Charles Manson and his “family” kill Sharon Tate and 4 others in a Los Angeles villa.

August 15-17 - Woodstock Festival: over 400,000 people gather in a 600 acre farm in NY for three days of music and peace. Nudity, sex and open use of drugs take place, but no violence. Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, The Who, Santana participate among others. The festival would remain the defining event for a generation: the “Woodstock Nation”.

August 26 - FBI reports a 98% increase in marijuana arrests between 1966 and1968.

September 3 - Ho Chi Min, leader of North Vietnam, dies.

September 24 - The trial against the “Chicago Eight” (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale), charged with conspiracy to incite Chicago Convention riots, begins. Early in the course of the trial, Black Panther Party activist Bobby Seale throws insults at the judge for denying his request to represent himself in trial, and the judge orders him bound and gagged in the courtroom, and finally severs him from the case, sentencing him to four years in prison for contempt (one of the longest sentences for that offense in American history). The Chicago Eight then became the Chicago Seven.Yippies Hoffman and Rubin constantly mocked the court. The trial lasted for months and became a focus of attention throughout the country, with many celebrated figures from the American left and counterculture called to testify. Meanwhile, demonstrations grew outside the courtroom and the National Guard was called in for crowd control.

October 8-11 - The Weathermen proclaim 4 “Days of Rage” in Chicago. Slogan: “Bring the War Home.” The riots, meant to sparkle revolutionary action, end in damage to property and the wounding or arrest of most Weathermen leaders (causing the Weathermen decision to go underground and take up the arms). Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (later that year killed in a police raid) criticizes the action as likely to increase police repression.

October 15 - Peace Day. 500,000 protesters nationwide. First Vietnam Moratorium.

October 21 - Jack Kerouac, beat author of On the Road, dies.

October 30 - Supreme Court orders desegregation nationwide.

November 15 - 500,000 anti-Vietnam war demonstrators, coordinated by “The Mobe,” march on Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest the war, in the largest antiwar rally in U.S. history. Speakers: McCarthy, McGovern, Coretta King, Dick Gregory, Leonard Bernstein. Singers: Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, & Mary, John Denver, Mitch Miller, the touring cast of Hair.

November 17 - First round of SALT talks in Helsinki.

November 20 - A group of American Indians seize Alcatraz Island, the former prison in San Francisco Bay and occupy it for 19 months in a long standoff over the issues of Indian causes, igniting Native American resistance.

November 21 - The Internet, called Arpanet during its initial development, is invented by the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the U.S. Department of Defense.  The first operational packet switching network in the world was deployed connecting UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

November 25 - President Nixon orders all US germ warfare stockpiles destroyed.

December 6 – During their US tour the Rolling Stones organize the Altamont Free Festival in California, featuring along with themselves Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Grateful Dead cancelling due to organization programs. The Hells Angels (a California motorcycle gang) are hired as security. Generalized use of drugs and alcohol leads to increasing violence during the event and a young man is stabbed and kicked to death after a fight with the Angels. A violent western counterpart of Woodstock, the concert has been often perceived as the symbolic end of the hippie era of “peace and love.”

December 8 - Raid on Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles: 4-hour shoot-out.

December - Over 100,000 US troops are dead or injured in Vietnam to this date.
Flashes forward
1972 – While Nixon declared that peace is at hand, Christmas bombing raids over Vietnam lead to renewed demonstrations.

1973 - Peace treaty in Paris: end of the US involvement Vietnam. In the course of the undeclared war, the US lost about 50,000 soldiers, with an additional over 300,000 wounded. Estimates put the figure of Vietnamese deaths to nearly 5 million, with 4 million civilians killed. The war cost nearly 150 billion U.S. dollars.

1973 - Roe vs. Wade legalizes abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.

April 30, 1975 - Fall of Saigon.