Democracy: Limitations And Possibilities DBQ

Democracy: Limitations and Possibilities DBQ

from Columbia University America History Online

During the 1960s, a series of widely disparate protest movements emerged in the United States. While the antiwar movement directed against U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War appeared to be the most salient, many of the movements' leaders and activists expressed discontent with American government and society. In particular, members of previously underrepresented groups—including students, women, and ethnic minorities—sought a greater role in determining the goals, values, and policies of the U.S. government. The thread that tied many of these groups together was a desire to redefine American democracy to make it more inclusive and responsive to the needs of previously oppressed or underrepresented groups.
To what extent did various groups seek to redefine American democracy during the 1960s?
Using the document excerpts (provided below) as well as your knowledge of the period, please answer the question with respect to three of the following groups:
1.  African Americans
2.  College and university students
3.  Ethnic minorities
4.  Government (judges, elected officials, etc.)
5.  Women
In answering the question, please be sure to define democracy as widely as possible, keeping in mind that it encompasses more than voting rights. Pay special attention to how demands for social and economic justice were added to concepts of democracy that were more traditional.
A. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
Primary source: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, book, 1963.
Background information: In her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan (b. 1921) explained that many middle-class women found their roles as wives and mothers unfulfilling. The book helped to spark a new wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
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. . . [O]nce she [the American woman] asks herself "What do I want to do?" she begins to find her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique [the housewife's perception of entrapment]—and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self—she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated.
[ . . . ]
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 338.
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B. Martin Luther King Jr. Addresses March on Washington
Primary source: Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech, 1963.
Background information: A pivotal moment in the civil-rights movement was the March on Washington in 1963. There the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) expressed the hopes of millions in his stirring "I Have a Dream" speech.
The text of "I Have a Dream" is available at http://www.stanford.edu/.
Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963, at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/address_at_march_on_washington.pdf.
C. Free Speech Movement
Primary source: Free Speech Movement Newsletter, "For Free Speech 824-115," statement, 1964.
Background information: In 1964 at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, students, many of them active in the civil-rights movement, protested the university administration's rule forbidding them to distribute leaflets on the school's campus. Thus began what came to be known as the free-speech movement. \
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The source of their power is clear enough: the guns and the clubs of the Highway Patrol, the banks and corporations of the Regents. But what is the source of our power?
It is something we see everywhere on campus but find hard to define. Perhaps it was best expressed by the sign one boy pinned to his chest: "I am a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me." The source of our strength is, very simply, the fact that we are human beings and so cannot forever be treated as raw materials—to be processed. Clark Kerr [president of the University of California] has declared, in his writings and by his conduct, that a university must be like any other factory—a place where workers who handle raw material are themselves handled like raw material by the administrators above them. Kerr is confident that in his utopia "there will not be any revolt, anyway, except little bureaucratic revolts that can be handled piecemeal."
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"For Free Speech 824-115," in Free Speech Movement Newsletter, no. 5 (December 10, 1964). Full text available online at http://texts.cdlib.org/dynaxml/servlet/dynaXML?docId=kt3s2002zf&doc.view=entire_text.
D. Civil Rights Act, 1964
Primary source: U.S. Congress, Civil Rights Act, federal law, 1964.
Background information: Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917–63) in November 1963. Drawing on his long experience as a U.S. senator, President Johnson spearheaded congressional passage of key pieces of civil-rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, excerpted below, provides for equal access to all public accommodations, thereby abolishing the federal government's tacit acceptance of or acquiescence to segregation between blacks and whites.
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. . . All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
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. . . Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that any person or group of persons is engaged in a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of any of the rights secured by this title, and that the pattern or practice is of such a nature and is intended to deny the full exercise of the rights herein described, the Attorney General may bring a civil action in the appropriate district court of the United States by filing with it a complaint . . . requesting such preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order or other order against the person or persons responsible for such pattern or practice, as he deems necessary to insure the full enjoyment of the rights herein described.
[ . . . ]
Civil Rights Act of 1964, U.S. Statutes at Large 78 (1964): 241–68. Full text of the act is at Our Documents, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97.
E. Miranda Decision
Primary source: U.S. Supreme Court, Miranda v. Arizona, Supreme Court decision, 1966.
Background information: In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law-enforcement officials are required to inform the accused of their legal rights.
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Mr. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court.
The cases before us raise questions which go to the roots of our concepts of American criminal jurisprudence: the restraints society must observe consistent with the Federal Constitution in prosecuting individuals for crime. More specifically, we deal with the admissibility of statements obtained from an individual who is subjected to custodial police interrogation and the necessity for procedures which assure that the individual is accorded his privilege under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to be compelled to incriminate himself....
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Our holding . . . briefly stated . . . is this: the prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination....
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F. National Organization for Women
Primary source: National Organization for Women, statement of purpose, 1966.
Background information: The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 and soon became the most prominent organization promoting the causes of the women's movement.
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Despite all the talk about the status of American women in recent years, the actual position of women in the United States has declined, and is declining, to an alarming degree throughout the 1950's and 60's. Although 46.4% of all American women between the ages of 18 and 65 now work outside the home, the overwhelming majority—75%—are in routine clerical, sales, or factory jobs, or they are household workers, cleaning women, hospital attendants. About two-thirds of Negro women workers are in the lowest paid service occupations. Working women are becoming increasingly—not less—concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. As a consequence full-time women workers today earn on the average only 60% of what men earn, and that wage gap has been increasing over the past twenty-five years in every major industry group....
Further, with higher education increasingly essential in today's society, too few women are entering and finishing college or going on to graduate or professional school....
In all the professions considered of importance to society, and in the executive ranks of industry and government, women are losing ground. Where they are present it is only a token handful....
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. . . There is no civil rights movement to speak for women, as there has been for Negroes and other victims of discrimination. The National Organization for Women must therefore begin to speak.
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National Organization for Women, "Statement of Purpose" (1966), in America through the Eyes of Its People: Primary Sources in American History, ed. Bruce Borland, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 336–37, reproduced at http://www.now.org/history/purpos66.html.
G. Robert F. Kennedy Runs for President
Primary source: Robert F. Kennedy, announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, speech, 1968.
Background information: Many Americans who supported President Johnson's (1908–73) domestic policy, which included the War on Poverty, were critical of the president's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As antiwar sentiment grew, Robert F. Kennedy (1925–68), U.S. senator from New York, announced that he would run against President Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. In his speech he addressed the nation's domestic problems and appealed to African Americans, Latinos, women, and the poor.
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I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I am obliged to do all I can. I run to seek new policies—policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, in this country and around the world....
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As a member of the Cabinet and a member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts, young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they lack all hope and they feel they have no future, and proud, able-bodied families to wait our their lives in empty idleness in Eastern Kentucky. I have traveled and listened to the young people of our Nation and felt their anger about the war they are sent to fight and the world they are about to inherit....
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Robert F. Kennedy's announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, Washington Post, 17 March 1968, p. A6. Full text is at http://www.rfkmemorial.org/RFK/68_announcement.htm.
H. Black Power
Primary source: Charles V. Hamilton, "An Advocate of Black Power Defines It," essay, 1968.
Background information: Many African Americans grew frustrated with the economic and social forms of discrimination they still encountered despite passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the face of their increasing restiveness, many black leaders invoked the term black power. In 1968, Charles V. Hamilton, professor of political science at Columbia, explained that the term meant different things to different people.
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Black Power is concerned with organizing the rage of black people and with putting new, hard questions and demands to white America. As we do this, white America's responses will be crucial to the questions of violence and viability. Black Power must (1) deal with the obviously growing alienation of black people and their distrust of the institutions of this society; (2) work to create new values and to build a new sense of community and of belonging; and (3) work to establish legitimate new institutions that make participants, not recipients, out of a people traditionally excluded from the fundamentally racist processes of this country. There is nothing glamorous about this; it involves persistence and hard, tedious, day-to-day work.
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Charles V. Hamilton, "An Advocate of Black Power Defines It," New York Times Magazine, 14 April 1968, p. 22–23, 79–83.
I. Chicano Liberation
Primary source: Corky Gonzales, "What Political Road for the Chicano Militant?" speech, 1969.
Background information: While some Mexican Americans sought to improve their standard of living by fighting for greater economic justice under the leadership of Cesar Chavez (1927–93) (founder of the United Farm Workers of America), Corky Gonzales and other Mexican Americans sought political self-determination for the Chicano people.