The Second Revolution, 1965-1980

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, and bisexual people;and equal employment, including in the schools, the military, and government. The modern gay, lesbian, and bisexual,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 property 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.

Pivotal Moments in Civil Rights in the Late 20th Century

Showing results 1-10 of 17

    • Type: Person
    Asian woman with cat-eye glasses holding megaphone speaker.

    Yuri Kochiyama was a Japanese American political and civil rights activist. During World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed her and her family to an incarceration site for Japanese Americans. For fifty years, Kochiyama spoke out about oppressive institutions and injustice in the United States.

    • Type: Article
    • Locations: Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Denali National Park & Preserve, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Independence National Historical Park, John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site,
    Painting of suffragist on a horse

    The times are a changin’, and there’s no better time to honor those moments of change than in June. Over the course of America’s history, the month of June is filled with cultural changes, and some seasonal ones too. So just before the season changes and summer begins, take some time to visit these parks that commemorate extraordinary moments.

  • Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site

    Eleanor Roosevelt and Women's Rights

    • Type: Article
    • Locations: Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site
    Eleanor Roosevelt n in a voting booth.

    Eleanor Roosevelt did not consider herself a suffragist, but her leadership following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment demonstrates a life committed to the rights and welfare of women.

    • Type: Article
    A group of men stand outside a truck with a Voter Registration sign

    This episode examines the barriers to voting faced by Mexican Americans in the Pacific Northwest. In Washington State, for example, some counties still required literacy tests, even after they were supposed to be banned by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To learn more about this history and to understand how Mexican Americans challenged discriminatory laws we interview Dr. Josué Q, Estrada

    • Type: Place
    • Locations: Alcatraz Island, Golden Gate National Recreation Area
    The lighthouse and prison can be seen on Alcatraz island from the water.

    Alcatraz Island, the site of pre-Civil War-era fortifications, was the nation’s first military prison, which later became the most notorious maximum security penitentiary in the United States. On November 9, 1969, American Indian people once again came to Alcatraz Island when Richard Oakes, a Mohawk Indian, and a group of Native American supporters set out in a chartered boat to symbolically claim the island for the native people.

  • César E. Chávez National Monument

    Forty Acres, California

    • Type: Place
    • Locations: César E. Chávez National Monument
    A metal plaque mounted in bricks. The plaque reads, "The Forty Acres... National Historic Landmark"

    The United Farm Workers quickly expanded during the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and international grape boycott. The movement purchased a 40-acre parcel of bare land just west of Delano to supply room for the union to grow. The land came to be known as Forty Acres.Cesar's brother Richard organized volunteers to clear and level the land. Buildings were constructed, which provided basic infrastructure to meet the needs of the union and farm workers: a co-op service station, R

    • Type: Place
    • Offices: National Register of Historic Places Program
    Tall, sand-colored church with a tower on a San Francisco corner

    The Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, California was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. The church is historically significant as a space for progressive activism and ministry for the neighborhood’s LGBT, Black, and Asian American communities in the 1960s and 1970s.

    • Type: Article
    Two dancers dancing in front of a crowd. Black and white photo.

    Just like jazz, researchers and historians are still learning about salsa history; there are many and various opinions about what salsa is, how it came to be, and what is important in the history of salsa. Instead of defining what salsa is, Oíste? Listening to the Salsa Stories of Afro Latin Music presents some of many salsa stories so that we can start to better understand what salsa means to people both now and then.

    • Type: Article
    Acto a Marti gathering at Club Cubano Inter-Americano with Machito playing the maracas

    Whether you're well-versed in the salsa community or new to its world, Pathways Through Salsa invites you to embark on a journey of curiosity by exploring a range of topics that may be both familiar and unfamiliar to you. As you navigate each pathway, you'll encounter trail markers that pose thought-provoking questions, encouraging you to reflect on the connections between these stories and the valuable insights they offer.

    • Type: Article
    • Locations: Stonewall National Monument
    • Offices: Park Cultural Landscapes Program
    A bronze statue on a pedestal stands in a city park, surrounded by plants and an iron fence

    The Stonewall National Monument cultural landscape includes the streets and locations of the Stonewall Uprising, which took place from June 28 and July 3, 1969. While it was not the start or end of the fight for gay rights, the events at the Stonewall Inn and the surrounding streets of Greenwich Village in New York City were a major catalyst in organizing the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement. The streets, parks, and buildings of the landscape help reflect this history.

Last updated: March 10, 2025

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