The Korean War

In the early morning hours of June 25, 1950, the North Korean army launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea. The United Nations voted to sent troops to help repel the invasion. On September 15, General Douglas MacArthur (commander of the allied forces) landed at Inchon, behind the enemy’s lines. Caught between two large enemy forces, the North Koreans fled back across their borders.

On October 8 the UN army crossed into North Korea any by the end of November had reached the Yalu River, separating Korea from China. MacArthur thought the fighting might be over by Christmas. But then on November 26 the Chinese (whose leader Mao Zedong had won a long struggle to rule China by driving out Chiang Kaishee) crossed the Yalu River and hurled some 200,000 men at the allies. With massive reinforcement from China, the Communists cleared North Korea of UN troops and on January 4, 1951, recaptured Seoul.

Peace talks began in July 1951 but were soon deadlocked and for the next two years, the two sides fought a see-saw “Battle for the Hills” of Korea.

The Korean War ended in July 1953.

Civil Rights Movement

December 1, 1955, triggered a ten-year campaign by blacks against the South segregation laws. The cause was that Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and the local black leaders, including a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr., organized a city-wide bus boycott to protest the arrest. For the next year, the city’s blacks walked, carpooled or taxied to work while bus company revenues plummeted to 35 percent to their former level. Then in November 1956 the Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s laws requiring segregated buses.

The boycott had been so successful that in 1957 black leaders formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to continue a “direct action” assault on segregation. Strictly adhering to a philosophy of nonviolence, the organization sponsored a wide range of protests. Then in February 1960, a “sit-in” by four black college students at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, brought a wave of similar demonstrations throughout the South. The following year, the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee helped sponsor a series of “freedom rides” to implement a federal directive ordering desegregation on all interstate buses.

The freedom rides, like most of the other black demonstrations, brought violent reprisals from Southern whites; the terrorism, however, generated a huge groundswell of support for the civil rights movement in the North and put pressure on Congress to act on behalf of the blacks. A brutal assault by Birmingham police on nonviolent matchers in the spring of 1963 particularly outraged public sentiment and led Kennedy to push for the passage of a strong Civil Rights Bill. That summer, some 250,000 demonstrators staged a march on Washington to rally support to the law, and in July 1964 Congress responded by passing the comprehensive Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination in all public facilities. The murder of three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964 during a massive black voter registration drive again underscored the need for federal intervention. In 1965, Congress enacted a tough Voting Rights Act, making possible for the first time since Reconstruction the full participation of blacks in state and federal elections.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, discrimination still remained, but it was more economic and informal than legal. Although King wished to continue the struggle, his leadership and nonviolent tactics came under increasing criticism after 1965 from more militant black crusaders.

In August 1965, the streets of Watts, a black ghetto in Los Angeles, became a battlefield. For six days police and rioters fought among burning cars and buildings. A large area was burnt out. Thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand were injured.

The Watts riot was followed by others – in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington.

In April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, by a white sniper. Many blacks then turned to the Black Power movement. Black Power taught that the only way for blacks to get justice was to fights for it.

The splintering of the black movement, rising black militancy and the ghetto riots of the late 1960s all combined to undermine support for further reforms, but there could never again be any legal denial of the fundamental civil rights of American minorities.

In the 1970s and 1980s most blacks decided that voting was a more effective way to improve their position. Their idea was to elect blacks to positions of power – as city councilors, as mayors of cities, as member of Congress. Jesse Jackson, a former assistant of Martin Luther King’s, became the chief spokesman for this idea. By 1985 more than 5,000 of the 50,000 elected officials in the United States were black. This number included the mayors of such large cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. In 1988 Jackson himself came close to being chosen as the Democratic Party’s candidate in the Presidential elections of that year. He came in in second place overall, with 7 million primary votes, and he won 92 percent of the Democratic black vote, along with 12 percent of the white vote.