The Ghetto Riots

The achievements of the civil rights movements in the decade after 1955 left the urban blacks of the North virtually untouched. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of blacks had migrated north, settling primarily in large urban centers. They still lived in inferior housing and attended all-black schools and they were still largely untrained and poorly educated.

There were some signs of discontent among urban blacks in 1963, when over 200,000 marched in Detroit to protest discrimination and almost half of the children in Chicago boycotted their schools to help bring an end to de facto segregation in public education. The next year, rioting broke out in Harlem. Then in 1965 a six-day riot in Watts (the black neighborhood of Los Angeles) left 34 dead and caused $40,000,000 worth of property damage.

The worst summer of violence occurred in 1967, when the racial unrest hit over 100 cities across the country. The largest riots took place in Newark and Detroit. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 was the cause of a new round of black-ghetto upheavals.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 14, 1962, a U-2 flying a routine reconnaissance mission over Cuba uncovered the existence of fully equipped missile bases capable of attacking the United States with nuclear warheads. Shown the photographs two days later, President Kennedy quickly assembled his top security advisers and, while news of the bases was carefully kept form the public, the group debated what action should be taken.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff leaned strongly toward an air strike and even suggested an invasion to topple the Castro regime. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, argued vigorously against such action. The United States had already backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion a year earlier and the Administration was still recovering from the political fallout; a full scale assault on Cuba, the President’s brother insisted, would completely destroy America’s moral position in the world. Finally, the President decided on a naval quarantine of the island to block the further introduction of offensive weapon. While demonstrating that the United States would not tolerate the presence of the missiles so close to its shores, a quarantine would also give the Soviets a way out if they wanted one.

On the evening of October 22, Kennedy revealed to the world the existence of the missile bases. Emphasizing Russia’s repeated assurances that it would not introduce offensive weapons in Cuba, Kennedy then announced his decision to quarantine the island. The Soviets immediately denounced the United States action and Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned that Russia would not accept the quarantine. With Soviet ships steaming toward the blockade, people around the world nervously awaited a confrontation.

Then a break came. On October 26, a top Soviet diplomat unofficially approached John Scali, a United States newsman, with a proposal: The Russians would dismantle their vases in exchange for a public promise by the United States not to invade Cuba. That evening a telegram arrived from Khrushchev suggesting the same thing. A follow up letter from the Premier the next day, though, demanded the withdrawal of NATO missiles from Turkey in exchange. The President would not agree to this, but cleverly chose to ignore the second letter altogether and respond only to the first offer. This formula worked and, on October 28, the Soviets agreed to the terms.

The confrontation had been adverted but the missiles crisis had graphically demonstrated the ease with which the two super-powers might slip into nuclear war. The realization, however, awakened both sides to a determination to prevent a similar incident in the future. The Cuban missile bases were soon dismantled and withdrawn; a telephone hotline was installed between Moscow and Washington guaranteeing instant communication between the two governments; and in July 1963 two nations signed a nuclear Test Ban Treaty.