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The Making of A Counter-Culture, Part II: Civil Rights

© Robert Whillans

From the beats, we move on to the social factors that inspired the Hippie Generation. Rock had given the boomers the opportunity to voice opinions which weren't neccessarily those of their elders. This new generation had the ability to follow their own lead and respond to events that were taking place around them. They were the first real generation of youths to develop a social concience, and it was this awareness to injustices around them that led to the creation of the Hippie Revolution. And there were many injustices taking place around them. Actually the first wave of hippies were the ones who had been around at rock's creation, and who had gone through college during the folk boom. They were the first to hear Bob Dylan and Joen Baez sing of nuclear holocausts and racial inequity. Many of them went on the Civil Rights Marches, protesting segregation and unconstitutional laws.

The first real kick to segregation was the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka. Basically, the case was that Linda Brown had to attend an elementary school five miles from her house because she wasn't the right race to attend the one four blocks her house. The powere to refuse admission based on race had been granted by the supreme court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1896, the Sumpreme Court ruled that schools could be "separate but equal", thereby ruling segregation as constitutional. This decision was overruled by the sumpreme court in '54, and separate schools were now unconstituional because they violated the children's fourteenth amendment rights. The decision of the court to ban legal segregation in the heart of the South seriously damaged all cases for segregation. Govener Wallace of Alabama stood strong in the face of great adversity, supporting segregation 'till the bitter end "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." (Inaugural address, Jan. 14, 1963)

The famous bus boycott in Montgomerey, Alabama came about after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white person, the first of December 1955. It was a well-established rule that black persons were to surrender their seats to whites, and when Rosa Parks refused, she incited a desire for revolution in the Afro-American community. A local pastor at the time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., recommended a boycott of the bus system. His role in the boycott led to his appointment as president of the Montgomerey Improvement Association. The boycott lasted 381 days until, November 13th, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the Montgomerey bus system was unconstitutional and it was banned. December 20th, federal injustions forced the bus companies to follow the Sumpreme Court's ruling.

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