Edward Thompson famously characterized the 1950s as the ‘apathetic decade’ when people ‘looked to private solutions to public evils’. ‘Private ambitions’, he wrote, ‘have displaced social aspirations. And people have come to feel their grievances as personal to themselves, and, similarly, the grievances of other people are felt to be the affair of other people. If a connection between the two is made, people tend to feel—in the prevailing apathy—that they are impotent to effect any change.’ The year 1960 will always be remembered for the birth of a new social consciousness that repudiated this culture of moral apathy fed by resigned powerlessness. ‘Our political task’, wrote the veteran pacifist A. J. Muste at that time, ‘is precisely, in Martin Buber’s magnificent formulation, “to drive the ploughshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality”.’ The method was direct action—nonviolent and determined.
First behind the plough were Black students in the South, whose movement as it spread to a hundred cities and campuses would name itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc). In North Carolina, the Greensboro lunch-counter February sit-ins began as quiet protests but soon became thunderclaps heralding the arrival of a new, uncompromising generation on the frontline of the battle against segregation. The continuing eruption of student protest across the South reinvigorated the wounded movement led by Martin Luther King and was echoed in the North by picket lines, boycotts and the growth of the Congress of Racial Equality (core). Separately the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, and the powerful voice of Malcolm X began to be heard across the country. Meanwhile, as the United States continued to install icbms in Europe, the growing revolt against nuclear weapons signalled, as Lawrence Wittner put it, ‘an end to the Cold War lockstep among sizable segments of the American population. The peace movement by 1960 had been reestablished as a significant social movement.’ The same could be said for student activism and radical scholarship at some of the major Cold War universities. Progressive campus organizations such as slate at Berkeley—the precursor of the Free Speech Movement—and voice at Ann Arbor dramatically broke the ice of student apathy, while Studies on the Left (founded in 1959 in Madison) and New University Thought (1960) gave voice to what everyone was soon calling the New Left.