1960 Archives - PopHistory.org

Greensboro sit-in begins

On February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four Black college students spark a nationwide civil rights movement by refusing to leave a “whites-only” lunch counter at a popular retail store after they are denied service. The North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State students—Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond—become known as the “Greensboro Four.”

The students sat at the Woolworth counter until the store closed, promising they would be back the next day. By the end of the first week, 200 protested at the store.

The demonstration in Greensboro continued for six months, until Woolworth gave in and integrated the lunch counter.

Although not the first sit-in, the non-violent Greensboro protest became the best known. Local television provided extensive coverage, and in subsequent days, similar sit-ins occurred in more than 30 other cities.

The initial protest was a result of extensive planning by the students, who received guidance from mentor activists and others.

In 2002, a monument to the “Greensboro Four” was dedicated at North Carolina A&T. The Woolworth’s store, which closed in 1993, became home to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.

READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline

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Ruby Bridges desegregates her school

On November 14, 1960, a court order mandating the desegregation of schools comes into effect in New Orleans, Louisiana. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walks into William Frantz Elementary School, accompanied by federal marshals and taunted by angry crowds, instantly becoming a symbol of the civil rights movement, an icon for the cause of racial equality and a target for racial animosity.

The Supreme Court ordered the end of segregated public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education just a few months before Bridges was born, but it was not until after her kindergarten year that the City of New Orleans finally assented to desegregation. African American children in New Orleans were given a test, and only those who passed were allowed to enroll in all-white public schools. Bridges passed the test and became the only one of the six eligible students to go ahead with desegregating Frantz Elementary. Her father opposed the idea at first, but Bridges’ mother convinced him that sending Ruby to Frantz was both right for their daughter and an important moment for all African Americans. Bridges entered the school along with her mother and several marshals on November 14, and images of the small child and her escorts walking calmly through crowds of rabid segregationists spread across the country. Bridges later recalled that she had initially thought the crowds were there to celebrate Mardi Gras.

Bridges did not attend any classes on November 14 due to the chaos outside the school. No other students attended and all but one teacher, Barbara Henry, stayed home in protest of desegregation. It was several days until a white father finally broke the boycott and brought his son to school, and even when the white students returned, they were kept separate from the school’s lone Black student. Henry, whom Bridges said was the first white teacher and “the nicest teacher I ever had,” taught a class consisting of only Bridges for the entire school year. Federal marshaled continued to escort her to school for that time, and crowds chanting racial slurs and making death threats continued to greet Bridges for months.

Bridges’ family suffered enormously—her father lost his job, her sharecropper grandparents were kicked off of their land and her parents eventually separated—but they also received support in the form of gifts, donations, a new job offer for her father, and even pro-bono security services from friends, neighbors and people around the country. The following year, the school became further integrated, and Bridges attended class with both Black and white children without major incident. Today, Bridges remains a household name and an icon of the civil rights movement.

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Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz divorce

Year: 1960

Month Day: March 04

After 20 tumultuous years of marriage, actress Lucille Ball divorces her husband and collaborator, Desi Arnaz, on March 4, 1960. The breakup of the couple, stars of the hit sitcom I Love Lucy and owners of the innovative Desilu Studios, was one of the highest-profile divorces in American history at the time.

Ball met Arnaz, five years her junior, while she was acting and he was leading a band in the film Too Many Girls. They married six months later. Though the two were, by all accounts, deeply in love for most of their lives, the relationship was always tumultuous, due to both of them being in showbusiness and to Arnaz’s womanizing and problems with alcohol. Ball first sought a divorce four years into the marriage, but they reconciled and determined to strengthen their relationship by finding opportunities to work together. When CBS asked her to develop a sitcom, Ball insisted on having her real-life husband play her husband on the show. The network was hesitant to cast a Cuban-American as a co-lead, but the couple convinced them by putting on a live show and conducting a successful tour.

I Love Lucy ran from 1951 until 1957. It was popular for the entirety of its run, won five Emmys, and continues to be regarded as one of the most influential programs in American history. Once again challenging the powers that be, Ball and Arnaz wrote her pregnancy with their second child into the show, making it the first television program to depict a pregnancy. Desilu Studios, which they founded to produce the show, was for a time the largest independent production company in the country, and it produced a number of shows besides I Love Lucy, including Mission: Impossible and the original Star Trek. I Love Lucy and its successor, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, lovingly poked fun at married life in modern America; however, the underlying problems of the real-life marriage it was based on never went away. Ball filed for divorce in 1960 and bought out Arnaz’s share in Desilu two years later, becoming the first woman to run a major television studio. Though the divorce was reportedly contentious, the two remained close for the rest of their lives, which they each spent in showbusiness.

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Iconic photo of Che Guevara taken

Moments before he was shot to death by a soldier of the Bolivian government, the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara told his executioner, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Guevara died a short time later, on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39, but he was correct in his assertion that this would not be the end of his legacy. Today, that legacy almost always takes the form of a single photograph, Guerrillero Heroico, which some have called the most famous photograph in the world.

That photo was taken on March 5, 1960, seven years before Guevara’s death, at a funeral for workers killed in an explosion in a Cuban port that Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government blamed on the Americans. Guevara, a general in the revolution and the intellectual heavyweight of Castro’s regime, looked on as Castro delivered his fiery funeral oration. For about thirty seconds, he stepped to the front of a crowd near Castro’s rostrum, into the view of newspaper photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, also known as Alberto Korda. Korda snapped two shots of Guevara, his face resolute and his long hair flowing from under his trademark beret, before Guevara retreated back into the crowd. Perhaps due to his background as a fashion photographer, Korda took a liking to one of the images and cropped it into a portrait, even though the newspaper La Revolución declined to use it.

For several years, the now-iconic photo remained nothing more than a personal favorite of the man who took it. Korda named the picture Guerrillero Heroico—“Heroic Guerrilla Warrior”—and hung it on his wall, occasionally handing out copies to guests. It was not until 1967 that the public would first see the image, which appeared in the magazine Paris Match alongside an article about Latin American guerilla movements.

Guevara was killed in November of that year, captured while fighting with Bolivian revolutionaries. During his memorial service in Havana, an enormous print of Guerrillero Heroico was hung over the façade of the Ministry of the Interior. The service marked Che’s canonization as a martyr of global revolution, as well as the ascendance of Korda’s image as an icon of rebellion.

The following year the image of Guevara went viral. It appeared on the cover of a copy of Guevara’s memoirs, published in Italy. It was also used as the cover of a literary journal advertised on the New York City subway. In the same year, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a stylized version of the image, setting a black-and-white Guevara against a red background, and distributed it as widely as he could to honor Guevara’s legacy. A poster bearing Fitzpatrick’s image was shown at the Arts Laboratory in London. 1968 was a year of upheaval across the world, and Guevara’s image featured prominently during the student riots that swept France in May, the populist protests of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” and the nonviolent, surrealist-inspired demonstrations of the Dutch “Provos.”

In addition to being held aloft at protests or hung in the homes of his admirers, Guevara’s image has become popular as a fashion statement, adorning t-shirts and posters wherever counterculture is revered. Rage Against the Machine used a modified version of the image as the cover for their 1993 single “Bombtrack,” and Madonna referenced it on the cover of her 2003 album American Life. Korda succeeded in stopping Smirnoff Vodka from using his photo in one of its campaigns, but it has appeared in countless other advertisements, including ads by Nike and a campaign by Taco Bell which featured a Chihuahua in revolutionary garb.

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“To Kill a Mockingbird” published

Year: 1960

Month Day: July 11

On July 11, 1960, the 34-year-old novelist Nelle Harper Lee publishes her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Set in Maycomb, a small Alabama town much like Lee’s native Monroeville, To Kill a Mockingbird is populated with indelible characters, including the book’s tomboy narrator, Jean Louise Finch (known as “Scout”), the mysterious recluse Boo Radley and Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, an upstanding lawyer who defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. Now a staple of junior high and high school classrooms and the subject of numerous censorship efforts, it offers a vivid depiction of life in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression.

By the mid-1950s, Lee had followed her dreams of a writing career to New York City, where her childhood friend Truman Capote had already won fame in literary circles. For Christmas in 1956, her good friends Michael and Joy Brown gave her a check equal to a year’s salary, so she could quit her job and devote more time to her writing.

Soon, Lee had produced a novel manuscript, titled Go Set a Watchman, which she was able to sell to the publisher J.B. Lippincott and Company for $1,000 after her editor, Tay Hohoff, suggested she revise the story and expand on flashback sequences set during the narrator’s childhood. Lee spent two years rewriting her book, calling the revised manuscript To Kill a Mockingbird. (She dropped her first name for publication, in order to avoid people mispronouncing it “Nellie.”)

Lee’s book became an immediate success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and eventually selling more than 40 million copies worldwide. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus in the 1962 film version, which also nabbed statuettes for screenwriting and art direction.

But the famously private Lee didn’t come out with a follow-up; in fact, she wouldn’t publish another book for 55 years. Then in 2015, HarperCollins published the recently rediscovered Go Set a Watchman. The book is set 20 years after the time period depicted in Mockingbird and features an aging Atticus who has embraced racist views and even attends a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. Despite seriously mixed reviews, and doubts surrounding whether Lee actually wanted it published, the book was a huge hit, selling 1.1 million copies in its first week. The following year, Harper Lee died in Monroeville, at the age of 89.

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Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower trade threats over Cuba

Year: 1960

Month Day: July 09

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev trade verbal threats over the future of Cuba. In the following years, Cuba became a dangerous focus in the Cold War competition between the United States and Russia.

In January 1959, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro overthrew the long-time dictator Fulgencio Batista. Although the United States recognized the new Castro regime, many members of the Eisenhower administration harbored deep suspicions concerning the political orientation of the charismatic new Cuban leader. For his part, Castro was careful to avoid concretely defining his political beliefs during his first months in power.

READ MORE: Cold War

Castro’s actions, however, soon convinced U.S. officials that he was moving to establish a communist regime in Cuba. Castro pushed through land reform that hit hard at U.S. investors, expelled the U.S. military missions to Cuba, and, in early 1960, announced that Cuba would trade its sugar to Russia in exchange for oil. In March 1960, Eisenhower gave the CIA the go-ahead to arm and train a group of Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro regime. It was in this atmosphere that Eisenhower and Khrushchev engaged in some verbal sparring in July 1960.

Khrushchev fired the first shots during a speech in Moscow. He warned that the Soviet Union was prepared to use its missiles to protect Cuba from U.S. intervention. “One should not forget,” the Soviet leader declared, “that now the United States is no longer at an unreachable distance from the Soviet Union as it was before.” He charged that the United States was “plotting insidious and criminal steps” against Cuba.

In a statement issued to the press, Eisenhower responded to Khrushchev’s speech, warning that the United States would not countenance the “establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western Hemisphere.” The Soviet Premier’s threat of retaliation demonstrated “the clear intention to establish Cuba in a role serving Soviet purposes in this hemisphere.”

The relationship between the United States and Cuba deteriorated rapidly after the Eisenhower-Khrushchev exchange. The Castro regime accelerated its program of expropriating American-owned property. In response, the Eisenhower administration severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1960.

A little more than a year later, in April 1961, the CIA-trained force of Cuban refugees launched an assault on Cuba in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. The invaders were killed or captured, the Castro government cemented its control in Cuba, and the Soviet Union became Cuba’s main source of economic and military assistance.

READ MORE: Communism Timeline

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National Liberation Front formed

Updated:: Jul 28, 2019
Original:: Dec 20, 2018

Year: 1960

Month Day: December 20

North Vietnam announces the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of the South at a conference held “somewhere in the South.” This organization, more commonly known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), was designed to replicate the success of the Viet Minh, the umbrella nationalist organization that successfully liberated Vietnam from French colonial rule.

The NLF reached out to those parts of South Vietnamese society who were displeased with the government and policies of President Ngo Dinh Diem. One hundred delegates representing more than a dozen political parties and religious groups–both communists and non-communists–were in attendance at the conference. However, from the beginning, the NLF was dominated by the Lao Dong Party Central Committee (North Vietnamese Communist Party) and served as the North’s shadow government in South Vietnam. The Saigon regime dubbed the NLF the “Viet Cong,” a pejorative contraction of Viet Nam Cong San (Vietnamese Communists).

The NLF’s military arm was the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). In February 1965, the PLAF attacked U.S. Army installations at Pleiku and Qui Nhon, which convinced President Lyndon B. Johnson to send the first U.S. ground troops to South Vietnam a month later. Ultimately, more than 500,000 U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam to fight the PLAF and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, or North Vietnamese Army).

The NLF reached the height of its power during the 1968 Tet Offensive, when the communists launched a massive coordinated attack against key urban centers throughout South Vietnam. Although the Viet Cong forces were soundly defeated during the course of the offensive, they achieved a great psychological victory because the attack prompted many long time supporters of the war to question the Johnson administration’s optimistic predictions.

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High-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann captured

Year: 1960

Month Day: May 23

On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announces to the world that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has been captured and will stand trial in Israel. Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,” was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina on May 11 and smuggled to Israel nine days later.

Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906. In November 1932, he joined the Nazi’s elite SS (Schutzstaffel) organization, whose members came to have broad responsibilities in Nazi Germany, including policing, intelligence, and the enforcement of Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Eichmann steadily rose in the SS hierarchy, and with the German annexation of Austria in 1938, he was sent to Vienna with the mission of ridding the city of Jews. He set up an efficient Jewish deportment center and in 1939 was sent to Prague on a similar mission. That year, Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish section of the SS central security office in Berlin.

In January 1942, Eichmann met with top Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin for the purpose of planning a “final solution of the Jewish question,” as Nazi leader Hermann Goring put it. The Nazis decided to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. Eichmann was appointed to coordinate the identification, assembly, and transportation of millions of Jews from occupied Europe to the Nazi death camps, where Jews were gassed or worked to death. He carried this duty out with horrifying efficiency, and between three to four million Jews perished in the extermination camps before the end of World War II. Close to 2 million were executed elsewhere.

Following the war, Eichmann was captured by U.S. troops, but he escaped the prison camp in 1946 before having to face the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal. Eichmann traveled under an assumed identity between Europe and the Middle East and in 1950 arrived in Argentina, which maintained lax immigration policies and was a safe haven for many Nazi war criminals. In 1957, a German prosecutor secretly informed Israel that Eichmann was living in Argentina. Agents from Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, were deployed to Argentina, and in early 1960 they finally located Eichmann. He was living in the San Fernando section of Buenos Aires, under the name Ricardo Klement.

In May 1960, Argentina was celebrating the 150th anniversary of its revolution against Spain, and many tourists were traveling to Argentina from abroad to attend the festivities. The Mossad used the opportunity to smuggle more agents into the country. Israel, knowing that Argentina might never extradite Eichmann for trial, had decided to abduct him and take him to Israel illegally. On May 11, Mossad operatives descended on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando and snatched Eichmann away as he was walking from the bus to his home. His family called local hospitals but not the police, and Argentina knew nothing of the operation. On May 20, a drugged Eichmann was flown out of Argentina disguised as an Israeli airline worker who had suffered head trauma in an accident. Three days later, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion announced that Eichmann was in Israeli custody.

Argentina demanded Eichmann’s return, but Israel argued that his status as an international war criminal gave it the right to proceed with a trial. On April 11, 1961, Eichmann’s trial began in Jerusalem. It was the first trial to be televised in history. Eichmann faced 15 charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes. He claimed he was just following orders, but the judges disagreed, finding him guilty on all counts on December 15 and sentencing him to die. On May 31, 1962, he was hanged near Tel Aviv. His body was subsequently cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea.

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John F. Kennedy nominated for presidency

Year: 1960

Month Day: July 13

In Los Angeles, California, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts is nominated for the presidency by the Democratic Party Convention, defeating Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. The next day, Johnson was named Kennedy’s running mate by a unanimous vote of the convention.

Four months later, on November 8, Kennedy won 49.7 percent of the popular vote in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, surpassing by a fraction the 49.6 percent received by Vice President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican.

On January 20, 1961, on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States. A fourth-generation Irish American, Kennedy was also the nation’s first Catholic president. During his famous inauguration address, Kennedy, the youngest candidate ever elected to the presidency, declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and appealed to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline, and the large Kennedy clan seemed fitting representatives of the youthful spirit of America during the early 1960s, and the Kennedy White House was later idealized by admirers as a modern-day “Camelot.” In foreign policy, Kennedy actively fought communism in the world, ordering the controversial Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and sending thousands of U.S. military “advisers” to Vietnam. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he displayed firmness and restraint, exercising an unyielding opposition to the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba but also demonstrating a level-headedness during tense negotiations for their removal. On the domestic front, he introduced his “New Frontier” social legislation, calling for a rigorous federal desegregation policy and a sweeping new civil rights bill. On November 22, 1963, after less than three years in office, Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open-car motorcade with his wife in Dallas, Texas.

READ MORE: JFK: His Life and Legacy

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Massacre in Sharpeville

Year: 1960

Month Day: March 21

In the black township of Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, South Africa, Afrikaner police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180 in a hail of submachine-gun fire. The demonstrators were protesting against the South African government’s restriction of nonwhite travel. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, protests broke out in Cape Town, and more than 10,000 people were arrested before government troops restored order.

The incident convinced anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to abandon his nonviolent stance and organize paramilitary groups to fight South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial discrimination. In 1964, after some minor military action, Mandela was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. He was released after 27 years and in 1994 was elected the first black president of South Africa.

READ MORE: Remembering Nelson Mandela

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