The 1960s was one of the most tumultuous decades in American history. It was marked by violent political radicalism, unpopular overseas wars and the terrifying threat of nuclear armageddon. But there were breakthroughs too: in civil rights, reproductive rights and space travel.
Click through this gallery to see incredible images that capture the drama and upheaval of 1960s America...
It’s the second of February in the first year of the decade, and America is transfixed by a drama playing out at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four African-American students staged a sit-in in protest at the counter’s 'whites only’ policy – the first shot across the bows for the 1960s civil rights movement, which would grow in strength through the decade. The sit-in movement spread, and in the summer diners across the south began integrating. Today that same building houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
On 9 May a giant step forward was made for women’s rights, when Enovid was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Known colloquially as ‘the pill’, Enovid changes the balance of oestrogen and progestogen in women to prevent pregnancy. Invented by Gregory Pincus and John Rock with the support of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, it gave women control over reproduction and helped kickstart a sexual revolution that reverberated through the decade.
This decade also saw the first ever televised presidential debate between Senator John F Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. Held on 26 September, the debate was broadcast to an estimated 70 million people, and is generally considered a turning point in the 1960 presidential election. Nixon looked sweaty and uncomfortable, while Kennedy looked tanned, youthful and telegenic. At the time many commentators, including the debate moderator Howard K Smith, scored the debate in Nixon’s favour. But as historian David Greenberg has noted, "the perception of television’s influence went on to transform American politics".
A huge wave of optimism swept through the country in November when John F Kennedy was elected the 35th President of the United States. At only 43 years of age, he was the youngest person ever elected to the office, and the first Roman Catholic. The youth, energy and dignity of his administration would see it nicknamed 'Camelot' after the mythical castle of King Arthur. "Ask not what your country can do for you," said Kennedy in his inaugural speech, "ask what you can do for your country."
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The first misstep of the Kennedy administration came early, when a US-backed invasion of Cuba in April 1961 failed spectacularly. An army of American-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and were quickly crushed by Castro’s forces. Around 1,200 members of the brigade were captured, 100 were killed and two escort ships were destroyed. Attorney General Robert F Kennedy eventually secured the release of the prisoners in return for $53 million (£41m) worth of baby food and medicine. Here we see artillery shells lying on the beach of a Cuban holiday resort following the ill-fated invasion.
The journey towards civil rights hit a roadblock when a bus taking part in a Freedom Ride through the southern states was mobbed and set on fire in Anniston, Alabama on 14 May 1961. The bus trips were sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and designed to draw attention to the segregated bus terminals that still operated across the South. Photographs of the burning bus and the bloodied Freedom Riders were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world, drawing attention to their cause.
At the end of the 1950s Marilyn Monroe was perhaps the most famous actress in the world, adored by critics and audiences alike after her acclaimed role in 1959’s Some Like It Hot. But the new decade saw her star wane and her personal life become even more difficult. By 1961 she was under the constant care of a psychiatrist, and on 5 August 1962 she was found dead from an overdose in her home in Brentwood. The coroner ruled it was suicide, although conspiracy theories still persist, some revolving around her alleged lover John F Kennedy. This photo shows Monroe with director George Cukor on the set of her final film, Something's Got To Give, which remained unfinished.
Kennedy’s presidency faced its biggest challenge in October 1962, when the Soviet Union started building a missile launch base in Cuba, only 90 miles (145km) from the American mainland. The world held its breath as the rhetoric between the two nuclear powers ramped up. When this American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba on 27 October the threat of all-out nuclear conflict became chillingly real. Thankfully the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, removed the missiles as part of a secret deal with the Americans, and the world was spared nuclear oblivion.
The Cuban Missile Crisis threw the threat of nuclear war into sharp relief for Americans. Students at schools like this one in Brooklyn were taught to 'duck and cover' in preparation for a nuclear attack. Dropping immediately and covering exposed skin supposedly provided protection against blast and thermal effects, while desks could defend against shattering windows. How effective it would have been in a real nuclear attack is open to debate. Many believe that such drills served only to reassure people and sanitise nuclear weapons.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, American families were urged to keep a seven-day supply of food and water on hand in case of atomic emergency. And for an extra few thousand dollars, the prepared family could build their very own backyard fallout shelter. Here we see a mother and children in Fair Oaks, California practicing running towards theirs in October 1962. Nuclear blasts were still thought by many to be survivable if you made the right preparations, but in reality the development of thermonuclear weapons rendered all these shelters defunct.
On 28 August 1963, over 200,000 demonstrators descended on the nation’s capital in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event that would become synonymous with Martin Luther King Jr’s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The iconic line wasn’t part of the planned speech, but rather an off-the-cuff response to gospel star Mahalia Jackson calling out "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin, tell 'em about the dream!" He did, and his message of freedom rang out from one end of the country to the other... and around the world.
John F Kennedy’s "brief, shining moment" as president of the United States ended tragically as he rode through Dallas in a motorcade on 22 November 1963. The killing of the dashing young president – which came completely out of the blue – shocked the nation to its core. Businesses closed out of respect (pictured) and the optimism that his presidency had brought flickered, and was extinguished.
Kennedy’s assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine and known communist sympathiser. He was quickly tracked down and captured, but rumours spread that he was part of a broader conspiracy – a theory that was turbocharged when Oswald himself was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby while he was being transferred. Here we see images of unidentified men submitted to the Commission on the Assassination a week later, of possible co-conspirators seen near the notorious 'grassy knoll' where secondary shots were allegedly heard. The exact events of the Kennedy assassination are still debated, and remain a hotbed for conspiracy theories.
The antidote to the nation’s grief came in the unlikely form of four mop-topped musicians from Liverpool in England. Two and a half months after the assassination the Beatles appeared on the influential Ed Sullivan Show, bringing joy and energy to a nation still under a gloomy cloud. Their appearance went down in TV history. At least 73 million Americans tuned in and a week later they were on the show again, this time from the Deauville Hotel in Miami. Here we see them on one of the city’s famous beaches in February 1964.
These are the earliest photos ever taken of the United States
There was joy in the nation’s African-American community when the Civil Rights Act was finally enacted on 2 July 1964, prohibiting "discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin". Here we see two of the movement's most influential campaigners, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, moments after a press conference on 26 March at which they urged the senate to pass the bill. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains America's most important civil rights legislation and continues to resonate across the nation to this day.
The Civil Rights Act was a landmark moment, but the fight for equality went on. Here we see protestors on a march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama on 7 March 1965, fighting to ensure that Black Americans could exercise their right to vote. The marchers only made it to Edmund Pettus Bridge before they were brutally attacked by locals and state troopers. A second attempt two days later was again stopped at the bridge, before a third march on 21 March saw 25,000 protestors make it to Montgomery, their numbers swelled by people joining along the route.
Midway through the decade another of the iconic symbols of the Sixties was born: the hippie. On the West Coast, the word was first used in print by journalist Michael Fallon in an article about Haight-Ashbury in the San Francisco Examiner on 5 September 1965. The area had become the city’s new bohemian quarter, home to "serious writers, painters and musicians, civil rights workers, crusaders for all kinds of causes" that he lumped together as "hippies". Derived from 'hip', this new counterculture now had a name. And it stuck.
Meanwhile, President Lyndon Johnson was trying to keep the reforming spirit of his predecessor alive with a programme he called 'the Great Society'. His main stated aim was to eliminate poverty and racial inequality through a series of ambitious policy initiatives. One such measure was Medicare, which covered hospital costs for the elderly. Perhaps fittingly, this photo from a gala celebrating the initiative on 7 October 1965 was snapped just as the President was heading to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a gallbladder operation.
The Black Panther Party, or the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to give it its full name, was founded in Oakland, California in October 1966. It was a revolutionary organisation that preached Black nationalism and advocated armed self-defence, particularly against police brutality which was alarmingly common. They opposed the integrationism and nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr and were embraced by disaffected Black men and boys, like these boys outside their office in Brooklyn, New York.
Star Trek is revered as a science fiction classic today, but on 8 September 1966, when the first episode aired, the response was more muted. Indeed, Variety declared it "an incredible and dreary mess of confusion and complexities". The show went on to become more popular thanks to reruns after it was cancelled, ensuring that characters like Spock, seen here playing 3D chess in a publicity shot for the first series, took their rightful places as icons of American popular culture.
By 1966 America’s involvement in Vietnam had become full-scale war, and young American men were being drafted to fight in a bitter and ugly conflict thousands of miles away. One of those drafted was Muhammad Ali, heavyweight boxing champion of the world and an outspoken advocate of Black rights. He refused to enlist, saying: "I ain't got no quarrel with those Viet Cong". He was found guilty of draft evasion and stripped of his boxing titles, but avoided going to jail by appealing to the Supreme Court.
Muhammad Ali wasn’t the only American unhappy about being drafted for a war that many ordinary people didn't support. Between August 1964 and March 1973, 209,517 American men were charged with violating draft laws, while roughly another 360,000 were never formally charged. Burning draft cards became a popular form of protest, as seen here in New York's Central Park on 15 April 1967. It became so common that a law was passed making it a specific criminal offence, punishable by a large fine or up to five years in prison.
While African-Americans only made up 12% of the general population of America at the time of the Vietnam War, they made up 31% of US ground combat troops. They were more likely to be sent to the frontline, disciplined more severely and promoted less often. The Viet Cong were quick to recognise the propaganda value of these inequalities and built 'tombstones' throughout the jungle, like this one seen on patrol in 1967, reminding African-American soldiers of the racism they faced both on the battlefield and back home.
On 15 January 1967, another all-American institution was created, the annual Super Bowl. The match was the first showdown since the AFL (American Football League) and the NFL (National Football League) had agreed to merge, seeing AFL winners the Kansas City Chiefs face off against NFL winners the Green Bay Packers. The Packers won 35-10 in front of a celebrity-packed crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum (pictured), with over 65 million football fans tuning in at home. The most important date in the American football calendar was born.
In the summer of 1967, close to 100,000 young people flocked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in what a PBS documentary described as the "biggest migration of young people in the history of America". They came to create a community that they felt reflected their values – that prioritised freedom, art and nature over money and capitalism. Drugs, sexuality, spirituality and rock 'n' roll all proliferated under the California sun. A few months later it was all over, but for many of these young people the world seemed wonderful – if just for a fleeting moment.
On 20 July 1969 US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. It was the culmination of almost a decade of intense effort, set in motion by President Kennedy in 1961. The two astronauts spent two hours on the surface of the Moon taking photos and collecting samples, watched by an estimated TV audience of 650 million people on Earth. All told the Apollo programme cost $24 billion, close to $100 billion (£77bn) today. The Soviet Union never managed to put astronauts on the Moon, and the landing was a huge symbolic victory for America in the Cold War.
On 15 August 1969 an estimated 400,000 people descended on a dairy farm in Bethel in upstate New York for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. Posters for the event promised "three days of peace and music", and festival-goers like the two seen here flocked to the site hoping to experience a new Summer of Love on the East Coast. With legendary performances by Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joe Cocker and Santana, Woodstock went down in history as the most legendary of the 1960s music festivals.
The reality was a little more complicated. The festival was very poorly organised, miles of traffic jams saw people abandon their cars to reach the farm on foot and persistent rain turned the site into a quagmire. The festival's promoters were left almost bankrupt – few attendees bought tickets – but the copious psychedelics consumed by both performers and audience helped create the atmosphere they'd been hoping for. National Guard helicopters were called in to ferry performers to and from the stage, and to supply food and medical supplies to the site.
While Woodstock is now regarded as a generation-defining moment, another festival was taking place just two hours away that would have an equally tectonic effect on Black American culture. The Harlem Cultural Festival was held over a series of weekends in Mount Morris Park in New York and saw leading African-American artists including Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson play before 300,000 people. Here we see Sly Stone from Sly and the Family Stone performing – the only artist to play both the Harlem Cultural Festival and Woodstock.
Read on for incredible historic images of America in the 1950s