America's Devil

With all the changes that occurred in America in the 1960’s it is difficult to assess which issue defined the decade. It was a decade, starting in the late fifties, that saw the height of the Cold War and communism’s reach into the western hemisphere, a decade that ended with a very costly, very unpopular war in Vietnam, and in between, a decade that saw a number of political assassinations, a cultural revolution, a youth movement, and even a man on the moon. Yet at the heart of the sixties, and maybe more importantly, at the heart of the nation itself, lay the civil rights movement. In a decade that would recognize the hundredth year of the beginning and end of the Civil War that ripped the country apart, very little had changed in the Deep South, and in the rest of the country for that matter. W. E. B. Dubois predicted, “the problem of the color line…” would be, “the problem of the twentieth century.” And even while well after the sixties Dubois prediction would remain true, and race would still play a role in our country’s makeup and struggle for equality, the civil rights movement, beginning in the late fifties and coming to prominence and political and legislative fruition in the mid 1960’s brought to light the plight of an entire race of Americans, who for nearly a century had been degraded, disenfranchised, and disheartened by a society that was based on and championed freedom itself. It is said the Devil’s greatest deception was convincing the world he did not exist. The civil rights movement of the 1960’s shattered America’s devil, and made it impossible to deny the existence of an evil that had plagued the country since the Civil War.

In the “Jim Crow” south the lack of equality between black and white Americans was not only striking, it was deeply engrained in their lifestyles and traditions, to the point it was simply accepted by most white southerners that blacks were content with their lot in life, happy even. What made this more astounding was...