The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee Review

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(More customer reviews)I stumbled upon this wonderful book as a used book at the local bookshop, and was delighted to discover just how complete and accurate a description it renders of the virtual kaleidoscope of activities associated with what came to be called 'the movement" in what was likely the most turbulent and tumultuous decade of the 20th century; the nineteen sixties. Professor Terry Anderson delivers a yeoman historian's look at the details of how what began as a fairly narrowly circumscribed civil rights effort on behalf of American blacks was transformed into a far-more comprehensive and sometimes all-inclusive broadside social and cultural critique of mainstream American society. In this book, "The Movement and the Sixties", Anderson breathes considerable life & pointed animation into a cautionary tale many of us actually lived through some forty years ago.
Anderson finds the origins of the so-called movement in the civil rights movement originating in the Greensboro sit-in protests in 1960. Through meticulous research and impressive documentation, he traces how the combination of moral outrage, youthful energy, and the rapid economic changes transforming American society itself combined to create an almost unstoppable cultural force, one that literally brought millions of citizens into the streets into social activism, and in the process transformed almost every aspect of contemporary society, from race relations to sexual equality, from student activism to the cultural view on the war in Vietnam. This is indeed a penetrating effort that succeeds in meaningfully exploring the nature of the social history of the sixties generation, who dared to question the very nature of and validity surrounding the American social system. Anderson shows how the initial efforts of the civil rights activists eventually blossomed into a garden variety of different protest activities, most profoundly, of course, in connection with the war in Vietnam.
In the fullness of time, the coalition of different communities in this widely-supported anti-war effort led to the further flowering of cultural criticism into many other areas of the contemporary culture, from minority rights to the counterculture, from gay rights to feminism. In the process, an impressive array of important aspects of our society came to be more closely examined, and were subsequently criticized and attacked, ranging from elements such as corporate polluters, who were then attacked by the environmental movement, to the behavior of organizations like the FBI and CIA, who were revealed later to have committed a wide range of transgressions against American citizens, most of whom had done nothing wrong and who the federal agencies had no legal right to either spy upon, nor to harass, nor to smear in the mass media, all of which was done. Anderson covers the history of the era with precision and a plethora of evidence regarding how the events and individuals depicted made the history of the times, and how profoundly they influenced how life in this country changed forever as a result. Enjoy!

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