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Harvest of Shame
With raw and striking images, Murrow's documentary exposed the poverty and deplorable working conditions endured by America's 2 to 3 million migrant farm workers.
"Only in name are they not a slave," From the tomato, bean and sugarcane fields of Florida, working steadily north to the apple orchards of New York, life was an endless road trip. Housing was crowded, dilapidated, often filthy - but all a worker could afford on an average yearly income of $900. That's about $6,700 today. -
Air Pollution Control Act
Congress amends the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 to fund a study conducted by the U.S. Surgeon General to investigate the health effects caused by automobile exhaust. In the United States alone, there are 74 million cars on the road.It lead the way for many other Environmental Acts to follow. -
16th Street Baptist Bombing
On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast. -
First African American wins an Oscar
Sydney Poitier became the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as a construction worker who helped to build a chapel in Lilies of the Field.The presenter actress Ann Bancroft congratulated him with a kiss on the cheek, a gesture that caused a mild scandal among the show’s most conservative audiences. Poitier took part in a more momentous kiss three years later, when he and Katherine Houghton shared the first interracial on screen kiss. -
Malcolm X's Assassination
In 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, Malcolm X was set to deliver an address to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. After a scuffle in the crowd got the attention of his security detail who then moved to silence the fight, a man walked up and shot Malcolm X in the chest with a shotgun.Although silenced for reasons still yet to be revealed officially, Malcolm X and his message still stirs souls. -
Watt's Riot
The riots were sparked by the arrest of a black motorist, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. When Frye's mother intervened, a crowd gathered and the arrest became a flashpoint for anger against police. The deeper causes, as documented by the McCone Commission, which investigated the riots, were poverty, inequality, racial discrimination and the passage, in November 1964, of Proposition 14 on the California ballot.After nearly a week of rioting, 34 people, 25 of them black. -
Delano Strike and March
Over 500 migrant workers march 250 miles from Delano to Sacramento, California's capital, to present a list of their demands. Several grape companies agree to sign a contract with the union. These were the first contracts for American farm workers. This march would become one of the seventeen pilgrimages to California seeking better represention and wages.
That same year, the NFWA and AWOC merge, forming the United Farm Workers (UFW), which becomes an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. -
Levitate the Pentagon
Slogans like "How Many More?," "I'm a Viet Nam Dropout" and "Ship the GI's Home Now!" graced the buttons, flags and banners of the anti-war movement.On October 21, 1967, 70,000 demonstrators came to Washington, D.C. to "Confront the War Makers." This was the first of the biannual Anti-War demonstrations to fuse protest with the whimsicality of the counter culture and to take civil disobedience to new levels of confrontationWhen the permit expired at 7:00 p.m., more tha 1000 persons remained. -
Protest At 1968 Miss America Pageant
The pageant protest was organized by the New York Radical Women a group of women who had been active in the civil rights, the New Left, and the antiwar movements. In the group's manifesto written to explain the protest of the Miss America Pageant, "No More Miss America!,"At the center of it all, and attracting the most media attention, was the "Freedom Trash Can" -- a receptacle where women would toss items such as dish detergent, false eyelashes, wigs, curlers and copies of magazines -
Feminist Conference
More than 200 women from 37 states and Canada convened at Lake Wood near Chicago for the first national Women's Liberation. Sarachild wrote up A Program for Feminist Consciousness-Raising which was distributed.It initially received a mixed reception, but before long, even groups that had previously disparaged consciousness-raising as “therapy” or “navel-gazing” began to take it up. Consciousness-Raising swept the country, with groups in every major city and many smaller towns. -
Ladies' Home Journal Sit-in
200 women who were fed up with the way the male-run magazine portrayed women stormed the Editor-in-Chief's office and demanded the magazine change.The women presented a list of demands to the then Editor-in-Chief John Mack Carter, who refused to sign, but did allow the protestors to produce a section of the issue that would appear in a later issue. -
First Earth Day
Ira Einhorn, Master of Ceremonies, Earth Day Rally on Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park, Apr. 22, 1970.The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the media. -
Clean Air Act and formation of EPA
The Clear Air Act passes, allocating $95 million for the study and cleanup of air and water pollution. The act gave the federal government authority to reduce interstate air pollution, and invest in technologies that will remove sulfur from coal and oil.The adoption of this very important legislation occurred at approximately the same time as the National Environmental Policy Act that established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was created on December 2, 1970.
