Movements, not a single revolution
The word “revolution” is often applied to 1967 in America, but what actually happened was less a single upheaval than several organised movements pursuing different aims, sometimes overlapping and sometimes in conflict. Some had been building for years; others were taking shape that year. Because these stories are often compressed in popular memory, a few dates are worth fixing at the start. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, not 1967. The Stonewall uprising in New York took place in 1969. Both belong in the background and aftermath, and neither was a 1967 event.
Black Power
The slogan “Black Power” had come into wide use in June 1966, when Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee used it during a march in Mississippi. In 1967 it became a political programme and a source of controversy. Carmichael and the political scientist Charles Hamilton published the book Black Power that year, arguing for Black communities to build their own political and economic strength rather than rely on integration alone. In May, H. Rap Brown replaced Carmichael as the SNCC chairman, and the organisation moved further from its early emphasis on interracial cooperation.
The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966, gained national attention on 2 May 1967 when armed members entered the California state capitol in Sacramento to protest a gun-control bill. Martin Luther King Jr. and older civil rights groups continued to work for nonviolent reform, and the movement’s strategies diverged more openly than before. Reactions among Black Americans varied; some embraced the new militancy, others kept to earlier approaches.
The antiwar movement
Opposition to the Vietnam War grew more organised in 1967. On 4 April King delivered his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York, linking the war with poverty and racism. On 15 April large demonstrations in New York and San Francisco, organised as the Spring Mobilization, drew very large crowds, far bigger in New York than in San Francisco, although estimates of the numbers differ. In October the activists of Stop the Draft Week tried to block an induction centre in Oakland, and on 21 October tens of thousands marched on Washington for the March on the Pentagon, where there were clashes and many arrests. Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left groups were prominent, but so were church leaders, veterans and parents. The movement was broad and not united, and polling at the time showed that most Americans did not yet identify with it.
The Human Be-In and the counterculture
On 14 January 1967 a crowd usually estimated in the tens of thousands gathered in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for the Human Be-In, an event billed as a gathering of the tribes. Poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder took part, along with musicians and Timothy Leary, who urged people to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. It was not a protest in the usual sense, with no list of demands, and it is best understood as a statement of community and style. It prepared the ground for the Summer of Love, which attracted large numbers of young people to the Haight-Ashbury area from the spring. The counterculture was a movement of a different kind from the others here: more about lifestyle than about legislation, and more loosely organised.
Early feminist activism
NOW, as noted, was founded in October 1966 and spent 1967 building chapters and defining its aims. Its conference in the autumn of 1967 is generally described as adopting a bill of rights that included support for an equal rights amendment and for repeal of abortion laws, though the details were disputed inside the organisation. In October 1967 President Johnson signed an executive order extending a ban on discrimination in federal employment and contracting to include sex, effective the following year. Separately, younger women in the civil rights and New Left movements, frustrated by sexism within those groups, were starting small women’s liberation groups in cities such as Chicago and New York. Their larger public impact came in 1968 and after.
Early gay activism
Organised gay activism in 1967 was small and cautious. Groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis had existed since the 1950s, and demonstrations were rare. In Los Angeles, a protest followed a police raid at a bar called the Black Cat around New Year’s Eve at the turn of 1966 to 1967, and a gay newspaper that grew into The Advocate was started in the city during 1967. In Britain, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men in England and Wales in July 1967, but nothing comparable existed at the federal level in the United States. The mass visibility that Stonewall helped create was still two years away.
What they had in common
These movements often disagreed about goals, methods and leadership. What they shared was the belief that existing institutions would not change without pressure from below, and that younger people had a part to play. How lasting each effort would prove was not yet clear at the end of 1967, and several would change shape sharply in the following year.