Since World War II the decade of the 1960s stands out for its monumental changes in American life.

Civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam War protests, the “Pill”, music, President Kennedy’s assassination were all part of an upheaval in American life.

The most noble legacy of the 1960s was the Civil Rights movement.

Although slavery was officially abolished by the13th Amendment to the Constitution at the end of 1865, the Federal Government gave up trying to protect former slaves in the South as part of the politics of the Presidential election of 1876 (an election so close that the Republican candidate won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate).

Prior to the election of 1876, President U.S. Grant had tried mightily to protect blacks in the South. That effort became politically unpopular.

Ninety-nine years after the end of the Civil War, President Lyndon B. Johnson finally got Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, declaring an end to racial discrimination in almost every aspect of life in America.

The next year, President Johnson got Congress to pass the Voting rights Act which, at long last, empowered the Federal Government to protect the right of black Americans to register and to vote, especially in the former Confederate States.

The life of women in America changed greatly in the 1960s. The United States Food and Drug Administration approved the contraceptive pill for use in 1960 touching off the “sexual revolution” where women could finally control their own reproduction.

The Supreme Court in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut by a 7-2 vote ruled that the State of Connecticut could not make it a crime for even married couples in the privacy of their own bedroom to use contraception.

The “right to privacy” established in Griswold would be the basis of the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, just 8 years later.

Sadly, and tragically the 1960s were a time of multiple political assassinations. President Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered April 4, 1968 in Memphis, while supporting sanitation workers who were on strike. New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, running for President, was murdered June 6, 1968, the night he won the California Democratic Presidential primary.

Senator Kennedy’s murder hit Chautauqua County residents especially hard. During his Senate campaign in 1964 Robert Kennedy came to Jamestown. He arrived to the biggest crowds in our history. Upwards of 10,000 greeted his arrival at the Jamestown Airport in the Kennedy family plane, the Caroline

Many thousands more gathered to see and hear him in Downtown Jamestown. More thousands lined the highway from the Airport to the City just to get a glimpse of him.

Once elected to the Senate, Robert F. Kennedy got Chautauqua County and the rest of the Southern Tier included in the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). To this very day Chautauqua County benefits from Federal funding through ARC.

The 1960s saw the Vietnam War emerge as a hugely divisive issue. In the 1964 Presidential election President Johnson defeated Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson’s campaign portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous “war monger” who should not be trusted with the Presidency.

Johnson promised the voters that he would not send “American boys to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Despite Johnson’s promise, by 1968 Johnson had 500,000 American boys fighting and dying in Vietnam, compared to the 16,000 when he became President.

The nation was so torn apart by America’s role in Vietnam that on March 31, 1968 Johnson announced he would no longer seek reelection in November 1968.

Johnson’s broken promise to not send “American boys to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves” led to introducing the term “credibility gap” into American politics. Americans became less trusting of their elected leaders.

Music in America saw a massive change in the 1960s. The Beatles version of “rock and roll” arrived in the United States from England in 1964 on the Ed Sullivan television show, starting the “British Invasion” of music in America.

Frank Sinatra had been the country’s most revered recording artist since 1939. In 1965 he won his last Grammy for “Album of the Year” for the aptly titled “September of my Years.” From 1965 on, pop singers like Frank Sinatra, backed by lush orchestrations, were replaced by countless rock bands typically using a few guitars and drums.

Only those born in the 1950s or before have a personal recollection now of the revolution of the 1960s, capped off by Woodstock in the Catskills at Bethel, New York, in August of 1969, a “Summer of Love.”

For all Americans alive today the 1960s is the most consequential decade since World War II in shaping the America we live in today, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

Fred Larson is a 1969 Jamestown High School graduate, a graduate of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Yale Law School. He has been a private practice attorney for 38 years Retired City Court Judge and is a retired Jamestown City Court judge.