THE YEAR 1960

Edward Thompson famously characterized the 1950s as the ‘apathetic decade’ when people ‘looked to private solutions to public evils’. ‘Private ambitions’, he wrote, ‘have displaced social aspirations.
. . .
The year 1960 will always be remembered for the birth of a new social consciousness that repudiated this culture of moral apathy fed by resigned powerlessness.

That sounds a lot like the cultural and political situation we are in today. This was the leading edge of the revolution then:

First behind the plough were Black students in the South, whose movement as it spread to a hundred cities and campuses would name itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In North Carolina, the Greensboro lunch-counter February sit-ins began as quiet protests but soon became thunderclaps heralding the arrival of a new, uncompromising generation on the frontline of the battle against segregation. The continuing eruption of student protest across the South reinvigorated the wounded movement led by Martin Luther King and was echoed in the North by picket lines, boycotts and the growth of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Separately the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, and the powerful voice of Malcolm X began to be heard across the country. Meanwhile, as the United States continued to install ICBMs in Europe, the growing revolt against nuclear weapons signalled, as Lawrence Wittner put it, ‘an end to the Cold War lockstep among sizable segments of the American population. The peace movement by 1960 had been reestablished as a significant social movement.’

Here comes The New Left:

The same could be said for student activism and radical scholarship at some of the major Cold War universities. Progressive campus organizations such as SLATE at Berkeley—the precursor of the Free Speech Movement—and VOICE at Ann Arbor dramatically broke the ice of student apathy, while Studies on the Left (founded in 1959 in Madison) and New University Thought (1960) gave voice to what everyone was soon calling the New Left.

Hollywood portrayal of the Southern California Paradise vs. reality:

A young generation was waking up in Southern California as well, despite the stunted character of political and intellectual life in most of the region. If films like Gidget (1959) popularized the image of a carefree teenage paradise, life was most definitely not a beach in the ghettoes, chinatowns and barrios of Los Angeles.

. . .

Focused on Southern California, this piece follows month-by-month the emergence of a new agenda for social change, along with some of its key actors and organizations.

Racism has always been endemic in the LAPD:

Los Angeles schools, meanwhile, segregated more students than any Southern city and, as far as most residents of South Central LA were concerned, the LAPD might as well have had Confederate emblems on its patrol cars.

As integral as peace and anti-war activism were to the story of the decade, and as important as feminism and gay rights became at the beginning of the 1970s, the core narrative of Los Angeles in the sixties was the sustained uprising of young Blacks and Chicanos and the alternative futures they passionately envisioned.

Some highlights:

January: Commission on Civil Rights

In its Los Angeles hearings, the Commission on Civil Rights, established by Congress in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott,

. . .

[Loren Miller, publisher of the California Eagle and the nation’s leading legal expert on housing discrimination] told the Commission of a study by FHA housing analyst Belden Morgan in 1954 which found that ‘approximately 3,000 of the 125,000 housing units built from 1950 to 1954 in the Los Angeles area were open to non-Caucasian occupancy.’ Later research by the Los Angeles Urban League concluded that less than 1 per cent of new housing between 1950 and 1956 was occupied by minorities. In addition, ‘most of the housing that is open to non-Caucasian occupancy is located in subdivisions built expressly for Negro occupancy.’ Finally, Miller reminded commissioners that the federal government had been ‘a partner in discrimination’ and that the contemporary ghetto was as much the result of government policies as the organic result of local racism.

Suburban apartheid

The result was the concentration of the African-American population in a single super-ghetto or ‘black belt’, in an otherwise rapidly decentralizing and suburbanizing metropolis. Some 75 per cent of Los Angeles County’s Black population was unwillingly concentrated in the urban core between Olympic Boulevard to the north and Artesia Boulevard to the south. [9] Alameda Street, the old highway and railroad route to the harbour, was called the ‘cotton curtain’ because Blacks could not live or be seen at night in any of the dozen or so industrial suburbs east of it. A clan of white gangs, the ‘Spookhunters’, patrolled racial boundaries, attacking Blacks with seeming impunity.

White resistance in Compton and Watts?

Meanwhile the chief hot spots of white resistance were the city of Compton, south of Watts, where a racial transition had already begun, and all-white Inglewood, where police and residents were mobilized to defend the city’s eastern and northern boundaries against Black homebuyers. Only the Crenshaw area, with its mixture of Jews, Japanese-Americans and Blacks, qualified as a true multi-racial community.

I have always thought "sundown towns" were a southern phenomenon:

Apart from South Central Los Angeles, there were also historical black neighbourhoods in Pasadena, Santa Monica/Venice, Long Beach and Monrovia, in the San Gabriel Valley—each of which could be accurately described as a ghetto. The rest of the older secondary cities—like Torrance, Hawthorne, Burbank and, above all, Glendale—were zero-Black-population ‘sundown towns’, where the local police enforced illegal curfews on Black shoppers and commuters.

Skipping February and March, which brings us to:

April: Game Theory

Santa Monica in 1960 was still the three-shift company town of Douglas Aircraft. The huge factory complex at the Santa Monica airport, which at its peak in 1943 had employed 44,000 workers, was the bread and butter of the city where Route 66 met the Pacific. Douglas was also the mother (the Air Force was the father) of ‘Project RAND’, a secret weapons-planning and strategy group that moved out on its own in 1948 to become the RAND Corporation.

Nuclear Rational Choice Theory:

New mathematical models were used to explore the logical structure of strategic decision-making. ‘By the mid-1950s’, writes Alex Abella in his history, ‘RAND became the world centre for game theory.’ John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, John Nash—the giants of ‘rational choice’ and game theoretics—worked at RAND during the 1950s in the quixotic quest for a solution to the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ (a problem first formulated by RAND researchers in 1950). The essence of the Dilemma was that two rational opponents might choose not to cooperate, and thereby fail to avoid nuclear war. Daniel Ellsberg, one of many at RAND struggling with the grim implications of game theory, became so pessimistic about the future that he didn’t bother to subscribe to the life insurance offered by the Corporation. [28] The Cuban Missile Crisis was just around the corner.

Synanon and political activism. Who knew?

Meanwhile another game, ‘The Game’ in fact, was being played down the street from RAND in the brick three-storey building at 1351 Ocean Front Avenue that housed the Synanon Foundation. Its founder, Chuck Dederich, a former executive and recovered alcoholic, had been very active in AA, but became disillusioned by its refusal to help drug addicts as well as the formulaic nature of its group sessions. Synanon was a racially integrated therapeutic commune organized around hours-long group confrontations, emotionally explosive and often terrifying to newcomers, that aimed to destroy self-deception while fostering a tough ‘intimate honesty’ between participants. No hint of violence was tolerated in The Game but participants were otherwise free to use language as a sledgehammer. Dederich, who was ‘fair game’ like everyone else, was frank about the perils of the process. ‘The Game is a big emotional dance and it’s like a dream. It’s random. Some dreams are nightmares.’ [29]

In the event, Synanon seemed to work, as former addicts successfully helped newcomers through the torture of cold-turkey withdrawal, and hundreds of vulnerable people, ranging from celebrities to San Quentin parolees, managed to live together in some harmony. In the later 1960s, the community would turn to activism, supporting the Farmworkers’ Union and the Black Panther breakfast programme. (Cesar Chavez, in the late 1970s, when the union was losing ground and its organizers were becoming discontented, became obsessed with The Game and forced his staff to play it on a marathon basis with ultimately disastrous results.

This article is a very long read with extensive historical insights and parallels for today, including JFK getting booed at the 1960 California Democratic Convention:

Accordingly in June, King and Randolph announced a ‘March on the Conventions’ movement targeting the Democrats in LA and the Republicans in Chicago: ‘The 1960 elections will be farce unless more than 10 million Negroes in the South have the opportunity to vote.’ Of both parties and the Eisenhower administration they demanded the federal registration of voters in the South, injunctions to prevent violence against demonstrators, an end to discrimination by firms doing business with the federal government, ‘an anti-lynch law with teeth in it’, enforcement of the Supreme Court’s ruling on school integration, and a foreign policy that opposed apartheid and colonialism.

Addressing the Democrats specifically, they asked the National Convention to unseat and expel ‘white supremacists, racists and Dixiecrats in your ranks’. Although now a forgotten moment in civil-rights history, this was the first attempt in the post-war period to define a broad national platform for equality. [39]

On 10 July, King led 5,000 demonstrators from the Shrine Auditorium to the Sports Arena where Democratic Party chairman Paul Butler greeted them on behalf of the Convention. ‘We dedicate ourselves to the elimination of all discriminatory practices at the earliest possible moment without violence.’ The marchers were not pleased and began to chant ‘No! No! Now—not later!’ [40] This was exactly the show of force and impatience that King and Randolph had hoped would goad the Democrats. The demonstrators marched back to the Shrine where several thousand others were waiting.

Loren Miller, who would know, described it as the largest Negro political gathering since the 1940s. The Eagle had polled a sample of the community and found universal opposition to LBJ and some support for Kennedy. Stevenson however remained far and away the most popular choice. When Kennedy arrived at the Shrine, the crowd, which had been jeering the names of Truman and Johnson, continued to boo, very disconcertingly, as he entered the auditorium.

Maybe we can rewind the 60's. More history here:

https://newleftreview.org/II/108/mike-davis-the-year-1960