What you’ll learn to do: describe significant social and political changes associated with other civil rights movements and activism of the 1960s

Figure 1. A Students for a Democratic Society demonstration at Boston University.

The successes of Black grassroots activism inspired other identity-based movements for social justice such as the Chicano movement. On American campuses, a new wave of student movements fought for free speech and opposed the Vietnam War. This “New Left,” as distinct from the older labor activists of the Depression era, also influenced and overlapped with the burgeoning women’s movement, which itself built on the foundation provided by the suffragettes and other progressives of decades past. While these movements sometimes experienced internal division over goals, tactics, and alliances, their pursuit of social, political, and economic justice was often successful. Many of their accomplishments continue to reverberate today, though some of their goals remain both controversial and unfulfilled.