Chronology of
Political Events, 1954-1992
Part One,
1954-1966
Part Six,
Source Reference Guide
Author’s note: I compiled this chronology
to organize my notes in preparation for writing Revolution in the Air. It
covers key events in international and U.S. politics; mass movements and popular
struggles; and especially developments on the U.S. left and within the current
which came to be known as the New Communist Movement.
Following each entry one or more sources are listed
in abbreviated form. The books, pamphlets, articles, journals or newspapers
each abbreviation stands for are listed in the Source Reference Guide at the end. Fuller information about many of
these sources is available in the bibliography posted elsewhere on this
website.
Because of the chronology’s length (190 single-spaced
pages) it is posted here in six parts. Part one covers 1954-1966; part two
covers 1967-1970; part three covers 1971-1974; part four covers 1975-1980; part
five covers 1981-1992; and part six consists of the Source Reference Guide.
Since I was not trying to develop a comprehensive
chronology per se, some sections (for example the years from 1967 to 1980)
include much more details than others. Also, I did not go back over the
chronology to double-check and correct mistakes after I began writing my manuscript.
If you notice errors, please send the correct information to me at
contact@revolutionintheair.com so I can change this document accordingly.
I hope you find this of some use or interest.
Peace,
Max
Chronology
Part One, 1954-1966
1954-
January 25-February 17: Berlin Conference
ends a five-year break in negotiations among the “Big Four” powers (U.S., USSR,
Britain, France). Though resisted by Dulles, the meeting is held and - while no
substantive agreements are reached - the participants sets dates for further
meetings on various issues, in particular for the Geneva Conference on
Indochina and Korea. This begins a process of substantive East-West
negotiations, regarding Germany, Austria (where a settlement is reached May 15,
1955 for neutralization of the country and withdrawal of all Soviet troops),
Indochina and Korea. This entrance into dialogue reflects the end of “Cold War
I” in 1953 and the beginning of what Halliday called a period of “Oscillatory
Antagonism” lasting until formal “detente” begins in 1969. (Second Cold War; Political Affairs April
1954; Century)
March 1: On the 37th
Anniversary of the law that made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens, four Puerto Rican
nationalists - Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero and
Irvin Flores - unfurl a Puerto Rican flag and fire weapons from the gallery of
the House of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen. They are imprisoned
with sentences of 50 (Lebron) and 75 years, and along with Oscar Collazo - shot
while trying to attack then-President Truman in Washington during the 1950
uprising on the island - they become the “five nationalist prisoners.” (Puerto
Rico)
March:
Beginning of the fall of Joe McCarthy with the Army-McCarthy hearings and
Edward R. Murrow’s telecast attack on the senator broadcast March 6. On
December 2, McCarthy is censured officially by a Senate vote of 67-22 for
contempt of a Senate subcommittee, abuse of its members and insults to the
Senate. (Haunted; Student Generation; Goines chron; SF Chronicle 3/5/98 in D-3)
May 7-8: Fall of Dien Bien
Phu; The U.S. had explored conducting air strikes to rescue the French
garrison, and also tentatively offered France nuclear weapons to stave off
defeat, but there are hesitations in France and Britain and the deal for France
to formally request the nuclear weapons and the U.S. to supply them for use
falls through. (Almanac; Century; Hobsbawm; Coates in NLR #145/May-June 1984;
Raskin/Fall)
May
17: Supreme Court rules segregation in public schools is illegal - “separate is
inherently unequal” - in the landmark Brown
v. Board of Education case. (Prize)
May:
CIA-sponsored coup overthrows the reformist Arbenz government in Guatemala
(Isserman; Barnet; Political Affairs
August 1954)
Early
in the year: First issue of Dissent,
edited by Irving Howe, appears. (Isserman)
July
21: Geneva Agreements on Indochina are signed after complex negotiations, the
Geneva Conference had opened on April 26. The Vietnamese are pressured by Zhou
Enlai to make more concessions that they wish, the anti-imperialist forces in
Cambodia are dissatisfied with the deal; although the U.S. delegate to the
conference says the U.S. will not use force to disturb the agreements, Eisenhower says “The U.S. has not itself
been a party to, or bound by, the decisions taken by the conference.” (Karnow;
Century; Fact Sheet; Revolution Rescued; Raskin/Fall; Schurmann; Harding)
September:
Khrushchev visits Beijing, several agreements are concluded, according to
Schurmann this is the highest point of the Sino-Soviet alliance and the
positive climate between the two powers continues until the Soviet 20th
Congress in February 1956. . (Schurmann)
November
20: U.S. begins sending aid directly to the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh
Diem, not through the French as formerly. On February 12, 1955 U.S. General
O’Daniel takes over training of the South Vietnamese Army from the French.
(Fact Sheet; Goines chron)
November
1: Algerian War of Independence against France is officially proclaimed and
launched. (Student Generation; Said in NLR #180)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Malcolm
X is appointed Minister of Nation of Islam Temple No. 7 in Harlem. (Allen)
1955-
January: The Mattachine Society - founded in
1951 in Los Angeles by Harry Hay and other ex-CPUSA members to promote
homosexual rights from a militant progressive perspective but after 1953 taken
over by more conservative figures - begins publishing its own newsletter, The Mattachine Review. Mattachine is the
first continuing organization of what becomes known as the homophile movement.
(D’Emilio)
February 8: Malenkov, who
had appeared to be in the strongest position to succeed Stalin after his death
(March 5, 1953) is forced to resign as Soviet Premier, but he is given another
responsible post, setting a new precedent for the ouster (without arrest or
execution) of a Soviet leader. Bulganin becomes Premier but it is clear that
Khrushchev, the “First Secretary” of the CPSU, is in charge. (Nove; Century)
February
9: AFL and CIO sign a merger agreement for creation of a single union center.
The new AFL-CIO is born December 5 with the AFL’s George Meany as its
president. (Almanac; Green; Untold)
Late
March: Split in the “Correspondence Group” (which had originated in 1951 out of
the “Johnson-Forest”/State Capitalism Tendency - Johnson is C.L.R. James,
Forest is Raya Dunayevskaya - of the Trotskyist movement). Dunayevskaya and her
followers leave to form News and Letters, remaining folks (with C.L.R. James
offering advice in letters from exile in London) include Martin Glaberman and
James and Grace Boggs, all three later to play important roles in the revival
of the left in Detroit in the mid and late 1960s. James Boggs is editor of the
group’s publication, Correspondence.
(James)
April 18-24: Bandung
“Conference of the Afro-Asian States” in Indonesia is the forerunner of the
Non-Aligned Movement; key figures are Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of
Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josef Broz Tito of Yugoslavia; 29 nations
participate. At first this is essentially an Asian and African movement,
involving Latin Americans only after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. People’s
China participates in this meeting and signs the final communiqué. Richard
Wright and Adam Clayton Powell are present. (Hobsbawm; Century; Black Scholar
December 1976)
May 14: Warsaw Pact is
signed. (Century)
May 15: Austrian State
Treaty signed by the USSR, U.S., Britain and France; Austria becomes a neutral
state and Soviet troops leave the country. (Century; Schurmann)
May 26-June 2: Khrushchev,
Bulganin and Mikoyan reconcile with Tito during trip to Yugoslavia, saying
there are “many roads to socialism.” (Century; Schurmann)
June
26: The Freedom Charter is adopted by a Congress of the People in South Africa
held under the guidance of the African National Congress. (Frontline Supplement, September 30, 1985)
July
18-21: First East-West Summit Conference at Geneva, the heads of state of the
U.S., Britain, France and the USSR meet each other. One result of the Summit is
the opening of Sino-U.S. talks at the ambassadorial level in Poland, marking
the first official contact between the U.S. and China since the establishment
of the People’s Republic of China October 1, 1949. (Century; Schurmann)
August
8: 26th of July Movement is founded in Mexico City by Fidel Castro and other
revolutionaries. (Century)
August
28: Emmett Till is murdered in Money, Mississippi, his (later admitted) killers
are acquitted by an all-white jury, the case gets major nationwide publicity.
(Freedom; Prize)
September
21: Eight women - four couples, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon - gather
in San Francisco and within a few weeks form the Daughters of Bilitis. In
October 1956 DOB publishes the first issue of The Ladder, which lasts until 1972. (D’Emilio; BAR January 1, 1998
in BMOV-1)
October
13: Allen Ginsberg gives the first public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco with Kenneth Rexroth
presiding and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder
and Philip Whalen also reading on the program; “it seemed a moment that allowed
those present to see that a new force had arisen in American culture.”
Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is
published in 1956 by City Lights (San Francisco). During this time “the beats”
come to national prominence. (Utopia; Gitlin)
December 1: Rosa Parks refuses to
yield her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama; the bus boycott begins on
December 5, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. plays the central leadership role and rises
to national prominence. The boycott ends in victory December 21, 1956. (Prize)
-------------------------------------------------------
After
a series of military defeats, the Philippine Communist Party (PKP), leader of
the Huk insurgency, abandons the armed struggle in favor of concentrating on
parliamentary struggle. (Rectify/Rebuild)
Publication
of first edition of Labor’s Untold Story,
by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais (UE-United Electrical Workers &
Cameron Associates, New York); this as well as the second and third editions
will be reprinted many times, especially as many New Left activists turn their
attention to Marxism and the working class in the late 1960s/early ‘70s.
(Untold)
Two
landmark films focusing on “youth rebellion” are released, Nicholas’ Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause starring James
Dean - who died in an auto crash at age 24 on September 30, 1955, three days
before the film opened - and Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle. The Wild
One, starring Marlon Brando (“What are you rebelling against? Whadda ya
got?”), had been released in 1953. (Gitlin; Utopia)
1956-
February
14-25: Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. At the Congress, Nikita Khrushchev gives
his “secret speech” with its revelations about Stalin and the extent of his
crimes, terror and repression. The Congress criticizes the “cult of
personality” and adopts a new perspective that, with nuclear weapons and the
change in the world balance of forces, Lenin’s thesis that world wars are
inevitable as long as imperialism exists is no longer valid - rather world war
in no longer inevitable. Additionally, there are supposedly new possibilities
for a peaceful transition to socialism in many capitalist countries. The
Congress, especially the revelations about Stalin, sends shock waves through
the International Communist Movement (see April 28 entry below for the response
of the CPUSA), with the Chinese and Albanians critical (at first privately and
only later openly) of Khrushchev’s line, and Italian Party head Palmiro
Togliatti most aggressively arguing the case for a new, “polycentric” world
communist movement. Within the USSR there is a “thaw,” relaxation of
censorship, freeing of many prisoners, posthumous rehabilitation of many CPSU
members killed by Stalin, etc. The height of “de-Stalinization” is reaching in
1961, afterwards and especially following Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 things
“tighten up” again. (20th Congress; Starobin; Isserman; Haywood; Nove; Cohen; Line of March No. 11)
April
18: It is announced that the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau, formed
September 21-28, 1947) has been dissolved. (Century)
April
28: First meeting of the CPUSA’s full national committee in five years, at
which general secretary Eugene Dennis gives his report entitled The Communists Take a New Look (text in
D-7). The last full convention had been in 1950. The term “new look” had first
been used by Dennis at the anniversary meeting for the Daily Worker in January 1956. A summary of Khrushchev’s speech had
been available at the meeting, but the full text was not published in the U.S.
until June after the U.S. State Department released a text to the press on June
4. The Daily Worker reprinted
excerpts the next day and the full text in the Sunday Worker. (Starobin; Isserman; Haywood)
April:
The Diem regime formally reiterates its “non-recognition” of the Geneva Accords
as the last of the French Expeditionary Force withdraws from Vietnam. With the
backing of the Eisenhower administration, Diem refuses to hold the elections
mandated by the Geneva agreement; the U.S. Assistance Military Advisory Group
begins training and equipping the South Vietnamese Army. About 700 U.S.
military advisers arrive in Vietnam. (Century; Spoke; Fact Sheet)
June
28-30: Rioting in Poznan, Poland sets the stage for Gomulka’s return to power
after 5 years in prison as an anti-Stalinist. (Almanac; Century)
June:
Meeting sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) at Carnegie Hall
featuring A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, Eugene Dennis and W.E.B. DuBois; draws
2,000, perhaps largest at any radical meeting since the 1948 Wallace campaign.
And this spring the first issue of Liberation
magazine appears; it is a radical pacifist publication whose initiators
included Muste, Dave Dellinger and Bayard Rustin. (Isserman; Gitlin).
July:
The U.S. withdraws its promise of aid to Egypt to help build the Aswan dam,
partly in response to Nasser buying Czech arms. Nasser in reply nationalizes
the Suez Canal on July 26. (Roots)
September
13: publication of CPUSA’s “draft resolution” for the upcoming 16th convention.
(Starobin; Isserman; Haywood)
September:
Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party declares that “transition”
period is over, period of constructing socialism had begun and the main task is
to develop the productive forces, Liu Shaoqi plays a leading role. (Trial)
October
23-November 4: Hungarian uprising. Imre Nagy installed as prime minister after
students clash with Soviet troops and the troops are at first withdrawn from
Budapest. Nagy could not restore order, announced that Hungary would withdraw
from the Warsaw pact, and Soviet tanks rolled into the cities November 4,
overthrew the Nagy government and, after a few days of fighting, put down
resistance. During the crisis 100,000 West Berliners protesting the Soviet action
are dissuaded from storming the East German guardposts by mayor Willy Brandt
(who is mayor from 1957-1966) who fears a bloodbath and the outbreak of a wider
war. Also note: China had been supportive of Nagy - consistent with a policy of
favoring autonomy for and equality between the various ruling parties within
the socialist camp - until he announced
that he was taking Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact; at that point, Beijing -
based on their current view that party autonomy had to be within the camp -
broadcast a statement denouncing him. (Starobin; Isserman; Haywood; Hall-S;
Schurmann)
October
29: After tensions had been building since Egypt’s July 26 nationalization of
the Suez Canal, Israel (by secret agreement with France and England) invades
Egypt; Britain and France invade November 5; Cease-fire forced by U.S. November
6. During the crisis, the U.S. makes “an overt and explicit [nuclear] threat
toward the USSR through the global actions of U.S. strategy forces” to deter
the Soviets from intervening on the side of Egypt - this is the first of at
least 4 times over the next 17 years such an explicit threat was made, and one
of at least 19 times that the U.S. at some level indicated it was preparing to
use nuclear weapons. (Second Cold War;
Almanac; Hall-S; Roots)
November
6: Eisenhower beats Stevenson in presidential election. (Almanac)
November
18: CPUSA national committee meets and is deadlocked on Hungary. Ends with
statement that they neither support nor condemn the invasion. (See Isserman, p.
30).
December
21: Montgomery bus boycott ends in victory. (Prize)
-----------------------------------------------------
In
the wake of Hungary and Suez, the first “New Left” takes shape in Britain (the
phrase itself is borrowed from “nouvelle gauche” concept put forward by the
editor of France Observateur Claude
Bourdet). The main expressions of the new current are the magazines Universities and Left Review (fist issue
appears in 1957, it is “independent socialist” with Stuart Hall as an editor)
and The New Reasoner (started as a
critical bulletin, The Reasoner,
within the CP in July 1956, name changed after its founders leave the party or
are expelled, “dissident communist,” E.P. Thompson is among the core). (Hall-S;
NLR #153/Sept-Oct 1985)
End
of “Operation Wetback,” which in its three years of official operation
(1953-1956) was linked with the other repressions of the McCarthy era and
deported more than two million people to Mexico. (Chicano)
Rock
& roll is here to stay: 1955 and 1956 are the breakthrough years for rock
& roll’s explosive emergence into the center of popular music. The term
originated in June 1951 with Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, who started a
rhythm and blues show on a mainly white radio station for which he coined the
euphemism “rock & roll,” since the Black-rooted R&B was considered
disreputable by the white-owned music and radio industry. By 1955 chart-toppers
included Bill Haley and His Comets Rock
Around the Clock, Chuck Berry’s Maybelline,
Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame and
Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti. In
1956 Elvis Presley - now on RCA Records - hits No. 1 with Heartbreak Hotel, followed by other hits; he appeared three times
on the Ed Sullivan Show that year and made his first movie, Love Me Tender. White artists are now
“covering” songs written and originally recorded by Blacks and (along with the
record companies) reaping the profits. (Gitlin; Top 40)
The
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorizes 41,000 miles of Interstate freeways:
a major boost to suburbanization: between 1946 and 1958, outside the farms, 85%
of all new housing was built beyond the central cities. (Gitlin)
Irish
Republican Army begins armed campaign against Unionist regime in Northern
Ireland; ends in failure in 1962. (Student Generation)
The
African Party for the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands
(PAIGC) is founded, Amilcar Cabral is the key figure. (Cabral; Guardian July 7, 1975 in BTr5; MR
December 1975)
Publication
of C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
(Oxford University Press, London and New York); William H. Whyte, The Organization Man; Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: The Problem of Youth in
the Organized System (New York, Random House);
1957-
January 10-11: In the
aftermath of the successful Montgomery bus boycott, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) is founded under the leadership of Martin Luther
King. (Prize; Spoke)
February 9-12: 16th National Convention of
the CPUSA in New York, which the Maoist New Communist Movement as the gathering
which consolidated the party around a revisionist line. For broad left and
public reaction at the time, see Starobin for citations of numerous
contemporary articles commenting on the crisis in U.S. communism; and also -
page 226/227 and notes to these pages - for the very contradictory ways the
convention was summarized. (Starobin; Isserman; Class Struggle #4-5)
March 6: Ghana becomes the
first Black African territory to win independence from the European colonial
powers, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. (Prize; Almanac; Student
Generation)
March: Some of the
participants from a December meeting initiated by A.J. Muste (that meeting,
which drew 35 people, turned out to be the high point of the effort) formally
launch the American Forum for Socialist Education as a left regroupment effort
with Muste as chair. The effort is short lived. (Isserman; CrossRoads No. 52).
May 6: Washington announces
it is sending an Air Force detachment of Matador guided missiles, capable of
carrying nuclear weapons, to Taiwan. the announcement is virtually ignored in
the U.S. but noted in China with extreme alarm; it appears to Beijing as if the
thaw of 1954-56 is being replaced by new imperialist aggressive moves.
(Schurmann)
June: Power struggle in
Moscow: Khrushchev is outvoted in the Politburo, but then convenes and wins a
vote in the Central Committee, the “anti-party group” of Molotov, Malenkov and
Kaganovich (and others) is criticized and demoted to minor posts (but again,
not subject to any legal penalty). (Nove)
September
24: Eisenhower sends federal troops to Little Rock to enforce school
integration. (Almanac)
October
4: Sputnik I is launched. Only a few months previously, in August, the USSR had
successfully fired its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). These
steps - breakthroughs for Soviet technology and also prestige throughout the
world - provided the fuel for the outcry about a “missile gap” that arose in
the U.S. and was a factor in Kennedy’s campaign and election in 1960. They also
were apparently key factors in Mao ZeDong’s speech in November 1957 in Moscow -
where he attended the international meeting of communist parties, see below -
in which he asserted that “the east wind prevails over the west wind,” implying
a shift in the world balance toward the socialist camp - a perspective which
was at the core of Soviet doctrine at the time. He is also quoted as saying in
that speech that “the socialist camp must have one head, and that head is the
Soviet Union; the communist and workers’ parties of all countries must have one
head, and that head is the Soviet Communist Party.” (Century; Schurmann)
October 15: Soviets sign a
secret agreement on sharing nuclear technology with China which may include a
promise to provide China with a sample of an atomic bomb. The Soviets
unilaterally abrogate this agreement in June 1959 (see entry below) and both
the agreement and its renunciation only become public in 1963 with the Soviet
signing of the Test Ban Treaty. (Schurmann)
November
16: “Declaration of Communist and Workers Parties of Socialist Countries”
issued in Moscow after meeting of 12 ruling communist parties; from November
16-19 representatives of 64 parties meet in Moscow and unanimously adopt the
declaration, though later the world learns of the intense struggles that went
on in preparing it especially between the Soviets and the Chinese. This is the
“Moscow Declaration” argued over in the Sino-Soviet polemics of 1962-64. The
Declaration also sets off a fight in the CPUSA over whether to “adopt” the
declaration. Finally adopted at February 1958 National Committee meeting after
John Gates’ resignation (Polemic on the General Line; Haywood; Century).
Fall:
Clark resigns from CP in September; Daily
Worker forced to shut down because Foster group withholds funds in December;
a little later Gates resigns from CP. (See Isserman; Haywood gives January 1958
for date of Gates resignation)
Fall:
Harry Haywood completes For a
Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question for the internal fight in the
CP, later adopted as an official position of the POC and much later (1975)
reprinted and heavily promoted by the October League. (Haywood)
Fall:
A newspaper ad against nuclear tests sparks the formation of the National
Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. Over the next couple of years peace
activism grows on campuses: a Student SANE is formed. In spring 1959 the AFSC
sponsors the formation of a Student Peace Union (SPU). At the other end of the
political spectrum, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) is formed in
September 1960 at William F. Buckley’s family manor in Connecticut. (Gitlin)
-----------------------------------------------------
AFL-CIO
expels the Teamsters for “unethical conduct.” (Goines chron; Frontline, April 10, 1989)
“Battle
of Algiers,” systematic use of torture by French troops, beginnings of antiwar
movement inside France. (Student Generation)
Founding
of the Situationist International, some of whose ideas (though often reduced
only to slogans) became prominent in the French upheaval of 1968. (NLR
#174/March-April 1989)
Publication
of Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Viking,
New York); Robert Lindner, Must You
Conform?; Vance Packard, The Hidden
Persuaders; Lewis Coser and Irving Howe, The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919-1957
(Boston, Beacon; also cited as New York, Frederick A. Praeger); Theodore
Draper, The Roots of American Communism
(New York, Viking) - Draper’s American
Communism and Soviet Russia appears in 1960; Paul Baran, Political Economy of Growth (Monthly
Review Press, New York) - important in radical literature around imperialism,
center/periphery, development/underdevelopment models - and reprinted as a
Modern Reader book in 1968; the novel On
the Beach - about the aftermath of nuclear war - is a bestseller, the movie
version follows in 1959; Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin Era (Mainstream, New York)
1958-
January: China begins its
“Great Leap Forward” - scrapping the five-year plan approved at the Eighth CPC
Congress - with backyard steel furnaces, people’s communes, etc.; the Central
Committee vote to proceed is actually at the end of 1957. (Trial; Jacoby;
NYT/2-20-97; Century)
June 16: Supreme Court bans
denial of passports to suspected Communists, including Paul Robeson, who had
been denied a passport in 1952 after a visit to the USSR. (Goines chron)
June: Now that Gates has
resigned and the Dennis/Foster leadership declare victory over revisionism, at
this month’s CP NC meeting Robert Thompson issues an anti-factional ultimatum
to the “anti-revisionists.” (Haywood)
June: Socialist Party
Convention approves merger with the Max Schachtman-led Independent Socialist
League (of which Michael Harrington is a member, and a key figure in ISL’s
Young Socialist League); after a summer referendum, in the fall ISL’ers enter
the SP. (Isserman)
July 14: Overthrow of the
Hashemite monarchy in Iraq removes the “home country” of the U.S.-sponsored
“Baghdad Pact.” Iraqi troops had been ordered to attack Syria and detach it
from the just-formed United Arab Republic with Egypt (which is dissolved in 1961),
but the troops, influenced by rising Arab nationalism, turned around to
overthrow the pro-U.S. regime. Two days later U.S. Marines land in Lebanon to
protect the right-wing government of Camille Chamoun, which had been engaged in
battles with Arab nationalists in that country. Three days later British
paratroopers land in Jordan to shore up the regime of King Hussein, which was
also under nationalist pressure. (Roots; Barnet; Second Cold War)
July: Most serious
confrontation yet over the “offshore islands” of Quemoy and Matsu between China
and Taiwan backed by the U.S. (an earlier crisis over these islands had taken
place in spring 1955). Chiang Kai-shek’s “rollback regime” had deployed 100,000
troops on the islands trying to provoke China and push the U.S. into backing
with force his ambitions to return to the mainland. Many charge the Soviets
with giving little if any support to the Chinese; others argue that the Soviet
nuclear umbrella over China existed and was a major force in restraining the
U.S. from “unleashing” Chiang Kai-shek. (Peck on China; Second Cold War; Century for November Khrushchev letters; Handbook;
Schurmann)
August 16-17: Folks from the
“Marxist-Leninist Caucus” in the CPUSA, some expelled and some quitting the
party, form the “Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the
Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC)” (Haywood gives name as “Provisional
Organizing Committee for a Communist Party” and a slightly different account)
at founding convention in New York. Harry Haywood (who resigns quickly, on
October 25), Ted Allen and Noel Ignatin are among the founders, Armando Roman
is chosen general secretary. About 70 members. (ARC45-50; Ignatin; Haywood;
Class Struggle No. 1).
December 15: Mao resigns
from the presidency of China and is replaced by Liu Shaoqi, a loss of power for
Mao that he only regains in the summer of 1966 just before the launching of the
Cultural Revolution. See also July 1959 entry below on the end of the Great
Leap Forward. (Schurmann; Hobsbawm; Trial; Century)
-------------------------------------------------------
First
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Aldermaston march in Britain. CND peaks
in 1960-61 and is in decline by 1963. (Student Generation; Hall-S)
World
Peace Council founded in Prague. (Newport in Black Scholar Jan-Feb 1986)
Publication of John Kenneth
Galbraith, The Affluent Society
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin) which Hobsbawm cites as one of the “major texts of
Golden Age reformism” along with Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York; Collier, 1960, also cited as
Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1960), Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism, and Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State, all written between 1956 and 1960.
Publication of C. Wright
Mills, The Causes of World War III
(Simon and Schuster, New York); Facing
Reality: New Society, Where to Look for It, How to Bring It Closer by Grace
Lee (Boggs) and C.L.R. James (Correspondence Group, Detroit).
1959-
January 1: Batista flees Cuba, for a brief
moment a military junta takes power but the next day a general strike paralyzes
the country and Che Guevara’s column enters Havana; on January 8 Fidel arrives
in the city. The Cuban Revolution triumphs. Huge impact throughout Latin
America and on the emerging New Left in the U.S. (Gosse; Gitlin; Che)
April
16: John Foster Dulles resigns as U.S. Secretary of State; he dies a month
later. He and his brother - Allen Dulles, long time head of the CIA, are among
the most hard-line and belligerent anticommunists in high posts in the U.S.
government. (Schurmann)
Spring: Tibetan rebellion
against Chinese rule, suppressed by military force. (Schurmann)
June
20: Soviets unilaterally abrogate a secret agreement on sharing nuclear
technology with China that had been signed October 15, 1957, apparently as a condition
of détente with the U.S. and the U.S. not giving nuclear weapons to West
Germany. (Among the background facts is Mao’s statement that even if half of
mankind died in a nuclear war, the result would be the other half building
socialism. Also, according to Schurmann, the 1957 Agreement was secret and both
it and the fact that the Soviets had abrogated it in 1959 according to the
Chinese as “a gift to Eisenhower” [whom Khrushchev would meet at Camp David in
September - see below] were revealed only in 1963 when the Soviets signed the
Partial Test Ban Treaty with the U.S. against strenuous Chinese objections.)
Also according to Schurmann, this Soviet reversal on nuclear weapons was the
“great blow that sparked the split between China and Russia” - “the Sino-Soviet
split began in the summer of 1959.” At the same time, the Chinese perceived
that the Soviet’s were pursuing a detente that would preserve the status quo on
Taiwan, due to lukewarm Soviet support for China during the confrontations with
the U.S. and Taiwan over Quemoy and Matsu in 1954 and again in 1958; and the
Chinese also were unhappy with the Soviets apparent tilt toward supporting
India in the first Sino-Indian border clashes in August-September 1959 (even
heavier clashes occurred later, in October 1962). (See Jacoby, Polemic on the
General Line; Medvedevs in NLR #130/Nov-Dec 1981; also see Second Cold War and its citing of John Gittings, The World and China, 1922-1972, London,
1974; Peck on China; Schurmann; Century; Viewpoint Vol. 3 No. 3).
July
8: Major Dale Buis and Sgt. Chester Durand killed are the first U.S. soldiers
killed in Vietnam. (Karnow)
July:
Bitter internal fight in CPC ending with Mao’s “Great Leap” effectively
abandoned. It had been slowed earlier, with Mao replaced as head of state on
December 15, 1958 by Liu Shaoqi, though Mao remained chair of CPC. At least
partially due to the policies of the Great Leap, China experiences “probably
the greatest famine of the twentieth century” (Hobsbawm) in 1959-61. At the
same time, the “Lushan Meetings” of party leaders in July and August are
debating the implications of the Soviet abrogation of the nuclear agreement,
and as a result the Minister of Defense, Peng Tehuai, who is a strong advocate
of a close alliance with the Soviets and reliance on them for technologically
sophisticated weaponry, is purged. (Hobsbawm; Trial; Century; Schurmann)
Summer:
In Dissent Irving Howe attacks C.
Wright Mills’ The Causes of World War III
for being too anti-American and pro-Soviet; Mills replies “as regards [U.S.]
foreign policy, from what, tell me, do you dissent?” In fall 1961, Howe in Dissent co-authors an article “New
Styles in Fellow-Traveling” essentially an attack on the New Left, and in
October 1963 (Isserman [wrongly?] says 1962) a meeting between Dissent editors and SDS leaders ends in
impasse over Dissent’s insistence
that anticommunism must be a pillar of any new left. (Isserman; Gitlin)
September 15-27: Khrushchev
visits the U.S. where he meets with Eisenhower in “the spirit of Camp David.”
Immediately following Khrushchev’s meeting with Eisenhower he flies to Beijing
for the Tenth Anniversary celebration of the PRC, but he receives an icy
welcome from Mao and other Chinese leaders; Khrushchev never returned to China.
The AFL-CIO under George Meany had opposed Eisenhower’s invitation to
Khrushchev to visit the U.S. (Polemic on the General Line; Second Cold War; Viewpoint Vol. 3 No. 3; Century; Schurmann)
December
10: Seventeenth Convention of CPUSA opens in New York, with the party decimated
by losses in membership since 1956/57 - perhaps down to about 5,000 members or
less after having 20,000 in 1956. Gus Hall gets the post of General Secretary;
Dennis has a stroke just before the convention. (Dennis)
---------------------------------------------------------
Group led by Sam Marcy
(“Global Class War Caucus”) leaves the SWP to form the Workers World Party; a
key issue is their defense of the Soviet role in Hungary - which was similarly
a key issue in the formation of the POC. They approach POC but are rebuffed.
(Ignatin; GCW)
Studies on the Left begins publication in Madison, Wisconsin, carrying
C. Wright Mills’ “Letter to the New Left” in its premier issue. The magazine is
largely the product of graduate students of William Appleman Williams; it moves
to New York City in 1964 with James Weinstein then playing the key editorial
role. (Student Generation; Aronowitz)
The San Francisco Mime
Troupe is founded - initially called the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe - led by R.G.
Davis. In 1960, Peter Schumann founds the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York
City. (Mime)
The American Socialist journal - founded by the Cochran-Clarke faction
after its split from the SWP in 1953 - ceases publication. (Noia)
Forty-six day strike against
seven New York hospitals by Local 1199 - then a small local of mostly
pharmacists - marks the beginning of a new wave of organizing the mass of
hospital workers; though 1199 does not win recognition this time it scores some
gains and lays the basis for recognition and contracts in the 1960s. (Hard
Times No. 87)
Congress passes the
Landrum-Griffen Act, allowing restrictions on mass picketing and outlawing
secondary boycotts. (Green)
German SPD at its Congress
at Bad Godesberg and adopts a new program eliminating references to Marxism,
celebrating a mixed economy, accepting German membership in NATO and generally
moving way to the right of previous official stance.
(NLR #145 & 131)
Publication of Century of Struggle by Eleanor Flexner
(Cambridge, Harvard University Press)
1960-
January: The Student League for Industrial
Democracy (SLID) changes its name to Students for a Democratic Society: SDS.
(Sale)
January:
Albert Camus dies in auto crash at 46 in the first week of the year. (Gitlin)
February
1: The start of the sit-in movement when four Black college students refuse to
move from a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina. By
September 1961, more than 70,000 people will have participated in sit-ins for
civil rights. (Carson)
March
17: Eisenhower (secretly) approves CIA training of Cuban exiles to overthrow
the new revolutionary regime. As U.S. hostility to Cuba rises, U.S. liberals
and radicals form the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in early 1960.
Starting with a small handful of members the group grows to 7,000 members in 25
chapters and 40 student groups. FPCC helped coordinate Fidel’s visit to New
York in fall 1960 (see below) and led protests against the Bay of Pigs invasion
in 1961. It sponsored trips to Cuba, and one in July 1960 included Amiri Baraka
(then LeRoi Jones), Robert F. Williams and Harold Cruse. The group declined
afterwards and went out of existence in 1963. (Che; Goines chron says
Eisenhower’s approval was February 17; CrossRoads No. 46; Kelley; and for
details on FPCC see Van Gosse’s book Where
the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left)
March 21: Sharpeville
massacre in South Africa, 69 people protesting pass laws are killed, ANC is
banned soon after, it turns to armed struggle. (Frontline Supplements September 30, 1985 and January 19,
1987)
April
16-18: Founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina, the organization which spearheads the
freedom struggle in the South over the next five years. The meeting was called
by Ella Baker, executive director of SCLC, but she resisted efforts to subvert
SNCC’s autonomy. The meeting draws more than 120 Black activists representing
56 colleges and high schools in 12 southern states and the District of
Columbia, as well as a dozen southern white students and representatives of
various other student and reform organizations. Marion Barry is chosen as
SNCC’s first chair, the organization launches a newspaper, the Student Voice. SNCC establishes a fuller
organizational structure and clarifies its goals and strategies at its second
conference October 14-16, 1960 in Atlanta. Following the conference Chuck McDew
becomes SNCC chair, and he serves until 1963 when John Lewis is elected.
(Carson; Prize)
At SNCC’s founding meeting,
Guy Carawan, then musical director of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle,
Tennessee, brings the song We Shall
Overcome - which already has a long history in the Black freedom movement -
into the sit-in movement and it becomes the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.
Highlander is an important institution in bringing together and training
networks of civil rights activists (one of whom was Rosa Parks); it had been
founded as one of many “radical labor colleges in 1932, it was directed from
1933 to 1973 by Myles Horton. Highlander was forced to close by segregationist
pressure in 1959, it reopened in Knoxville as Highlander Research and Education
Center, and then moved in 1972 in New Market Tennessee, and survived into the
‘70s. The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), founded in 1938, and its
newspaper, The Southern Patriot,
launched 1942, also play an early role in building support for SNCC, especially
among southern whites; the organization is left-identified and one of its
leaders, Carl Braden, serves a year in jail in the late 1950s for refusing to
answer questions before HUAC. (Carson; Prize; King; Gitlin; Radicalism; Left
Encyclopedia; Southern Patriot various issues)
April:
Publication of Long Live Leninism! by
the Chinese Communist Party, opening public ideological salvo in the emerging
Sino-Soviet split. Chinese allege it is a response to CPSU attacks on CPC at
various Congresses of CPs around the world. In practical terms, the CPC in this
dispute also alleges that during this year the Soviets renege on economic
agreements, withdraw technical advisers, etc. - see July entry below. (Trial;
Polemic on the General Line p59 & p533 & other pp.; Viewpoint Vol. 3
No. 3)
Spring:
Protests, including a vigil at San Quentin prison largely made up of UC Berkeley
students, surround the execution of Caryl Chessman, a convicted rapist who had
eloquently pleaded his innocence. (Goines; Gitlin; Viorst; Streets)
May
1: U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia, pilot Francis Gary Powers captured
alive. U.S. response justifying the spy
missions rather than apologizing for the intrusion leads to the failure
of May 16 Paris Summit, and, according to Roy & Zhores Medvedev, along with
the 1962 Cuban missile crisis is a key factor in Soviets decision to try to end
overwhelming U.S. military-technological superiority; that is, shifting
(beginning in 1961 and consolidated by 1964 with the fall of Khrushchev) from
“minimum deterrence” to the pursuit of “strategic parity” and the capacity to
fight a protracted nuclear war. (Medvedevs in NLR #130/Nov-Dec 1981; Second
Cold War; Almanac)
May
9: FDA approves the first oral contraceptives - “the pill.” Within six years
one out of five American women of childbearing age has a prescription (Goines
chron).
May
13: HUAC opens hearings in San Francisco, police hose protesters down the City
Hall steps with 31 arrests; genesis of the film “Operation Abolition,” made by
HUAC but so “camp” it became a recruiting film for the new left. (Goines;
Gitlin Rorabaugh)
Spring: Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) launches a youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA)
(O’Brien)
June 30: The Congo wins
independence from Belgium under left-wing leader Patrice Lumumba. (Second Cold
War; Almanac)
July: Sudden recall of 1,390
Soviet advisers, academics and engineers from China, taking blueprints and
plans with them; 343 contracts and 257 scientific and technical projects are
scrapped as a result. (FEER/ Revisionism; Viewpoint Vol. 3 No. 3; Schurmann)
August
27: Mob of whites attack desegregation demonstrators in Monroe, North Carolina,
where armed self-defense advocate Robert F. Williams heads NAACP chapter.
Williams is charged with kidnapping a white couple, flees to Cuba, lives there
until 1966, then goes to China, then in 1968-69 goes to Tanzania and returns to
the U.S. September 12, 1969. During this period he continues to publish the Crusader - which he had launched while
in the U.S. - promoting revolutionary nationalism and armed struggle. James
Forman, who had come from Chicago with other freedom riders to support the
movement, is present in Monroe. (Carson; SalesJr; ; Ahmad in Black Scholar
May-June 1978; Guardian, April 26, 1972 & September 27, 1969)
September
19-October 13: U.N. General Assembly Session attended by top leaders of most of
the socialist countries. Khrushchev addresses the assembly on September 23 and
again on September 28, where he pounds his shoe on the table and utters his
widely publicized “we will bury you” remarks (he means economically, but the
image popularized in the West drops out this point). Fidel Castro also attends
the Assembly, but rather than stay at a fancy downtown New York Hotel he and
the Cuban delegation stay in Harlem at facilities arranged by Malcolm X then
still with the Nation of Islam. The Cubans receive an enthusiastic reception in
Harlem, Fidel and Malcolm hold a well-publicized two-hour meeting at the
Theresa Hotel. (Century; SalesJr.)
November
8: John F. Kennedy beats Vice-President Richard Nixon in a close contest for
the presidency. (Almanac)
November
6-30: Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers Parties in Moscow, issues the “Moscow
Statement” frequently referred to in later Sino-Soviet polemics. Again, intense
struggle at the meeting, some of which only comes to light later. Liu Shaoqi is
the CPC’s delegate to the conference, and his inability to deflect Soviet
attacks on China (often by proxy through attacks on Albania) while China is in
the midst of grave difficulties - the famine following the Great Leap, along
with Soviet withdrawal of advisers - is, according to Schurmann, a
“humiliation” for him. (Polemic on the General Line; Century; Viewpoint Vol. 3
No. 3; Schurmann)
December
20: The National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam is officially
launched. (Schurmann; Century)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Universities and Left Review and The New
Reasoner merge in Britain to form New
Left Review, Stuart Hall is first editor. Later (1962-64) there is an
editorial and political change in NLR as Perry Anderson becomes editor and the
magazine becomes more distinctively (or perhaps “orthodox”) Marxist. (Hall-S;
MR October 1981; 1993 Resignation Statement in DCR-3)
The Folk Music Boom: Through
the late 1950s and early ‘60s Pete Seeger is kept from a mass audience - and
instead restricted to performing in left-wing enclaves - because of the
blacklist. But he (and the other members of the Weavers and others) are a large
if often behind-the-scenes influence in the growing popularity of folk music
via Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio and others. According to Gitlin,
folk music “was the main bridge between red-diaper babydom and the rest of
their generation.” (Gitlin)
ILWU, West Coast longshore
left-wing union led by Harry Bridges, negotiates the Modernization and
Mechanization (M&M) pact, allowing new technology into the industry in
return for lifetime job security for those already employed, pension benefits
and other items. (CrossRoads No. 27; Aronowitz in SR March-April 1979/reprinted
in Socialist Register 1980)
Malcolm X begins editing Mr. Muhammad Speaks to the Blackman
newspaper in Harlem, which soon becomes simply Muhammad Speaks and its offices move to Chicago. By the late 1960s
the paper has a 300,000-a-week circulation, and in the very early 1970s
650,000-a-week, second largest of any weekly newspaper in the U.S., and covers
many issues from an anti-imperialist perspective. Muhammad Speaks ceased publishing after the 1975 death of Elijah
Muhammad, his son Wallace renamed the paper The
Bilalian News and it folded up 3-4 years later. (Woodford in Underground)
Timothy Leary and assistant
Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now in 1971) begin psilopcybin research project at Harvard
and hold psychedelic sessions on their own outside the university. In 1961-62
he begins to use LSD. In May 1963 Albert and Leary are fired from Harvard and
they accelerate their campaign promoting widespread use of psychedelics.
(Acid)
Huge demonstrations of up to
a million people in Japan against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Pact;
the Japanese CP and the Zengakuren student federation are the central
mobilizers. Eisenhower is forced to cancel a proposed trip to Japan.
(Katsiaficas; Apology)
A decade of major demographic changes: world
population is 3 billion (an increase of 17% from 1950; U.S. population is 179.3
million (16% increase); between 1950 and 1960 U.S. suburbs grow 40 times faster
than central city areas, and automobile registrations increase by 22 million.
California population is 15.7 million (increase of 33%). (Goines chron; Davis
in NLR #143/Jan-Feb 1984)
And finally, there is an
overall “social revolution” in the nature of life pushed by urbanization,
technological change and its spread to previously unaffected areas, etc.:
Hobsbawm writes: “For 80% of humanity, the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the
1950s, or perhaps better still, they were felt
to end in the 1960s.”
Publication of The Great Contest: Russia and the West,
by Isaac Deutscher (London, Oxford University Press; U.S. Ballantine paperback
in 1961)
1961-
January 3: U.S. severs
relations with Cuba. (Che)
January 31: Eugene Dennis
dies. (Dennis)
February 12: Congolese Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba is murdered by a Belgian mercenary in the service of
secessionist leader Moise Tshombe, after being handed over to Tshombe by
President Joseph Kasavubu who had conducted a coup against Lumumba.
Joseph-Desiré Mobutu, who had become a CIA “asset” in 1959, gains a high post
in the army. Over the next several years mercenaries and Belgian troops are
employed by the regime to fight rebellions by followers of Lumumba. (Century;
Second Cold War; Barnet; Almanac; SF Examiner and SF Chronicle September 8,
1997 in BMOV-6)
March 1: President Kennedy
announces formation of the U.S. Peace Corps. (Goines chron)
March 13: Kennedy gives his
major speech announcing the Alliance for Progress for Latin America, which
includes some pressure on the most right-wing regimes and oligarchies for
reforms while acting as a cover for increased counterinsurgency programs and
the soon-to-come Bay of Pigs invasion. (Goodwin; Second Cold War)
April 17: Bay of Pigs
invasion, a failure by April 19; protests against the U.S. role on U.S. college
campuses. At Berkeley, Max Schachtman gives a speech giving qualified
endorsement to the invasion - he is opposed by the Berkeley YPSL chapter led by
Hal Draper. (Almanac, Isserman; Century; Che)
April: Bob Dylan, recently
arrived in New York, opens for John Lee Hooker at Gerde’s Fold City, makes a splash, is soon signed by Columbia
Records, and releases a series of albums that deeply affect popular music and
the emerging protest movements. (Rock & Roll; Gitlin)
May 4: First “freedom
riders” (sponsored by CORE) leave Washington, D.C. in two buses; on May 14 a
white mob in Anniston, Alabama burns
one of the buses and beats up the riders on both. The riders are beaten again
when they regroup and reach Birmingham the next day. CORE leaders discontinue
the freedom ride, but SNCC activists continue with further efforts, on May 20
riders including John Lewis are beaten in Montgomery. On May 21 1,000 Blacks
gathered in Martin Luther King’s First Baptist Church are besieged by a white
mob and it takes federal marshals and national guardsmen to protect those
inside. The Kennedy administration tries to get the protesters to stop and
“cool off”; its reluctance to protect
demonstrators or press for civil rights at home while proclaiming democratic
freedoms abroad has a major radicalizing impact on SNCC and others. A Freedom
Riders Coordinating Committee is formed by representatives of SNCC, CORE and
SCLC and in the following months hundreds ride and are arrested. The Interstate
Commerce Commission rules segregation in bus and train terminals is illegal on
September 22. (Carson; Gitlin)
August 13: “The Wall” goes
up in Berlin amid a simmering Berlin crisis. The crisis provided the climate for congressional
approval of new President Kennedy’s
plans for expansion of U.S. non-nuclear forces, as Kennedy and McNamara move to
establish a counter-guerrilla capacity in the armed forces and begin to direct
priorities toward anticipated interventions in the Third World. Major
influences on U.S. policy-makers are the 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution,
and then in 1962, the achievement of Algerian independence; Henry Kissinger is
one of the voices warning that without a buildup of counterinsurgency
capability the U.S. will not be able to win “limited wars” that cannot be
prevented by the threat of Massive Retaliation. (Almanac; Student Generation;
Gitlin; Century; Klare)
Late summer: The activist
National Indian Youth Council is founded by Clyde Warrior and others in Gallup,
New Mexico, among other activities it publishes a broadside entitled Americans Before Columbus.. (Hurricane;
Crazy Horse and COINTELPRO give other dates for the NIYC’s founding)
September 1-6: First Formal
Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade, with 25 countries participating. Over the
following decades the Non-Aligned Movement holds periodic Summits, conferences,
and various-level consultative meetings, as does its various sub-committees and
executive committee. The group is a major force in world politics in the later
1960s and the ‘70s, but declines after the mid-1980s. (Black Scholar December
1976; Century)
September-October: James
Forman goes to work at SNCC National Headquarters in Atlanta and a week later
agrees to become executive secretary (Carson)
October: 22nd Congress of
the CPSU, height of criticism of Stalin whose body is removed from the Lenin
mausoleum, new CPSU programme is adopted. Khrushchev also attacks Albanian
Party, Zhou Enlai walks out of the Congress, full dimensions of Sino-Soviet
split become apparent to U.S. communists. (Nove; Ignatin re: impact on POC;
Polemic on the General Line).
November 1: Some 50,000
women demonstrate around the country against the resumption of nuclear tests,
the beginning of the Women Strike for Peace organization, which reaches its
peak membership in 1963. (Gitlin; Left Encyclopedia)
December 16: First action by
Umkhonto we Sizwe, armed wing of the ANC. (Frontline Supplement January 19,
1987)
---------------------------------------------------
New Politics magazine, an advocate of
“third camp” socialism begins publication. It folds in 1978 and is revived in
1986. (Frontline, March 30, 1987)
Freedomways magazine, “A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement” is launched
(Freedomways, Fall 1961/Vol. 1. No. 3)
MPLA
militants attack the Luanda prison, launching the armed struggle in Angola that
in 1974-1976 will prove pivotal in the history of southern Africa and Portugal,
and also in the history of the New Communist Movement and international Maoism.
(LSM News No. 13)
The
Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) is founded in Nicaragua (NLR #164)
The
July 26th Movement and Popular Socialist Party (the traditional CP in Cuba)
join together to form the Communist Party of Cuba; the formal establishment of
a unified Marxist-Leninist Party takes place in 1965 and the First Congress in
1975. (Line of March No. 11)
Formation
of the Eritrean Liberation Front and launching of armed struggle “14 months
before Ethiopia’s formal annexation of Eritrea.” (MR June 1978)
Nasser issues widespread
nationalization decrees, turns to Soviet Union for economic help, especially in
the Aswan Dam project which is completed in 1964. (Storm)
Motown produces its first
major hits (Goines chron);
Founding of Amnesty
International by London lawyer Peter Benenson (Goines chron).
Publication of John Howard
Griffen, Black Like Me.
1962-
January
31: Under U.S. pressure the Organization of American States (OAS) votes to
expel Cuba. On February 3 Kennedy orders a total embargo on U.S. trade with
Cuba. The next day the Cubans issue the Second Declaration of Havana as a reply
to the OAS underlining Cuba’s support for revolutionary struggle throughout the
Americas. (Che)
February 16-17: Initiated by
Harvard’s Tocsin group, a coalition of peace organizations sponsors lobbying
and a demonstration opposing the resumption of nuclear testing at the White
House which draws 4,000-8,000, the largest White house demonstration since the
effort to stop the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953. Kennedy has his aides
bring an urn of hot coffee to the demonstrators marching in the snow. (Gitlin)
Spring: Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM) founded by a core of activists at Central State College in
Wilberforce, Ohio and others. The group was largely inspired by the ideas and
work of Robert F. Williams, had links to Malcolm X and played a role in pushing
SNCC toward more nationalist positions, Sales Jr. says an attempt to synthesize
a revolutionary nationalism on the basis of the ideas of Malcolm, Marx, Lenin
and Mao, Kelley says this was the “first Black Maoist-influenced organization
in history.” RAM published a bi-monthly called Black America and a newsletter RAM
Speaks. (SalesJr; Kelley; CrossRoads Sustainer Notes January/February 1992;
Ahmad in Black Scholar May-June 1978; Carson discusses RAM but says its
founding date is 1964; Nationalism says it is 1963).
June:
Port Huron “founding convention” of SDS, which approves and issues the most
widely read manifesto of the New Left, the Port
Huron Statement. In the aftermath, the executive committee of SDS’s
“parent” group, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) meets secretly, fires
SDS staffer Al Haber and changes the locks on the SDS office. A compromise is
soon worked out but the incident has lasting impact especially in shaping the
New Left’s image of “democratic socialism/social democracy.” (Sale; Isserman;
Gitlin)
July 1: Progressive Labor
Movement (later Party) is formed at a New York City gathering, led by people
who split/were expelled from the CPUSA; they had been publishing PL magazine since January. Key leaders:
Milt Rosen, Fred Jerome, Wally Linder, Mort Sheer, Bill Epton (PL Vol. 10, No.
1; Costello; O’Brien; Sale; Five Retreats)
July
3: Algerian independence struggle ends in victory; France transfers sovereignty
to the new republic (Almanac; Said in NLR #180)
July
23: Fourteen nation declaration on the neutrality of Laos is adopted in Geneva
in a great power attempt to defuse and control the fighting and crisis in that
country. In May an important base of the rightist forces had fallen to the
Pathet Lao and their allies; the Seventh fleet was dispatched to the Gulf of
Siam May 12, then a tripartite (neutralists, rightists and the leftist Pathet
Lao) coalition government was announced June 11, to be backed up by the
14-nation declaration. The country is effectively divided into different zones
of influence. (Schurmann)
September:
Revolution in North Yemen brings Nasserite forces to power on the borders of
Saudi Arabia and British-ruled South Yemen/Aden. (Second Cold War).
October
2: Riots at “Ole Miss” attempting to prevent James Meredith’s admission; it
takes federal troops to restore order. (Prize)
October 11: Pope John Paul XXIII
opens the Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) which holds four sessions,
continuing under Pope Paul VI after John Paul’s death on June 3, 1963. The
Council closes December 8, 1965. The Council’s pronouncements on human
development and social justice are a major spur to progressive Catholic
activism in the 1960s and 1970s, including the evolution of Liberation
Theology. (Boyte; Almanac; Century)
October 22-29: Height of the
Cuban Missile Crisis, which had begun to build in August. Kennedy gives his
speech announcing a “quarantine” of Cuba on October 22. Kennedy-Khrushchev
agreement - in which the Soviets have to back down and withdraw their missiles
from Cuba, though the U.S. does have to agree not to invade the island - ends
the crisis, which brought the world closer to nuclear war than any other
episode of the Cold War. (Second Cold War; Almanac; Gitlin; and many)
Fall:
Large-scale armed conflict on India-China border, Chinese accuse Soviets of
backing India (Polemic on the General Line)
December 15: First salvo in
the new round of the CPC’s polemics “against modern revisionism”: “Workers of All Countries, Unite, Oppose Our
Common Enemy!” (in Whence the Differences) The new round continues into and
through 1963 and until July 14, 1964. (The CPC does not mention CPSU by name
until after CPSU’s March 30, 1963 Open Letter.) See those years for details.
(Trial; Polemic on the General Line/Whence the Differences)
----------------------------------------------------------
“Turn” in POC toward hairsplitting doctrinairism and away from the
small amount of practice it had engaged in (Ignatin).
“Turning Point” (which had
changed its name in 1954 to the Communist League), only remnant of late-1940s
small “anti-revisionist” efforts to survive past 1950, folds up. (ARC45-50).
Workers World Party launches
Youth Against War and Fascism (Sale, p. 174) (O’Brien) credits YAWF with
holding the first anti-Vietnam War demonstration in the U.S. during this year;
but (Spoke) says the first organized demonstrations take place in August ’63
during the annual commemorations by U.S. pacifists of the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombings. (Sale; Spoke; O’Brien)
James and Grace Lee Boggs
lead a split from the Correspondence group and relaunch a new Correspondence with a different
viewpoint; Correspondence fades and in the 1970s James and Grace Lee Boggs
establish the National Organization for an American Revolution. The remaining
members of the pre-1961 Correspondence group, led by Martin Glaberman and
supported by C.L.R. James, change their name to Facing Reality. Facing Reality,
which published a newsletter Speak Out,
often carrying the writings of C.L.R. James, lasts until the 1970s. (James; MR
October 1993; Wald)
C. Wright Mills dies at age
45 of a heart attack. (Gitlin)
Publication of Michael
Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in
the United States (The Macmillan Company, New York, and then Penguin Books
in paperback); Rachel Carson, Silent
Spring (Boston, Houghton Mifflin), which is often credited with launching the
modern environmental movement. Also, first CPC explicit anti-CPSU polemic
(noted above); Conversations with Stalin,
by Milovan Djilas (New York, Harcourt); Doris Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook;
1963-
May
2: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birmingham campaign to end segregation in that city
takes off; in the buildup, in April, King wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
while in custody. Children and youth march on May 2 and again on May 3, when
police arrest 500 and disperse demonstrators with dogs and firehoses and
photographs attract attention across the nation and the world. More
demonstrations and arrests follow; a settlement that is a substantial victory
for the Civil Rights Movement is announced at the end of the week, but then a
racist bombing of Rev. A.D. King’s parsonage leads to confrontations and the
city threatens to explode. But the agreement holds and the Birmingham victory
is a watershed for King. (Parting the Waters)
June
11: Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death in Saigon to protest
religious persecution by the Diem government. (Fact Sheet; Goines chron)
June
11: Kennedy gives nationally televised speech on civil rights, at the mid-point
of a 10-week period after the Birmingham settlement in which there are 758
demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 cities. (for figures, see Parting the
Waters) Just after midnight that night, Medger Evers, Field Secretary of the
NAACP in Mississippi, is assassinated from ambush in Jackson and he dies in the
early morning hours of June 12. (Carson; King; Freedom; Parting the Waters)
June
14-17: Pine Hill (New York) Convention of SDS issues America and the New Era statement, the last broad, consensus
manifesto of the organization. (Gitlin; Sale)
June
22: Martin Luther King visits the White House, is warned to break all ties with
alleged communists Stanley Levinson and Jack O’Dell by Burke Marshall, then
Robert Kennedy, then President Kennedy himself. (Parting the Waters)
March-July: Height of open
polemics between the CPSU and CPC: CPSU Open
Letter to CPC March 30; CPC’s influential A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist
Movement June 14; and CPSU’s Open
Letter to Communists of the Soviet Union July 14. The CPC’s ideological
charges of “Khrushchev’s revisionism” in its June 14 Proposal center on the CPSU’s alleged deviations from
Marxism-Leninism on the questions “peaceful coexistence,” “peaceful
transition,” “peaceful competition,” the “state of the whole people” and the
“party of the whole people” (sometimes abbreviated as “the three peacefuls and
the two wholes”). CPC’s “nine comments” on the Open Letter begin September 6;
the first six appear in 1963, the others in 1964 ending July 14 (which see). In
the third comment the CPC argues that capitalism has been restored in
Yugoslavia, the first statement of theirs on how a socialist country could
become a capitalist country. (Trial; Polemic on the General Line/Whence the
Differences; Myth). In direct party-to-party meetings attempting to bridge the
gaps, Deng Xiaoping, then Secretary General of the CPC, heads a delegation that
visits Moscow in June-July; Schurmann argues that a central goal of his trip
was to try to dissuade the Soviets from signing the Test Ban Treaty with the
U.S. and instead prioritizing an alliance with China above detente with U.S.
imperialism, a goal that was not met. This proves to be the last formal contact
between high-level leaders of the CPC and CPSU until 1989. (NYT/2-20-97; Deng).
While Sino-Soviet talks are in progress, and just before a meeting of the
U.S.-USSR and Britain, the CPSU publishes its second Open Letter. (Polemic on
the General Line)
August 5: Test Ban Treaty
(often called the Partial Test Ban) banning aboveground nuclear tests signed in
Moscow by U.S., USSR and Britain. China refuses to sign and the Soviet decision
to sign the pact is a key factor in the Sino-Soviet split; right after the
signing, on August 15, the Chinese release a statement for the first time
revealing the secret nuclear-sharing pact with the Soviets of 1957 and the
Soviet unilateral abrogation of the agreement in 1959. (quoted in Schurmann)
Along with John Kennedy’s American University speech in early June saying “we
must re-examine our attitude toward the Cold War...” and inauguration of the
Washington-Moscow “hot line” on August 30, this is the high point of the what
the Medvedevs called the first of the “interludes of comparative sanity” in the
Cold War, “both initiated on the Soviet side,” this one “Khrushchev’s policy of
peaceful coexistence (1955-63).” Halliday’s slightly different periodization
says Cold War I was from 1946 to 1953 (Stalin’s death, truce in Korea); Period
of Oscillatory Antagonism 1953-1969; Detente, 1969 (with Nixon’s ascent to the
presidency)-1979; Cold War II 1979 to 1986-87. (Medvedevs in NLR #130/Nov-Dec
1981; Century; Isserman; Gitlin; Halliday in NLR #180/March-April 1990; Second
Cold War; Schurmann)
August 9: Formation of the
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) after a faction including Robert Mugabe
breaks away from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union led by Joshua Nkomo (Black
Scholar September 1978)
Early August: Mao ZeDong
issues his “Statement Supporting the Afro-Americans in Thier Just Struggle
Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism”; according to Kelley, Robert
F. Williams happened to be in China at this time and was a catalyst for Mao
issuing this statement; other sources identify Williams as a catalyst for Mao’s
1968 statement in support of the Afro-American struggle - see April 1968 below.
(Kelley)
August
27: W.E.B. Du Bois dies in Ghana at 96. (CrossRoads No. 28)
August
28: 250,000 demonstrate in DC for civil rights, Martin Luther King gives “I
Have a Dream” speech, John Lewis speaking for SNCC is forced to modify parts of
his speech under tremendous pressure. (Carson; Freedom; Reunion; Prize;
Marable)
September
15: Four young Black girls killed in bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham. (Prize)
September: SDS National Council meeting in Bloomington,
Indiana finalizes plans for ERAP - the Economic Research and Action Project,
which sends organizers - including many of SDS’ leaders - into the cities to
organize the poor. Tom Hayden, whose paper with Carl Wittman “Toward an
Interracial Movement of the Poor?” is influential, goes to Newark. (Sale;
Reunion)
November
1: Military junta backed by U.S. overthrows Diem regime in South Vietnam, Diem
and his brothers are executed. (Fact Sheet)
November
22: John Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson
becomes President. Malcolm X says that the assassination represents the
“chickens coming home to roost” in white America, allegedly the reason Malcolm
is suspended from the Muslims in December 1963. (Almanac; Allen)
Fall:
Grassroots Conference held in Detroit, Malcolm X gives his later famous “Speech
to the Grassroots Conference,” RAM and its larger network, the Black Liberation
Front of the U.S.A., plays a prominent role. (CrossRoads Sustainer Notes
January/February 1992)
December:
British hand over power in Kenya to government led by Jomo Kenyatta, after
brutal repression had defeated the earlier, more militant and radical Mau Mau
rebellion of 1952-1960. (MR May 1985)
----------------------------------------------------------
The
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is established in Washington, D.C. (various
IPS-published materials in BMOV-7; Barnet)
Reunification
of most of the world Trotskyist movement, which had been split into two main
tendencies in 1953, into the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
The U.S. Socialist Workers Party decision to participate in this reunification,
which meant uniting with the “Pabloists” who allegedly had revised classical
Trotskyism, provokes the formation of an opposition Revolutionary tendency
within the SWP, which itself splits and whose members, leaving and expelled
from the SWP, form the Spartacist League and the Workers League. (Fourth;
self-published material in D-5)
Founding
Conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
(Black Scholar, Jan-Feb 1978)
U.S.
Army Caribbean School in Panama, founded in 1949, is renamed the U.S. Army
School of the Americas and a new curriculum is introduced emphasizing training
in counterinsurgency. The School - dubbed by the left the “School of the
Assassins” is later moved to Fort Benning Georgia. (Klare)
Publication
of two books that will have a huge impact on the decade: (1) The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz
Fanon (New York: Grove Press) Fanon had died of leukemia at 36 [or 37] in 1961
at a U.S. military hospital in Washington, D.C. (MR May 1969); An MR October
1975 bibliography cites the publication date as 1968, while the Black Scholar July-August 1986 says the
book appeared in French in 1961 and English in 1965); (2) Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell), a key salvo in beginning
the “second wave” women’s movement;
Also publication of Clark
Kerr’s (President of UC) Uses of the
University with all its juicy quotes concerning the role of the University
in serving government and business (Goines chron); James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro
Worker’s Notebook (Monthly Review Press, New York); Open polemics continue
between CPSU and CPC, including CPC’s A
Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement
(noted above); The Making of the English
Working Class, by E.P. Thompson (London) - the Vintage edition paperbound
(Vintage, Random House, New York) widely distributed in the U.S. appears in
1966;
1964-
January
23: Adoption of 24th Amendment to the Constitution ending the poll tax. (Goines
chron)
January:
President Johnson declares a “War on Poverty,” it and the concept of a “Great
Society” are themes of his public appearances throughout the spring, the first
anti-poverty legislation is passed the day after the Tonkin Gulf resolution is
approved in August. (Pillar; Wei)
January: The Beatles revive
rock & roll as I Want To Hold Your
Hand hits the charts. In February they go on their first U.S. tour and on
April 4 Beatles records hold the top 5 positions on the Billboard charts. (Top 40; Goines chron)
February 1: A new program of
covert warfare against North Vietnam goes into effect. On March 17, a new
National Security Memorandum (NSAM 273) is approved that substantially expands
the scope of U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia from helping the South
Vietnamese government win its war to a full-scale U.S. defense of the country
and the region. A right-wing coup disrupted the tripartite coalition government
in Laos in April, and though formally the coalition is patched together in fact
the country is now divided into two sides with the “neutralist” government
serving as a figurehead for the right. Fighting within Laos intensifies and
some neutralists, unhappy with the new government arrangement, go over to the
Pathet Lao. These developments, in turn, lead to the beginning of U.S. bombing
of Laos on May 17, which continued right down to February 1973. The
administration tries to suppress the news of the strikes but the information is
semi-public and published in, for example, Aviation
Week and Space Technology magazine June 15, 1964. On June 6, 1964 the first
U.S. plane is shot down over the Plaine des Jarres. (Schurmann)
February/March:
Nationwide one-day boycotts of school to protest segregation and poor quality
of education; over 20,000 Black students boycott in Boston; 464,000 Black and
Puerto Rican students boycott nationwide (Goines says on March 3)
(Hunter-Green; Goines chron).
March
8: Malcolm X formally breaks with the Nation of Islam. (By early ‘60s, NOI had
grown to 200 temples, over 50,000 members and many more sympathizers). On March
12 he announces the formation of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. On April 13 (elsewhere
SalesJr. says April 22) he leaves for his pivotal hajj to Mecca. On June 28 the
founding rally of his new organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity
(OAAU) is held. Bill Epton among others is introduced to the rally as an
invited guest. Malcolm goes to Africa again in the fall. (SalesJr.)
March:
Conference at Yale calls for antiwar actions which take place on May 2,
including a march of 1,000 in New York to the U.N. PL initiates the “May 2nd
Movement” (M2M) out of this action. In the spring, PL launches a weekly
newspaper, Challenge. (Sale; Five
Retreats; PL Vol. 10, No. 1)
March:
First “fish-in” for Indian fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest, activists
of the NIYC recruit Marlon Brando to participate and he does. (Hurricane)
May
1-4: Fist National Afro-American Student Conference on Black Nationalism held in
Nashville, initiated by RAM-linked Afro-American Student movement (Ahmad in
Black Scholar May-June 1978)
May
28: Palestinian National Council proclaims the establishment of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jerusalem. This is largely an initiative of
the Arab governments who hope to control the emerging Palestinian guerrilla
movements, such as the Arab Nationalist Movement (founded in 1953 by George
Habash, and later to give rise to the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine/PFLP) and Fatah, formed in 1958. (Roots; Palestine)
June
19-21: W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America, CPUSA-initiated youth and student
group, is founded as a national organization at a convention in San Francisco.
(Fighting; O’Brien; MLQ Vol. II, No. 2)
Summer: Mississippi Summer,
hundreds of white students go south, Robert Moses of SNCC, who had spearheaded
earlier voter registration efforts in McComb and elsewhere in Mississippi,
plays the leading role. Civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner
and James Chaney are killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 22 (Prize
says 21), their bodies are discovered August 4. (On October 20, 1967, 7
Klansmen - of 17 charged, are convicted on federal charges, the first-ever
convictions by a Mississippi jury for racist crimes.) In the aftermath of
Mississippi Summer comes one of the most pivotal experiences for the Black
freedom movement, the entire anti-racist movement and the new left: the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge to the segregationist official
delegation is rebuffed at the Atlantic City Democratic Convention in late
August, with Hubert Humphrey and other whites with long liberal and civil
rights credentials playing hatchet-man roles for, or at best caving in to,
Lyndon Johnson. During the battle, Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the
Credentials Committee is broadcast to the country in network television;
Johnson tries to prevent it by calling an impromptu press conference. (Carson;
Goines chron; Prize; Gitlin; Freedom; Pillar)
Summer:
Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters careen around the country in a bus labeled
“Further” driven by beat hero Neal Cassady. By fall 1965 Kesey and friends are
sponsoring “Acid Tests” linking up with the Hell’s Angels and generally shaking
up the “counterculture,” and serving as the topic for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New
York, Bantam, 1969). (Acid; Gitlin)
July 2: Civil Rights Act of
1964 passed in Congress; it is signed by President Johnson on July 3; later it
is upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Spoke; Goines chron; Prize says bill is
signed on the 2nd)
July 13: Opening of the Rep