what were the 60's like?(ages 52 and older only)?

Question

where did you live?
do you remember anything about the assassination of jfk?
What were some events or experiences taking place in your community during the civil rights movement?
Describe your memories of life during the veitnam war?
What were women fighting for during this time?
What were the problems of minorities in your community? was there segregation in you area?
Anything else would help too! thank you!

Answer 1

Do you want an answer or a book?? Ask one question at a time. This is NOT Twenty Questions!!

Chow!!

Answer 2

Born in "55. Grew up in Charlotte, NC and Wilmington DE.
I was in the principal's office when the principal annouced that the President had been shot and school was dismissed. Everywhere the TV was on with Walter Cronkite, tears in his eyes, announcing the President was dead. Jack Ruby shot Oswald inside the jail on TV. School was cancelled for several days. I remember the funeral procession in Washington, D.C. with the horse with the boots reversed and no rider. The casket was on an old wagon. JohnJohn stepped out and saluted. Jackie was so beautiful in her black veil. Caroline held her hand.
During the civil rights movements there were "riots" in our city. No more segregation. Busing integrated the schools. There was a lot of hate. The National Guard occupied our city for months. The radio was always on.
In junior high we wore black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War. We almost got kicked out when we tried to have a sit in. Teachers would stop class and talk about the war.
Women who had been demonstrating against the war, for civil rights, started demonstrating for their own rights. Unfortunately what they showed on TV was bra burning. So we stopped wearing bras, using makeup, shaving. We had group meetings on abortion and how it should be legal and safe. We didn't want to be "owned" by men in inequal marriages. We wanted equality in pay. We started our own businesses,
We used to go to the parks in the summer and there would be concerts and love-ins all day and night. Everyone shared and accepted one another. We just listened to each other. I had the term white but I came from a white culture. We would "dig" black people.
We also went to folk festivals, the precursor to Woodstock and the Monterrey Jazz Festival. Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, and all the old-timey black blues guitar players and mountain fiddler like Doc Watson would be there. We'd go to the firehouse to eat pancakes in the morning.

Answer 3

I live in Canada.
I was in Grade 8 when JFK was assasinated. The nun who was the principal came running into the room and made the announcement. We all immediately dropped on our knees and started saying the rosary (to no avail).
The civil rights movement was always on the news, but we didn't have segregation here. I did think the marchers were very brave.
There were a lotof young guys who came here to dodge the draft.
The sixties was a great time to grow up in!

Answer 4

Lived in St. Petersburg FL
I was let out of school early on the day JFK was shot
Too young to be aware of community events
Vietnam war scenes on TV every night. Bombs blowing up, lots of napalm.
Don't recall much of women's rights fights.
I lived in all white neighborhood which was common back then.
I remember the home made bomb shelters, a friend of my dad had one is his back yard during the Cuban missile crisis.
Lots of hippies around with long hair.

Answer 5

I lived at home in a family of 7 kids, so was on my own a lot to fend for my self. The tail fins on cars were disapearing into realities of cold war life, post duck and tuck era. Middle class, had what was considered enough and never quite enough. JFK was a shock etched in my memory, I watched it unfold on TV that day, tragic. There were a few blacks and lots of tolerence to the point of elevating them as tokens to demonstrate we were tolerent, but it didn't matter much to my friends and I, some of whom were black. I studied the Viet war issues and decided I would refuse to go, but drew a high number and still wanting to give service to our country I wentr to work in human services. Left home before I graduated and had to get a GED. Lived on my own early on and made it work but it was tough. Lived on the side of a high mountain with color blind friends and neighbors sharing what we had. Played music with up and goming greats and became a teacher in a school with a Black Director and integrated staff, we all worked together. I think the 'race card' was played as an after thought to the reality I lived through. I had friends not come home from the war and some not all in one piece. Come in she said and hold me, shelter from the storm...

Answer 6

mid - west -- heard about the assassination on radio at work so the court house closed. lived in a predominately white neighborhood but the area I lived in treated them with respect. it was hell during the Nam war. friends and family fighting and getting killed then getting no respect from the majority of people who ran off to Canada. the mid west didn't suffer much from the hippie movement as we were to far removed from the West/East coast.

Answer 7

My mother was walking me down Tremont Street across from the Boston Common when we saw a group of people in a crowd in the 'Common' listening to two black people speaking, a black guy and a black girl.

Because this type of public gathering was new and different back in 1961 especially with black people, since there wasn't that many black Americans in Boston back then, out of curiosity my mother took me across the street to the 'Common' and we both stood with the crowd of 'hippies' listening to the black activists speak for about half an hour.

Then we left. Later on in the day we found out that the two black speakers in Boston Common were Angela Davis and Martin Luther King Jr.

As the 60s progressed Vietnam was in full swing and always in the newspapers. Vietnam vets were always coming back home to my neighborhood. By 1968 Black riots were taking place all over the country and blacks started to move into Boston by the droves. Blacks moved into the beautiful neighborhoods of Roxbury & Mattappan and turned them into crime ridden ghettoes that are unsafe to this very day. My aunts and uncles had to move out of those areas because of the black crime. To this day the Afro-American is the most racist person I've ever met.

They stopped corporal punishment in the Boston Public Schools in 1967, which meant that I got slapped, punched, or caned (rattaned or 'rat-handed') by school teachers for seven years for the high felony of giggling in class. In the 6th grade Choate Burnham school (now a condominium) the Principle slapped this cute little girl so hard she flew across the room. I think she giggled in class or some minor thing. She ran out of class screaming her head off with a big red hand print on her face. About less than an hour later her shipyard worker father came into class and beat the heck out of the principle right in front of the whole class. But generally speaking your parents would hit you harder when you got home for getting hit by the teacher, but that was outlawed in 1967.

About 1969 I took the train to Harvard Square where all the hippies were always protesting the Vietnam war, but that one day there was a big commotion. I saw John Wayne in an armored personnel carrier driving down the boulevard in front of the Harvard Coop in some sort of parade.

The rock 'n roll music of the '60s was probably the best thing about that time period, the rock 'n roll was great. Women were ironing their hair straight, wearing dungarees, and going bra-less under their 'T' shirts. Wearing colored 'T'shirts was new and different. Wearing dungarees, or blue jeans, was really radical. A kid in school, the Patrick F. Gavin, wore 'dungies' to class and got escorted out of the school by the headmaster, Mr. McDonough - blue jeans were that radical then.

I did not like what the guys were doing in the '60, the teens and 20 year old men were growing their hair and beards long, not taking baths, smoking dope, and wearing loose fitting 'women's clothes'(bell bottoms, palsley shirts, etc.). It was also the first time that movies had to be rated 'X' since a lot of nudity, sex, violence, and vulgarity was taking place unchecked in the movies: "I Am Curious Yellow", "Prudence and the Pill"; "Easy Rider", and a lot of other 'shockers' for that time.

Also, a lot of the 'kids' who hung out in Harvard Square through 1961-1969 where Vietnam vets who had a year or more of combat experience by the time they were 19, 20, and 21 years old. In the '60s you joined the Marine Corp at 17, got sent to combat for a year, came back to Boston at 19 or 20 with a year of combat experience and hung out in the 'Square' smoking dope. Today in 2007 when I cut through Harvard Square none of those 19 or 20 year old kids have ever had a job let alone seen combat like some of those teenagers or twenty year olds back in 1968 or 1969.

Answer 8

The woman below gives a pretty good description of the 60's.

Answer 9

If you can remember the 60s then you didnt really live during it. (stoner philosophy)