1968: The Year That Rocked the World

What was unique about 1968 was that people were rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only that desire to rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established order, and a profound distaste for authoritarianism in any form.

In the 1950s computer manufacturers had estimated that six computers could serve the needs of the entire United States. By January 1968 fifty thousand computers were operating in the country, of which fifteen thousand had been installed in the past year.

With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate.

But the most quoted and remembered line of the report was “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And that was exactly what was happening in the militant movements of the Left as well. Mirroring society, black and white activists were increasingly separated.

On the first day of the year, President Johnson launched an appeal to the American public to curtail plans for foreign travel in order to help reduce a growing deficit in international payments, which he blamed in part on the fact that Americans had been going overseas in increasing numbers.

Four historic factors merged to create 1968: the example of the civil rights movement, which at the time was so new and original; a generation that felt so different and so alienated that it rejected all forms of authority; a war that was hated so universally around the world that it provided a cause for all the rebels seeking one; and all of this occurring at the moment that television was coming of age but was still new enough not to have yet become controlled, distilled, and packaged the way it is today.

On the second day of 1968, Robert Clark, a thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher, took his seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives without a challenge, the first black to gain a seat in the Mississippi State Legislature since 1894.

When the American civil rights movement became split in 1968 between the advocates of nonviolence and the advocates of Black Power, the two sides could come together in agreement on opposition to the Vietnam War.

The word started out in 1968 as a term for black militants, and by the end of the year it became the preferred term for the people. Negro had become a pejorative applied to those who would not stand up for themselves.

One university president, remarkably free of today’s rules of political correctness, complained that graduate schools would now be limited to “the lame, the halt, the blind, and the female.”