Must we be nostalgic about the 1950’s? Hardly the Golden Age many make it out to be. If we turn over the shiny stone, there were more than a few creepy-crawlers underneath…
James Dean created a character who reflected the earliest stirrings of an emerging disaffection among the youth of America with their growingly affluent and materialistic parents. It was not really a lack of communication that was the culprit, but what was perceived as a lack of values: a status quo of injustice on many levels, and the wasted opportunity of dialogue and change following the tragedies of World War II morphing into the emotional freeze of the Cold War. The rebel without a cause was evolving into a rebel with a great number of causes and Dean was mushrooming into increasing numbers of like minded individuals such as the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights movement; the backlash that had been pent up with Senator Joseph McCarthy, HUAC and numerous other obstacles that were like brick walls, a citadel to keep fresh water as ideas out of the mainstream consciousness.
—Autherine Lucy and NAACP attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Arthur Shore outside Federal Court in Birmingham during her struggle to integrate the University of Alabama. February, 1956.—Read More:http://www.crmvet.org/images/imgeyes.htm
So, in a sense, the James Dean character might be used as an objective correlative to sum up the 1950’s, for more than anything else it was a decade of beginnings and germinations, of isolated instances and tentative moments that were enormously to multiply and expand in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And because air wouldn’t be let out of the balloon in a controlled manner, the unmasking of America process became synonymous with extreme radical movements; the Abbie Hoffman’s, Haydens, Cleaver’s, Black Panthers, and thousands of wannabees that discredited an integration of fresh perspectives.
—1961, Freedom Riders Julia Aaron and David Dennis sit aboard an interstate bus as they and 25 other civil rights activists are escorted by Mississippi National Guardsmen on a violence-marred trip between Montgomery, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi. Originally published in the June 2, 1961, issue of LIFE – Photo by Paul Schutzer—Read More:http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/iconic-images-of-human-rights-violations-75-freedom-riders/
On December 5, 1955, the African Americans of Montgomery, Alabama, under th leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, began a boycott of the city,s segregated public bus system, a seemingly local black protest against white injustice, severe inequality, that grew in the 1960’s, of course, into a massive movement throughout the country for African American civil rights that in one way or another altered the lives of millions. The 1950’s may this be seen as a time of calm before the storm, a period of surface tranquillity beneath which all sorts of major problems were,like undetected diseases, left to grow insidiously. ( to be continued)…
–USA. Arkansas. Little Rock. 1957. Reporter interviewing one of the “Little Rock Nine.”
Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas was set to begin the 1957 school year desegregated. The Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, defied the Federal Court’s decision in the case Brown v.The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that school segregation was unconstitutional and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the first nine African American students, the “Little Rock Nine,” from entering the school. In the ensuing crisis an injunction was issued against Governor Faubus and the 9 students returned to school. But this time they were met by a angry mob of townspeople who prevented them from remaining at school. Finally after many diplomatic efforts President Eisenhower intervened and dispatched 1,000 paratroopers and 10, 000 National Guardsmen to Little Rock. The Little Rock Nine finished the school year under federal protection.—Read More:http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=SearchDetailPopupPage&VBID=2K1HZONI2BSM9&PN=1&IID=2S5RYDWVVXXL
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