A few years ago, while still a student at the University of Calgary, I came across a class called “History of the 60s” while I was choosing classes for the upcoming year. I was a History minor and the period of the 60s seemed an interesting enough time period to warrant an entire semester’s worth of material.
It’s difficult to try and piece together the theme of that decade. Like most decades throughout human history, a lot happened, but viewed in a vacuum with the decade that preceded it and almost every decade after it, the 60s packed an embarrassment of riches in the historical event category.
Specifically in the United States, the 60s are most commonly defined as the decade of the protest movement. The fight for Civil Rights was in full swing throughout the entirety of the decade, bookend by the Vietnam War and the protests against that.
History books that deal with the time period feature some pretty incredible photos from the Civil Rights Movement. Photos of Alabama State Police dogs mauling civil rights advocates. Photos of white supremacists harassing people at lunch counters or on buses. Photos of student protesters being attacked by police for taking a stand against the Vietnam War.
It goes on and on. One of the more famous photos from the decade was caught in Vietnam in 1963 by American journalist Malcolm Browne, who managed to snap a photo of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Qung Duc burning to death at a busy street corner in Saigon.
The monk’s death was a form of protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the Roman Catholic president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. The photo became instantly famous and Browne would win the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for it. US president John F. Kennedy said of the photo “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
Self-immolation, the act of setting oneself on fire, is perhaps the most extreme form of protest that someone can perform.
The difference between the protests that set the 60s apart from the other decades of the 20th or 21st centuries, is that the causes were, without doubt or argument, righteous.
It has become clear in recent years that not all protests have been imbued with the same sense of righteousness.
