Political Activists
- Cesar Chavez was the spokesperson for migrant workers who founded the United Farm
Workers and led a five-year strike against California grape growers in 1965. During the
1960s, he helped organize Michigan's migrant workers to demand better working and living
conditions.
- Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus
seat to white riders in 1955. Her action sparked a major Civil Rights demonstration, a
boycott of the Montgomery bus lines. Parks' friends, fearing for her safety in Montgomery,
urged her to move to Detroit, which she did in 1957.
- Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in 1925, grew up in Lansing. Preaching black
identity, pride and autonomy, Malcolm X talked about racial discontent in our society and
wrote a book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was assassinated in 1965. A
historical marker stands at the site of Malcolm X's boyhood home on South Logan Street in
Lansing.
- John A. Sinclair of Ann Arbor was convicted on July 26, 1969, and sentenced to
9.5 to 10 years in prison for giving two marijuana cigarettes to undercover police
officers. In late 1968, he had cofounded the White Panthers, a radical youth group that
endorsed the Black Panthers.
- The University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus was the center of protests and unrest in
Michigan during the 1960s. Robert Alan Haber, Sharon Jeffrey and Bob Ross
created the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) out of the Student League for
Industrial Democracy (SLID) and the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) in 1960.
- Tom Hayden was a reporter at The Michigan Daily campus newspaper, at the
University of Michigan. He drafted a political manifesto for the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) and eventually became the president of SDS.
Learn more about 1960s events and people in our 1960s links list.
Return to A
Time to Question
|
