Things Done Changed: America in the ’90s

Chapter Three: The Culture War Begins

Complete with its own urban uprising of the sort not seen since the 1960s, the ’90s can be seen as a sort of epilogue to the ’60s, or even an extension of that momentous and tumultuous mid-century decade. The ’90s sees the completion of the great changes initiated in the ’60s (and during the civil rights era generally). School integration, for instance, doesn’t finally reach its peak level until just before the decade’s start, in 1988, 34 years after Brown v Board of Education and two decades after a series of Supreme Court mandates were issued to finally force integration in the South. Thus, as the decade opened, America was concluding only its first generation of formally and legally free black citizens with democratic rights. In not insignificant ways, the America defined by its democratic and liberal ideals doesn’t begin until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. After more than two centuries of slavery followed by another century of Southern apartheid, integration was still something of an experiment as the ’90s opened.

The Los Angeles rebellions of 1965 (left) and 1992 (right). The 1965 violence claimed 34 lives, while the 1992 upheaval resulted in more than 50 fatalities, making it the deadliest urban insurrection in American history.

In many ways, Sixties-era changes don’t take their full effect until the ’90s, whether…