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 in politics, culture, or education. As explosive and volatile as the ’60s were, there is still significant lag in how a population of hundreds of millions changes. All the fire of ’60s might be thought of as the lighting of a fuse whose detonation wouldn’t occur until the ’90s. This is seen clearly in the political sphere. After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first of two acts to dismantle the legal apparatus of Southern apartheid, President Lyndon Johnson famously turned to one his aides and lamented, “We have lost the South for a generation.” And while he was correct that the Democrats, having taken charge on establishing civil and voting rights for black Americans, would lose the half of their party comprised of white Southerners, he was wrong on the time frame. The Republican “Southern Strategy” to lure angry white Southerners away from their Democratic Party home began soon after the landmark civil rights legislation, but Republicans did not truly conquer the South for a…