1964
Civil Rights Act signed
Lyndon Johnson, who had spent a career as a Southern senator, pushed through the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history, outlawing segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment. He told an aide it would lose the Democrats the South for a generation. He was right, and he signed it anyway.
Mandela sent to Robben Island
At the end of the Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela told a Pretoria courtroom he was prepared to die for the ideal of a free society. The judge sentenced him to life. On Robben Island, off Cape Town, he broke rocks in a quarry and studied law by candle. He would spend twenty-seven years in prison and walk out to become president.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
After murky reports of a North Vietnamese attack on a US destroyer, Congress gave Lyndon Johnson a blank check to use military force in Southeast Asia. Within a year American combat troops were pouring into Vietnam. The resolution passed the House unanimously. The war it authorized would become the great division of a generation.
China tests its first atomic bomb
At a desert test site in Xinjiang, the People's Republic of China detonated its first atomic bomb, becoming the fifth nuclear power in the world. Mao had wanted the bomb for a decade. The test shocked the Soviets, who had pulled out their nuclear scientists, and the Americans, who had considered a preemptive strike. China was now a nuclear state.
Beatles hit America
Seventy-three million Americans watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan on a February Sunday, the largest television audience for a single program to that date. The British Invasion was on. Within a year Beatlemania had reshaped pop music, hairstyles, youth culture, and what a band could mean. Rock had become the century's folk music.
Cigarettes declared dangerous
The US Surgeon General released a report definitively linking smoking to lung cancer, heart disease, and death. A quarter of American adults smoked. Warning labels went on packs; advertising retreated from television. Over the next four decades the rate would plunge. Public health had scored a rare direct hit on an addictive industry.
Harlem riots
After an off-duty white police officer shot a fifteen-year-old Black boy in Harlem, six nights of rioting swept the neighborhood. One died, over a hundred were injured, five hundred arrested. It was the first of a long series of urban uprisings that would sweep American cities through the mid-1960s, exposing the limits of civil-rights legislation.