1960s Counterculture

Counterculture of the 1960s There were several protests and movements that took place during the 1960s which challenged the principles and values of their society. These protests ultimately gave rise to the thought that the West was not as moral or concerned with the matters of social justice as it claimed to be. Those who were involved with these movements and protests ultimately sparked the development of a new perspective on human nature, and a new model of social justice. This can be seen in Martin Luther Kings, Letter from Birmingham Jail, which was written during The Civil Rights Movement, Frantz Fanons, The Wretched of the Earth, which analyses the nature of Colonialism, and Simone de Beauvoirs, The Second Sex. These three texts challenge the values of the West during the 1960s, eventually resulting in a major shift in the Western society, which once insisted that it valued matters of social justice when in fact, it attempted to diminish them. The Civil Rights Movement was undeniably one of the most significant movements that took place in the 1960s in which black men and women pressed for their independence and equal rights in the United States. Mainly through non violent protests and boycotts, these coloured Americans confronted the conventional Western belief that all men were equal, and drew attention to the immoral and unjust dominant ideologies of Western society. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King indicates that unjust laws exist within the American society, displaying their lack of importance for social justice. To challenge the laws of segregation which separated the black men and women from the white, Martin Luther King refers to St Augustines statement that “an unjust law is no law at all” and that “any law that degrades human personality is unjust” (Haberman, 36). Due to these laws that were supported by the legal system of the United States, the Negro community was forced to undergo a great amount of injustice from the

Cited: Haberman, Arthur The Modern Age: Ideas in Western Civilization. 1987. The making of the modern age. Toronto Ontario Canada: Gage Educational Publishing Company, pp. 440 449, 462-496. Print.