| Counterculture
Timeline: Civil Rights Battles 1954-1959 |
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| Date | Context | Counterculture Events | The Arts | The Period | ||||||||||
| -- The generation -- | ||||||||||||||
| 1954 1st NY & 1st Detroit |
Feb 3 - First innoculations
for polio Thorazine invented - first
major tranquilizer |
UK: "Teddy
Boys" April - Television covers Army-McCarthy hearings, with Edward R. Murrow; McCarthy is censured by Senate May 17 - Brown v Board of Education of Topeka: Supreme Court strikes down `seperate but equal' doctrine, outlawing segregation in public schools Oct - Eli Lilly Co? succeeds in artificially synthesizing LSD Fender introduces Stratocaster guitar Simon Rodia completes Watts Towers, Los Angeles The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach is a center for jazz Ginsberg moved to San Francisco and took a room around the corner from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop; he joined with Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, and met Peter Orlovsky, who became his longtime companion. |
Hank Ballard & the Midnighters:
Work With Me Annie a closet hit |
1954 |
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1955 1st & 2nd |
January
1 - U.S. begins training South Vietnamese army Military 40 billion out of total U.S. budget of 62 billion April 18 - Albert Einstein dies First national marketing of
McDonalds (by Ray Kroc at Des Plaines, Illinois) |
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti (2003):
Caffe Trieste started after [we started City Lights Books]. And that was
the first real European- style cafe. Tosca existed then, but Tosca had its
famous cappuccino machine that makes cappuccino without coffee. Papa Gianni
Giotta came from Trieste with his family. He was a poor fisherman, not in
Trieste, in Ischia, and he started the Caffe Trieste in about '55. And that's
where poets started hanging out. It's still pretty much the way it was.
They're still singing Italian family opera on Saturday afternoons. . " |
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Jan 22 First "Poets' Follies",
San Francisco April 29 - countries meet in
Bandung, Indonesia to form the Non-Aligned Movement - beginning |
May - Davy Crockett song (Bill
Hayes version) tops best seller charts; other versions also in Top Ten spring - Kerouac: "Jazz
of the Beat Generation" in New World Writing |
1955 |
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June - Weavers reunion sells out Carnegie Hall, Vanguard releases lp record June 29 - Gordon Wasson eats psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca July - Ferlinghetti publishes first book of poems (Pictures of the Gone World) August - Pete Seeger called before HUAC, refuses to testify August 28 - Emmet Till, 14, lynched, Money, Mississippi for wholf whistle at a white woman August 31 - Emmet Till's body found in the Tallahassee River; body taken back to Chicago where he was raised and 600,000 came to funeral; Emmet Till was the second Negro boy killed in 16 days and the third since May 7 summer - Kerouac writes Mexico City Blues in Mexico City |
June 23 - folk/calypso
singer Harry Belafonte (28) first time on television June 29 - Bill Haley (29) & the Comets: Rock Around the Clock and Shake Rattle n Roll becomes No. 1 hit (for eight weeks) (released January 1 & plays behind the credits of the movie Blackboard Jungle) (Haley is a former hillbilly singer from Penn, cutting discs in the teenage idiom since `Rock The Join' 1952; inspired by Hank Williams (c&w) and Louis Jordan (r&b) summer - Fats Domino: Ain't That a Shame #1 r&b charts, 11 weeks Sometime in 1955 John Lennon (15) starts a skiffle group called The Quarrymen |
DJ
Alan Freed moves to WINS, NY [The Rock 'n' Roll Years] 7 of 15 pop best sellers are rooted in r&b, produced originally for the black music market Little Richard first record; Chuck Berry first record & hit : Maybelline TV: 64,000 Dollar Question, Gunsmoke The Blackboard Jungle (movie): links Rock Around the Clock with juvenile delinquency; Comics also come under fire for causing juvenile delinquency James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden Ingmar Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night John Lennon: In His Own Write (March) Family of Man - exhibit & book (Edward Steichen for Museum of Modern Art, NY) Joseph Heller: Catch 22 J.P. Donleavy: Ginger Man Mad Magazine starts (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit - Sloan Wilson) |
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| fall - Ginsberg
(29) takes peyote, has vision of Moloch as America fall - Kerouac (33) meets Gary Snyder (25) who has been studying Japanese and Zen Buddhism U.C. Berkeley in preparation for going to Japan as a Zen monk fall - Anais Nin takes LSD as part of Oscar Janiger's studies (LA) [Diary Volume V pages 47-55 & Volume VI pages 55-66] |
September 14 - Little Richard records Tutti Frutti September 30 - James Dean dies in Porsche crash on Highway 101; East of Eden is out, but Rebel, Giant not yet released |
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October 13 - Ginsberg organizes
poetry reading at Six Gallery, Fillmore Street, San Francisco (featuring
also Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Kenneth
Rexroth) and brings down the house by reading "Howl" publicly
for the first time. |
October - Mickey
Mouse Club starts on television October - Pat Boone's cover of Fats Domino's "Aint That a Shame" hits pop charts November - RCA signs Elvis Presley (20) from Memphis and Carl Perkins (23) from Tennessee The period described in Kerouac's Dharma Bums in Berkeley was circa 1955-1958 |
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1956 2nd & |
Federal-Aid Highway Act: Congress
authorized 41,000 miles of
1956 November - Eisenhower defeats Stevenson again |
January 26 - MLK arrested for
the first time when? First Committee? for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Aldermaston march, UK Abraham Maslow publishes first
paper on peak experiences |
January - The Platters - black
r&b group reach Top Ten pop chart with "Only You" and "The
Great Pretender"; first time June 5 -Elvis on Milton Berle's
tv show singing "Hound Dog"; |
1956 |
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1957 3rd & 4th |
Influenza
pandemic (new gene combination) Largest amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the United States from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever detonated in Nevada from May to October. (more) Strontium 90 detected in cow's milk around the US (radioactive isotope which lodges in bone & causes cancer) [Egbert Pfeiffer - zoologist & anatomy professor at the University of North Dakota] [Records "lost" 1994] Time magazine, March 11 - "U.S. daily press reports have indicated that radioactive strontium 90 from the fallout of thermonuclear explosions is nothing to worry about. Japanese scientists do not agree." Time magazine, May 6 - "Talk about the perils of atomic radiation has swelled in volume and intensity ever since the U.S. and Russia fired their much-publicized H-bombs in 1954." |
January? - Atlanta nonviolent
(Negro) bus demo Hugh Romney (20) in Boston
reads "The Cool, Cool Bards of 1957" in Time magazine, and decides
to become poet named Wavy Gravy Kenneth Rexroth warns in the Nation that Ginsburg runs "the danger
of turning into a popular entertainer — he affects an audience much
as Louis Armstrong affects French bobby soxers." |
1957 Wilhelm Reich
book burning and he died, shortly after sent to jail for selling Orgone
Box [WER #63 p 57] 1957 - The second issue of the Evergreen Review (No. 2) was a landmark - The San Francisco Scene: included the new Beat writers Jack Kerouac (October in the Railroad Earth), Allen Ginsberg (Howl), and poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Ralph Gleason on the San Francisco Jazz Scene, Kenneth Rexroth's San Francisco Letter, and Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Good Life. Editor Donald M. Allen "discovered" Richard Brautigan (24) and brought together the San Francisco Issue of Evergreen Review in 1957, linking up Ginsberg, Kerouac, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, James Broughton, William Everson [Brother Antoninus], Philip Lamantia, and me for the literary public eye. And it was Don who edited the major poetry-world shaker, The New American Poetry, in 1960. (Michael McClure 42) when? The White Negro - Norman Mailer (Dissent magazine) (used `hipster' to describe the Beats) |
1957 Tom Lehrer, out of the army,
starts doing concerts, opening for singers i.e. Odetta or comedians Mort
Sahl, Mike & Elaine (later Nichols & May) |
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| March 5 - British Gold Coast becomes Ghana, first independent nation of sub-Saharan Africa | March - Pete Seeger
indicted for contempt of court (for HUAC silence) May 17 - MLK leads Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington D.C. - 30,000 (Third anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education decision) |
March 25 - US Customs
seizes second printing of Howl by City Lights, US District Attorney decides
not to pursue, and printing released |
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| May 15 - Britain explodes thermonuclear bomb in central Pacific | July - Account
of Gordon Wasson's mushroom experience published in Life Magazine August 29 - Civil Rights Act (first civil rights legislation since 1875) passed |
July - Alan Freed
gets television rock and roll show July 9 Elvis: Teddy Bear (classic) = huh? August 8 - American Bandstand with Dick Clark (27) starts on national television August - San Francisco Police Juvenile Dept raid City Lights & charge Ferlinghetti with obscenity for selling Howl [& trial ended - Charters p. 57] |
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Sept 29 - Explosion at nuclear
weapons site near Chelyabinsk in Ural Mountains, USSR October 7 - Nuclear accident
(fire) at Windscale nuclear plant, England - first significant release
of radioactive material from a reactor - |
September 4 - Little
Rock, Arkansas: nine Negro students try to attend Central High; Governor
Orval Faubus orders National Guard to prevent them September 25 - President Eisenhower sends Federal troops to Little Rock; they remain for the entire school term (?to May 1959??) latter part of 1957- John Coltrane, member of the Miles Davis Quartet, does legendary gig with Thelonious Monk at New York's Five Spot. Teamsters Union is expelled from AFL-CIO when Jimmy Hoffa refuses to expel criminals & union refuses to expel Hoffa |
September - Kerouac's On
The Road finally published (written 1950 - about the late 1940s) and
stays 6 weeks on the bestseller list (almost titled The Beat Generation) October 17 - Elvis in movie
"Jailhouse Rock" |
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| November
- USSR launches second Sputnik, with dog inside |
SANE (Student National
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) founded (after newspaper ad about bomb
tests in late 1957) |
Dec - Kerouac reads at the Village Vanguard | ||||||||||||
| - - The generation
that grew up during World War II, then experienced the economic boom of
the early 1950s, the first boom in their and their parent's lifetimes, reaches their 20s- - |
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1958 4th Detroit |
Recession in US: almost 5.2
million unemployed
May V.P. Nixon motorcade booed in Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela |
when? 10,000 students
join school desegregation march, Wash DC [Haydn p. 29] March?? U.K.: Thousands march on Aldermaston nuclear base (first) (Direct Action Committee, Bertrand Russell) May 11 - Last Poet's Follies, San Francisco (Club Fugazi, 678 Green) spring - Partisan: The Know-Nothing Bohemians - Norman Podhoretz May - Art D'Lugoff opens Village Gate on Bleeker St. National attention on Beats, tour buses start touring North Beach During the 1950s and 1960s, San Francisco's hungry i nightclub (546 Broadway) was the main breeding ground for rising comedy talent, including Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Ronnie Schell, Jackie Vernon and Professor Irwin Corey; The Kingston Trio and The Limelighters + Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Phyllis Diller, Maya Angelou, Bill Dana, John Sebastian and Carmen McRae. The Beats movement spreads thru US and Europe UK: Teddy Boys "die out" First Montessori school opened in US (125 running by 1965) (concept introduced to US 1913) [Look} |
March
24 - Elvis (23) reports for army duty ("inducted") July 2 - Elvis in movie "King Creole" Everly Brothers: Hey Bird Dog, All I Have to Do is Dream Chipmunks Song, Purple People-Eater, Lollipop, Tequila, To Know Him is to Love Him; Elvis: Hard Headed Woman; Coasters: Yakety Yak; Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops (first?); James Brown: Try Me; Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode; Johnny Otis: Willie and the Hand-Jive; Bobby Darin: Splish Splash (first?); Stereophonic recordings come into use; Phil Spector starts producing records (?= start of Motown?); Kingston Trio: Tom Dooley; Theodore Bikel Town Hall concert, NY; John Coltrane: first album "Coltrane's Sound". TV: Seventy-Seven Sunset Strip Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The Ugly American - William Lederer John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society Ferlinghetti: The Coney Island of the Mind Kerouac: Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans Paul Krassner starts publishing The Realist Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun Jasper Johns first show |
1958 |
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when? Fidel Castro begins "total
war" against Batista govt, Cuba |
June - Paul Robeson
finally gets a passport 8 years after it was taken from him, some said for
being a Communist Party member?, allowing him to tour abroad again (explain
xx) September - MLK stabbed in Harlem department store Alan Watts takes LSD (at Huxley's invitation) (while doing his radio program) ---> LSD introduced to Ginsberg & Bohemia October - Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and 20 others arrested in Birmingham, Alabama protesting bus segregation; Reverend William Holmes Borders launches boycott in Atlanta which ends segregated busing when? Bayard Rustin organizes Youth March for Integrated Schools which sparks sit-ins in Oklahoma City and Wichita |
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| 1959 5th & 6th |
January 2 - Cuba: Batista's
army defeated by Fidel Castro's guerillas March - Uprising of Tibetans
against the Chinese, Dalai Lama flees to India with others when? Doyle, Dane, Bernback,
Inc. Volkswagon US campaign started: "Think Small", "Some
Shapes Are Hard To Improve On" (in 1953, 2000 had sold in the US;
in 1959, 150,000) |
UC Berkeley: SLATE
wins end to racial discrimination in fraternities & sororities (under
Brown vs. Board of Education) March - SLATE holds forbidden rally to support Berkeley housing discrimination initiative when? Wyatt Walker leads Richmond, Virginia CORE march of 2000 to protest school segregation; April 29 - CORE lunch counter sit-in in Miami spring: New York Post series "The Beat Generation" (check date xx) |
February 3 - Buddy Holly (22)
, The Big Bopper [J.P. Richardson, 29], & Richie Valens (17) |
1959 Joan Baez sings at Albert Grossman's Gate of Horn nightclub in Chicago, where she meets Bob Gibson as well as Odetta. |
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July - Khruschev visits the
U.S. August 21 - Hawaii becomes US 50th state |
June
- "The sick humor of Lenny Bruce" (recorded 1958) released during
an engagement at San Francisco's hungry i club ?? (he was 34) when? Ken Kesey, majoring in writing at Stanford, living in Perry Lane, Palo Alto w Robert Stone + (Vic Lovell - who had introduced Alpert to marijuana) takes psilocybin, LSD, etc at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital (under CIA's MK-ULTRA program) July - SCLC, CORE, and FOR sponsor first conference on non-violence, at Spelman College, Atlanta |
July 21 D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover (written 1928) finally ruled not obscene & legal
for publication in U.S. after U.S. Postmaster General tries to ban it from
the mails |
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| when?
USSR launches rocket w two monkeys aboard when? US artificial planet Pioneer 4 at Woomera when? USSR Lunik reaches moon; Lunik II photographs moon when? President Eisenhower invokes Taft-Hartley Act to halt 116-day-old steelworkers' strike; longshoremen's strike halted same way Eisenhower, in farewell address, warns of the military-industrial complex ? when was govts get our of the way for peace? Thalidomide children (Better Living Through Chemistry's first failure) First Barbie dolls |
September 2 - Lucy
Mae Jones (17) becomes the first black pupil at Durham High School, North
Carolina after a ten-year legal battle to allow black children to attend
white schools, in keeping with the 1954 US Supreme Court decision to end
segregation in schools; 225 black children applied, 8 were accepted September 26 - Highlander Folk School raided & closed down (Tennessee) late - TV program on Elijah Muhammed's Nation of Islam draws first national attention to his Muslims fall - U.C. Berk: protest over expulsion of student who had gone on a hunger strike to protest U.C. making ROTC compulsory "several months before Feb. 1, 1960") Durham sit-in October - Kerr Directives prohibit UC student governments from taking positions on "off campus" political issues; in response, SLATE sends letter to protest firing of professor at University of Illinois San Francisco Mime Troupe founded Nov 30 - Life magazine pans the Beats |
September - Bob Zimmerman (18)
enters University of Minnesota
winter - Kerouac on Steve Allen television show |
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| On to The Early Sixites: Folk Music and Idealism 1960-1963 | ||||||||||||||