h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you're gonna mention the 60's you've got to mention the civil rights movement in the US.

Also worth mentioning is that Britain saw lots of people migrating their from her colonies i.e. Caribbean

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Was the "Windrush" the first ship to sail from the Caribbean to Britain? Or was that in the fifties?
Funny thing, though, the era of West Indian independence from the U.K. & yet they follow us home! Fair enough, though!

By association, Harold MacMillan gave his "Winds of Change" speech on a visit to Africa in the early Sixties; & infamous Enoch Powell enflamed racial discord with his "Rivers of Blood" speech. Plus, Nelson Mandela was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. But which year? Early sixties sometime...1963?


Hope I have my facts right here?

The first ship from the Caribbean would probably have been in the late
50's. But the most immigrants would've arrived in the 60's since in 1971 (or maybe 73) they closed the borders.

You're right the '60s was the time when Britain started to cut many of her colonies loose.

I guess the thinking behind them follwing the colonials home was to reap some of the sweets that they'd slaved (literally) to produce. Simply put they were economic migrants looking for money and a better way of life.

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Civil Rights is interesting

Civil Rights was one of the most important domestic issues in the 1960s in America. The idea of Civil Rights had accumulated throughout the mid to late 1950s (with the Brown vs Board of Education decision and the integration of Little Rock Central High), and it culminated all throughout the 1960s.

Lunch sit-ins occurred in 1960, Freedom Rides in 1963, Dr Martin Luther King's immortal 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963, the Bus Protest in Birmingham in 1963, the Church Bombing in Birmingham in the same year, the march on Selma in 1965... protests throughout the decade.

Medgar Evans, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were all killed in the 1960s, not to mention US President John F Kennedy. Kennedy's death indirectly led to the historic passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, because Lyndon B Johnson, who took the office, pushed for the bill, and one of the memories of JFK was his position for civil rights. All these men died for Civil Rights - as well as innumerable others lynched in the south.

Today, by most standards, the Civil Rights movement has succeeded in America, demonstrating that all of this protest, and all of these lives were not in vain.