Introduction
During the 60’s and 70’s there was a lot of controversy over the Vietnam war, and what the government should be able to control. African Americans started to peacefully protest the unjust rules about the draft, and how it was mostly black people who couldn’t afford to buy their way out of the war. This movement became bigger as more and more people started to protest the unfairness of segregation and voting rights, because African Americans couldn’t do anything about the draft until they could vote the corrupt officials out of office. At first, the most popular form of protest was non-violence and civil disobedience, which is when people think a law is unjust and refuse to follow it. These peaceful ways of the movement were led by Martin Luther King Junior, who follows the teachings of Gandhi and decided to be peaceful and let white cops fight back to show how badly African Americans were being treated. However, M.L.K. died in 1968, the same year as the last Civil Rights law which banned discrimination in housing. Another method of the Civil Rights Movement took a more radical approach, and Malcolm X, a separatist, believed that the only way to get rights was to fight for them and defend yourself. The Civil Rights Movement also sparked other movements into play, such as the Women’s Rights Movement which fought for certain rights like the right to have an abortion, and fought against the discrimination of gender. In 1972, two burglars snuck into the Watergate building and planted microphones to spy on the democratic party about the upcoming ‘73 election. Two years later, as investigations were launched by Woodward and Bernstein and it became apparent that Nixon was clearly apart of this scandal, and the House of Represented commenced the meetings to impeach Nixon. Nixon, in fear that he would actually be moved out of office, resigned in August of 1974 and became the only president to resign in history, while Gerald Ford became the only president that the US people had not voted for.