AP U.S. History Practice Test 15

Interpretation of rights movements, 1960s–1970s

"The protest movements that followed the African American civil rights struggle are often treated as separate causes, each with its own leaders and goals. It is more useful to see them as sharing a common inheritance. Activists for women's equality, Mexican American farm workers, American Indian activists, and gay and lesbian Americans borrowed the civil rights movement's methods—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and lawsuits—and its language of equal citizenship. Even the environmental movement, which seemed to have little to do with rights, adopted the same strategy of combining grassroots pressure with demands for federal action, and by the early 1970s it had won new federal agencies and laws with support from both parties.

Yet this shared inheritance carried a cost. By relying on courts and federal agencies to secure their goals, these movements encouraged a growing number of Americans, especially in the suburbs and the expanding Sun Belt, to see Washington as an intrusive force. The conservative resurgence of the late 1970s grew partly out of that reaction."

Interpretation written for PrepBanq practice (secondary source, historian's perspective)