The Blacks, many with being gone to work in the industrial plants of North and the West, profited from the economic advancement: they all the more badly feel the marks of racism and the severe segregation which those of them undergo which remained in the South. From 1954, year when the Supreme court prohibits the school segregation, a vast movement of the civic rights is born. Multiple initiatives are launched to obtain an effective equality: demonstrations, boycottings, nonviolent fights, with through which the personality of Pasteur Martin Luther King emerges, who will receive the Nobel Prize of peace in 1964. The government, initially reticent, then works to advance the cause of the Blacks, especially under the impulse of the successor of Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson.
But, as from 1966, the racial riots multiply in the big cities of North; an active black minority, Black Panthers, does not require only any more the equality but the “black power”. In same time, other social groups express, in search of their identity or of their dignity: young people, hostile with the university discipline and music lovers rock'n'roll; the women, who want to affirm their rights; Indians, eager to put a term at the injustice which strikes them since so a long time. All these movements agitate the country until the middle of the years 1970.
From 1965, the opposition to the war of Viet-Nam plays a part of catalyst. This war, carried out to safeguard the existence of Viet-Nam of the South vis-a-vis its communist neighbor of North, had started discreetly under Kennedy; but president Johnson decides, in 1965, the massive sending of troops and the bombardment of the adversary. The operations follow one another, without however producing tangible results, and 540 ' 000 Americans do not seem to be enough to make yield a tough enemy. Trustful at the beginning, the Americans worry soon about a war which sinks; a change of strategy starts as from 1968 with the arrival of Richard Nixon to the presidency of the Republic and the beginning of negotiations. It will take nevertheless four years to put an end to the conflict (the agreements of Paris are signed in January 1973). Released from the Vietnamese mud pit, the United States, whose prestige is reduced, finds a room for maneuver and concludes from the agreements of disarmament with the USSR.
With the beginning of the year 1970, the US economy does not have any more same vitality. The dollar is devaluated in 1971, inflation accelerates with the oil crisis, and the American firms become less productive than those of Japan or Germany, even if the standard of living of the Americans remains higher than that moreover world. The political climate, already marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, is degraded more with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, following the scandal of Watergate.