History in Five: What drew you to write about the 1950s? Did you have any preconceived notions about this decade prior to starting your research?

James Gaines: I actually started out wanting to understand the Sixties, not the Fifties. My kids came home from school one day and said they wished their time was that exciting. I think they got that mainly from the music, but it got me thinking about the politics of those years, especially the civil rights, gay-rights, feminist, and environmental movements. I could not understand how the 1950s—a time when all bathtubs were white, all telephones were black, and nothing was gray—could have led to the polychromatic riot of the Sixties. History just doesn’t work that way, by decades, as if the Sixties exploded all by itself, and the deep rift between the 1950s and 1960s suggested there was something important missing.

Hin5: What motivated the activists of the 1950s to fight for the feminist, civil rights, LGBTQ, and environmental movements?

JG: After a great deal of time and reading, that was the most interesting part of what I discovered: They did not start out as activists. They were not the Tom Haydens and Eldridge Cleavers or Betty Friedans or Stonewall rioters of the 1960s. They were extraordinary people but not in the public sense: They were very private, de-centered people who were challenged by their alienation from the society in which they found themselves. For one gay man, Harry Hay, it was the homophobia of a society that denied him self-respect, the ability just to be himself and proud of who he was. For Rachel Carson, it was the threat to the natural world, which had been her haven since early childhood from a less than happy home. As for feminism, it was the decade of the “happy housewife,” a myth that trapped many white, middle-class women in the suburbs, unable to pursue any ambition other than that of wife and mother. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique effectively undermined that myth for many such women, but it was Pauli Murray, a light-skinned Black woman bedeviled by her mixed-race heritage and questions about her gender identity, whose most intimate conflicts led her to become a champion of 21^st century, intersectional feminism.

Maybe the clearest and most tragic case was that of Medgar Evers, a Black veteran of World War II who served from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge. He was motivated by his homecoming. Think what that would have been like. You’re finally back in the U.S. and on the way home, still in uniform with your honorable discharge in hand and a chest full of medals, and you’re made to sit at the back of the bus—and then refused service at a restaurant for the first time since you went to war, waiting on the bus while the other passengers ate inside. Understandably furious, he and his brother, also a veteran, plotted a shooting war against racism in America, but they decided not to go forward with it. Instead, Medgar went to work for the NAACP in Mississippi, only to be assassinated one late night when he got home from a very long day. Thanks to his wartime service, he was buried as a hero at Arlington National Cemetery.

They were the pioneers of the 1960s—people driven to act by their most intimate conflicts because they simply felt they could not do otherwise and who either did not care or simply moved through their fear of the consequences.

Hin5: Why have such influential figures as Pauli Murray, Harry Hay, Medgar Evers, and Rachel Carson not received the attention that their counterparts in the 1960s have?

JG: Rachel Carson and Medgar Evers did receive acknowledgment for what they accomplished but only after their deaths. Pauli Murray is only now getting the recognition she deserves—in a new documentary and in other forums—but she certainly didn’t get it in the 1950s. She fought for causes that were very unpopular in her time—from an end to segregation in the South to what she called “Jane Crow,” discrimination by both race and gender. She was overwhelmed by her troubles but refused to be overcome by them. As a result, she became first in her class at an otherwise all-male law school and eventually devised the legal argument that persuaded the Supreme Court to make sex discrimination unconstitutional. She also made an enormous contribution to the next generation’s Third Wave, intersectional feminism.

I think the reason Harry Hay is even less well-known is that gay-rights movement was so much stronger in the 1960s than in the first years of the Mattachine Society. I hope my book does something to make up for that. He was incredibly brave, a true pioneer. Just think about what it took, in the time of homophobia, McCarthyism, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, for a member of the Communist Party to start a gay-rights movement. He paid a very high price for doing that, and he deserves to be recognized for that and for the courage it took to get it done.

The courage it took all of these people and others like them to act alone against the society’s most powerful forces—without any expectation of being recognized for it—is the point I’m trying to make in the book.

Hin5: How should readers reconsider the 1950s and its place within these political and social movements?

JG: I’m not sure it’s the 1950s that need updating. It really was, as its reputation suggests, a time of conformity, racism, homophobia, McCarthyism, and disregard for the natural world. What I think needs reconsideration is the process of change. There is a prevalent theory that change only happens when the law changes, because then the hearts and minds of the people will have to follow. But there is no question that these and other reform movements of our times were started by individuals without the support of any movement, and so the 1950s uniquely present the model of how change actually begins--in the private lives of people most desperate for it, people whose courage inspires others and so begins to change the hearts and minds of the people who make the laws.

Hin5: What can today’s activists learn from the examples of Pauli Murray, Harry Hay, and others featured in the book?

JG: Maybe the best lesson is that you can take action by yourself, with the support of no movement, no social support, against whatever forces you may face, and later look back and know that the world is better for the fact that you have lived. Frank Kameny, another World War II veteran, who took over the Mattachine Society after Harry Hay was ousted from it, was lucky to live long enough to see that. In a ceremony at the Smithsonian, when he donated his picket signs from the first gay-rights demonstration ever to be held at the White House, the curator had put them beside the desk where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the inkwell Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. “Frank,” he said, “this is where the pickets fit into American history.” Kameny just said then that he was sure people were better off for the fact that he lived and that it was “a pretty good feeling to have.” Harry Hay got no such public honor, but I hope he had the same sense of accomplishment and recognition at the end of his life. He certainly deserved it.

Hin5: What would you like readers to take away from The Fifties?

JG: There are always such people in the world. Take Greta Thunberg, for example, who feels her Asperger syndrome is the superpower that allowed her to take on the issue of global warming and whose singular passion in that cause moved it forward. Or the Greta Thunberg of China, Ou Hongyi, whose demand for her country to take climate change more seriously has put her in the crosshairs of the authorities more than once. She could go to jail any day now for what she has already said and done. They and young people like them all over the world will inherit the many challenges to freedom, equality, health, and safety we leave behind, but I dedicated the book to my grandchildren and all grandchildren to suggest that even the hardest problems can be solved and that, no matter how bleak things may seem, hope is always a good idea.