1966

The Secret History of the United States

1966

On June 5, 1966 James Meredith began to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to serve as an example of individual courage so that other blacks in the state would overcome their fear and actively seek to exercise their right to vote. A shotgun blast abruptly ended Meredith's march, but only provoked in members of SNCC, the SCLC, and CORE a fierce determination to resume the trek from where Meredith had been ambushed.
The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader p.279
Integration in the South

more on civil rights1967

"It would have been professional suicide for us in the AP [Associated Press] to suggest that the Vietcong insurgents and Hanoi's regular forces were generally superbly trained and well motivated and seemed to believe in their revolutionary cause," war correspondent Peter Arnett noted in his book Live from the Battlefield. "We were dissuaded by our editors from suggesting that the Vietnam conflict contained significant elements of a civil war, even though every Vietnamese knew the truth of that description."
Inside The White House - Ronald Kessler p.252

[Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)] In 1966, Congress acted to increase public access to government records. It provided that any records, documents, memoranda, statements of policy, and other similar materials be made available to those persons who requested such data. Nine types of information are exempt from release...
Clear Intent - Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood p.4

the document Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and Ammendments from Electronic Privacy Information Center Home Page

In 1966 a B-52 crash near Paloma, Spain, resulted in dispersal of plutonium over an extensive agricultural area. The United States cleaned up the damage at a cost of $ 50 million.
Russian Roulette - Arthur Macy Cox

On October 5, 1966, the most ambitious of all the American electric utilities' nuclear power projects, Detroit Edison's experimental commercial breeder reactor, named Fermi I, on the shores of Lake Erie, ran into serious trouble. A piece of metal had worked loose at the bottom of the reactor and had partially clogged the flow of the core coolant, the core assembly had become overheated, a tiny part of it melted, releasing dangerous radioactive gases into the containment structures, and, for all the engineers knew, it seemed as though a major disaster was imminent. At the time, the reactor crew had no idea what had gone wrong, nor how to remedy it. Six months would pass before they could determine the extent of the damage and a full year before they had found the cause. In the early days of the accident, they could only hope the damaged core would stabilize itself without further mishap.
The Nuclear Barons - Peter Pringle and James Spigelman p.280