The 1960s
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175 free The 1960s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
62 free The 1960s trivia questions with answers. The 1960s changed everything: the Beatles landed, men walked on the moon, JFK and Dr. King were lost, Woodstock happened and television came of age. This quiz gives you 62 multiple-choice 60s trivia questions and answers on the music, the moon race, civil rights, politics, film, TV, fashion and fads of the decade, from easy ones any Boomer will get to hard ones only a real sixties buff will know. It pairs naturally with our 1970s quiz if you are building a 60s and 70s trivia night: play them back to back for a two-decade round. Every question shows an explanation after you answer, and each one has been checked against a real source. Play solo, share your score, or print the set for a party.
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Q 01To end the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from which country?
Turkey
Publicly, Washington only pledged not to invade Cuba; its promise to pull the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey was kept secret at the time.
Q 02Which agency enforces the job-discrimination rules of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
EEOC
The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) opened in July 1965 with no power to sue: until Congress amended the law in 1972 it could only investigate charges and try to conciliate.
Q 03Which Black nationalist leader, a year after breaking with the Nation of Islam, was shot dead at Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom in 1965?
Malcolm X
Malcolm X was suspended by the Nation of Islam after calling President Kennedy's assassination a case of 'chickens coming home to roost', and announced his break with it in March 1964.
Q 04Who was the first woman in space, launching aboard Vostok 6 in 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova was a textile-mill worker whose hobby helped win her the seat: she was an amateur skydiver, and Vostok cosmonauts had to eject and come down by parachute.
Q 05What sparked the six-day Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965?
A traffic stop
A traffic stop began it: a highway patrolman pulled over Marquette Frye for drunk driving on 11 August 1965, a crowd gathered as the arrest turned rough, and six days of rioting left 34 dead.
Q 06The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed as an amendment to which earlier federal statute?
Fair Labor Standards Act
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 amended the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938; a 1973 public service announcement starring Yvonne Craig as Batgirl demanded equal pay with Robin.
Q 07Which author of The Feminine Mystique co-founded a major women's rights group in 1966?
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women at a 1966 Washington conference, scribbling its acronym, NOW, on a paper napkin; she became its first president.
Q 08The Stonewall Inn, where a June 1969 raid sparked riots, was in which Manhattan area?
Greenwich Village
The Stonewall Inn stands on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village; the Mafia-owned bar was raided early on 28 June 1969 without the usual tip-off to its owners.
Q 09In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis supporting a strike by which city workers?
Sanitation crews
King came to Memphis to back its striking sanitation crews, who had walked out in February 1968 after two workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage truck.
Q 10Which two men founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland in October 1966?
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale drew up a ten-point program and began armed patrols that followed Oakland police to watch for brutality.
Q 11Reported attacks on US destroyers in which gulf led Congress to authorise force in Vietnam in 1964?
Tonkin
The Gulf of Tonkin clash of 2 August 1964 was real, but the destroyer Maddox's task-group commander soon cabled that freak weather on the radar may have accounted for many reports of the second attack two days later.
Q 12In February 1964, 73 million Americans watched the Beatles' live US television debut on whose Sunday-night show?
Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan took an interest after seeing some 1,500 fans greet the band at a London airport in October 1963; the audience for their first show was a record for American television.
Q 13On whose dairy farm in Bethel, New York, was the Woodstock Music & Art Fair held in August 1969?
Max Yasgur
Q 21Which British designer is credited with the 1960s miniskirt?
Mary Quant
Mary Quant sold the look from Bazaar, her boutique on the King's Road in Chelsea; who first raised hems that far is disputed, and Paris couturier André Courrèges is the other usual claimant.
Q 22The term 'hippie' became widely used in the 1960s to describe members of which cultural movement?
Counterculture
Counterculture youth were dubbed hippies from 'hip', slang for being in the know since the early 1900s; where 'hip' itself came from, nobody knows.
Q 23What protest did John Lennon and Yoko Ono stage at the Amsterdam Hilton in March 1969?
Bed-in
Max Yasgur rented part of his dairy farm to the organizers, who had told Bethel officials to expect no more than 50,000 people; more than 400,000 came.
Q 14Who founded Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan, in 1959?
Berry Gordy Jr.
Berry Gordy Jr. bought a former photography studio on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard in 1959 and turned it into Hitsville U.S.A., whose Studio A turned out the Motown sound.
Q 15Where was Kennedy's successor sworn in hours after the 1963 shooting in Dallas?
Air Force One
Aboard Air Force One, still on the ground at Dallas's Love Field: federal judge Sarah T. Hughes, a friend of the new president, was called to the plane to give the oath before it left for Washington.
Q 16Which category did Virginia congressman Howard Smith add to the 1964 Civil Rights Act's job-discrimination ban during House debate?
Sex
Sex was added on the House floor two days before the vote by Howard W. Smith, a segregationist who opposed the bill; whether he meant to sink it or to help women is still debated.
Q 17The Cuban Missile Crisis, the October 1962 standoff over nuclear missiles in Cuba, lasted how many days?
13
The crisis lasted 13 days, from 16 October, when Kennedy was shown U-2 photos of the missile sites, to Khrushchev's climbdown on 28 October; Robert Kennedy titled his memoir of it Thirteen Days.
Q 18What was Apollo 11's lunar module, which landed Armstrong and Aldrin in the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969, called?
Eagle
'The Eagle has landed,' Armstrong radioed from the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969; Michael Collins stayed in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia.
Q 19The 1963 March on Washington that ended with the "I Have a Dream" speech was formally a march for what?
Jobs and Freedom
Jobs and Freedom was A. Philip Randolph's banner: he had planned a march on Washington in 1941 and called it off when Roosevelt barred hiring discrimination in the defence industries.
Q 20Which science-fiction series premiered on NBC in September 1966?
Star Trek
Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, premiered on NBC on 8 September 1966 and ran only three seasons before syndication turned it into a phenomenon.
A bed-in: five days after their wedding, the couple invited the world's press into their Amsterdam Hilton suite from 9 am to 9 pm each day and talked about peace from bed.
Q 24The Mamas & the Papas were a popular folk rock group in the 1960s, known for which hit song?
'California Dreamin''
'California Dreamin'' was released as a single in December 1965; its alto flute solo by jazz player Bud Shank was reportedly improvised in the studio.
Q 25Under which US president did American forces in Vietnam grow from 16,000 advisers to more than 500,000 troops?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson sent the first combat troops in March 1965; three years later, with the war in stalemate, he announced he would not seek re-election.
Q 26The 1967 'Summer of Love' drew tens of thousands of young people to one neighbourhood of which U.S. city?
San Francisco
San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district was the magnet; a 'Human Be-In' in Golden Gate Park that January had put the city's hippies in the national spotlight.
Q 27Which classic novel, dealing with racial injustice in the American South, was published in 1960?
'To Kill a Mockingbird'
'To Kill a Mockingbird' won Harper Lee the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, yet she published no second novel for 55 years, until Go Set a Watchman in 2015.
Q 28Which Soviet cosmonaut became the first human in space in April 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin never flew in space again; he later served as backup for the Soyuz 1 mission that killed his friend Vladimir Komarov, and died in a 1968 jet crash.
Q 29Which group, formed in April 1960 out of the lunch-counter protests, became the main channel of student activism?
SNCC
SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, grew out of an April 1960 meeting at Shaw University organised by Ella Baker of King's SCLC, who urged the students to stay independent of it.
Q 30Which Alabama city was the starting point of the 1965 voting-rights marches to Montgomery?
Selma
The marches set out from Selma; state troopers beat marchers on its Edmund Pettus Bridge on 'Bloody Sunday', 7 March 1965, and the completed march reached Montgomery on 25 March.