Civil Rights Timeline: Martin Luther King - Assignment Example

Martin Luther King The Civil Rights Movement was an important chapter in American history which led to the establishment of human rights around the world. Widely believed to have led the movement, Martin Luther King Jr. played a significant role in the development of this movement, but so did many others. When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing the driver’s request to give up her seat to a white man, this act of civil disobedience became the spark that ignited the masses during the 1950’s and 1960’s in protesting the racial inequalities. A group of area ministers, because of this event, formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which coordinated what would become a 382-day boycott of the bus company. The ministers took this non-violent action to avoid the possible rioting that was widely rumored to soon ensue and to organize their collective congregations into one, larger and stronger common voice. In addition, had they not elected to organize, they likely would have lost many members due to the growing sentiment that all talk and no action would gain nothing. After discussion amongst the MIA leadership, twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., a minister who had moved to town but a year earlier, was unanimously selected to head the MIA. King had no previous experience in the civil rights movement, had recently refused the presidency of the city chapter of the NAACP and had not yet met Mrs. Parks, which was important to working on her case.1 Although Martin Luther King Jr. provided the civil rights movement with the figurehead and spokesperson they had been lacking prior to his election as the head of the MIA in 1955, he was only one of many who helped guide an action that was already taking place rather than being the father of the movement itself. This is not to negate the role King played in the development of this movement. King’s inspiring involvement during the Montgomery bus boycott, and the subsequent events in the years to follow, elevated him to becoming the most recognized and beloved leader of the civil rights movement in America. This was primarily due to his superb oratory skill and his ability to reach out to audiences of both black and white skin. His continued message of non-violent protest and appeals to common human needs shared by all races was of major significance in the social equality gains for blacks during these years. His ability to make complex ideas understandable made it apparent that non-violent strategies were defensible in court according to the U.S. Constitution. This gave additional credence to the protests which inevitably led to the awakening of the black plight to many unwary whites who then joined the cause and helped to eradicate racist Jim Crow type laws forever. People, both black and white, were now willing to violate absurd, archaic local segregationist laws because they believed they were abiding and defending a ‘higher law,’ the Constitution.2 The situation that required King’s abilities as its best means of advancing was brought about primarily by politics, which officially justified the segregation of the races. While it is often thought that all white people in the South discriminated against blacks and fully supported the segregation laws, this is not necessarily the case. The social pressures that motivated the political process are very different from motivations that drive the economic process. The Jim Crow laws of the South that disenfranchised black voters ensured that only white opinions mattered in the political process. An overwhelming majority of the white voters was therefore not needed to mandate racial segregation. If a minority of white voters wanted segregation while other white people didn’t have an opinion either way on the subject, this was adequate political clout to pass a law. However, the motivations of politics conflicted with incentives of the economic system. Private owners of the bus companies in which the civil rights movement was first given leverage lobbied in opposition to the Jim Crow laws while they were being created, made several court challenges following the passage of these laws and utilized delaying strategies while attempting to ignore the enforcement of segregation laws for many years in some locations.3 Employees of these transportation companies were arrested for failing to enforce these laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with prison time if he continued this non-compliance with the law. This resistance “was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront,”4 indicating that the owners were hardly motivated by racial equality and the ideals of justice for all. The subject of segregation had also become a much discussed topic during World War II, laying considerable foundation for the movement that would take flight in the 1960s. An embarrassing aspect of this struggle was that U.S. blacks were subjugated within the very armed forces that were supposed to stand for freedom of all nations. The black soldiers, of course, very much resented this lower class distinction as they bled the same color red as the white soldiers. This growing resentment among the blacks was coupled with a changing attitude among white soldiers as they became more personally associated with blacks and witnessed the heroic actions performed by black soldiers during the war. “The NAACP’s strategy for attacking segregation through the Legal Defense Fund was revitalized and extended after World War II. Eventually it led to the Supreme Court decision in the Brown case in 1954.”5 The Brown decision “appeared to remove the constitutional underpinnings of the whole segregation system and strike at the foundations of Jim Crow laws. It was the most momentous and far-reaching decision of the century in civil rights.”6 All over the country, even in the South, there were examples of blacks increasingly empowering themselves during the war era as there was a “ feeling of discontent and a growing consciousness of exclusion from social, economic, and political participation.”7 Black churches of the South had begun to encourage their congregations to begin a spiritually inspired quest for equality. The first step in this process started with the education of their flocks by preachers, educated blacks and whites. The fact that this process had started to such a large degree indicates that King, rather than being the instigator, instead joined an already growing cause and became a spokesperson for it. King’s selection as head of the MIA was not an accident, either. From early in his career it was recognized that King was a born speaker, intuitively seeking the knowledge and experience he would need to make an educated argument and carefully cultivating his contacts to place him in position to take a leadership role. He had already considered possible structural changes that could be made in America while he was in school. He had studied the work of Mahatma Gandhi and took a degree in sociology, helping him to formulate his own ideas of peaceful co-existence and non-violent protest.8 Undoubtedly, his insights and knowledge in these areas contributed greatly not only to his own speeches, but also to the strategy sessions held by the various groups of which he was part when organizing protests. His non-violent stance and expertise also held weight with his fellow ministers, who recognized a need for change and were seeking a means of channeling the growing energy they were feeling within the community into a positive and effective direction. His oratory ability had been demonstrated even before he graduated from school as well. “Samuel DuBois Cook recalled that King delivered a ‘Senior Sermon’ in the Morehouse Chapel a week before graduation. ‘He knew almost intuitively how to move an audience,’ Cook remembered. ‘He asserted that there are moral laws in the universe that we cannot violate with impunity, anymore than we can violate the physical laws of the university with impunity’.”9 In addition to his involvement in the MIA, King also helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which linked churches across the South in the common cause for all black people. The original objective of the SCLC was to build upon the success of the Montgomery bus demonstration by launching similar boycotts in other cities, but this effort had few successes. King followed the end of the bus boycott by making speeches, preaching everywhere and attending various demonstrations in an untiring way, constantly promoting the concept of non-violent protest. It was King who first identified the source of the black people’s power: We would use this boycott method to give birth to justice and freedom … I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil. We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. From that moment on, I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation.”10 However, at this time in Montgomery, the MIA was fundamentally unproductive in rebelling against other manners of discrimination. It would take the examples set by other organizations and student groups throughout the South to show King and his supporters the way. This is evident in the way in which the movement stalled, despite King’s best efforts, until 1960 when a ‘sit-in’ movement initiated a novel and more aggressive yet still non-violent chapter of the civil rights battle. The now famous first sit-in occurred at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina when four black students sat down at a ‘whites only’ establishment and requested service. The strategy quickly spread to ‘wade-ins’ at segregated city swimming pools and beaches, ‘pray-ins’ at segregated churches and ‘stand-ins’ at all-white theatres. These activists that braved the threat of being beaten and jailed in order to advance their cause of racial justice were inspired by the illustration of courage by those who participated in the Montgomery bus boycott; however, the SCLC had no part in organizing the original sit-in protests that gave rise to these further actions.11 The examples set in these somewhat spontaneous demonstrations helped inspire King and others for further efforts. This example helped establish that grassroots efforts in different locations could effect change to some degree and King again emerged as a spokesperson and central figure to whom other groups could turn for advice and suggestions toward furthering the effort. A youth activist group was founded by student leaders after consultation with King and SCLC leaders in April 1960.12 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee added another dimension to the movement and appeared to embrace King’s pacifist methodology for social change. The SCLC was also not party or privy to the succession of ‘Freedom Rides’ into the South in 1961. The Congress of Racial Equality sponsored and directed these rides designed to ensure that the Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia, which further defined and extended its earlier ruling that abolished segregation laws regarding interstate transportation, was being complied with at the state level. The Freedom Riders clashed with whites in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama which prompted President John Kennedy to send 600 U.S. marshals to safeguard the protestors. Yet, these, too, taught King and others many lessons regarding the most effective means of bringing about social change. “The Freedom Rides supplied an important strategic lesson for King and the SCLC: in order to arouse public sympathy sufficient to pressure the federal government to enforce civil rights in the states and localities, white racists had to be provoked to use violence against non-violent protestors.”13 With this knowledge, King helped to organize the March on Washington in August of 1963, during which he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King took part in the activities of other groups as well, joining their efforts mid-stride to support what they were doing or to warn against potential problems associated with a particular approach. These efforts, as might be imagined, were not always successful. In 1962, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, but only after President Kennedy used 600 U.S. Marshals and 15,000 federal national guardsmen to restore order.14 The rioting on the campus upon Meredith’s decision to attend the then all-white university resulted in the deaths of two people and the injury of 375 more including 160 Marshals. In 1966, Meredith decided to walk alone from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in his ‘March Against Fear’ during a primary election week to establish that, if he could walk this distance without being harmed, then blacks should not fear walking shorter distances to the polling booths. Soon after beginning the walk, Meredith was shot and wounded by a white sniper. Upon hearing the news, King joined with Stokely Carmichael in Greenwood, Mississippi where Carmichael gave his famous ‘Black Power’ speech. He used Meredith’s example of empowering himself to apply, attend and graduate from school under the harshest of circumstances to characterize the importance of independent political action.15 Yet the catchy slogan ‘Black Power’ would live on through the efforts of Malcolm X in much different means than that envisioned by King. Following Carmichael’s speech, Malcolm X (Little) became a powerful speaker in the movement and became more important to the cause by his death than he was in life. As King had secured the character of the Southern black, Malcolm had become the messiah of city slums in the North, Midwest and West. The semi-militant organization he headed, the Nation, grew quickly under his leadership. Malcolm was most remembered for his passionate anti-white speeches and this was the idea that was emulated by other pro-autonomy organizations. He was the target of many death threats, one of which, in 1965, was successful. Soon after Malcolm’s death, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale began forming the Black Panthers.16 By the mid-1960’s hostility between Oakland, California’s black community and the police, a long and ever escalating problem, had reached its apex. Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. The pair, who had been intensely influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X, structured the organization similar to the Black Muslim program except with no pretenses of religious practice. In contrast to Martin Luther King’s methods and teachings of nonviolent protest, the Black Panther Party claimed that they needed to equip themselves with weapons for use as self-defense against police brutality.17 Arming the group did provide the intended protection but, predictably, led to confrontations with the police that often times concluded with a bloody altercation. The Panthers helped the black community in other ways though. The group made the rounds throughout neighborhoods in Oakland carrying arms, recorders, and various books so as to teach black history, counsel welfare recipients, and effectively protest rent evictions through the court system. In 1967, Eldridge Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party. At the time, Cleaver was working as a writer for Ramparts magazine and was the creator of Black House, a political organization in San Francisco. “Cleaver served as the Panthers’ minister of information. In this position he was in charge of the publication of the Black Panther newspaper. On April 25, 1967, the first issue of the paper was published and quickly gained readership. As many as fifty thousand papers were sold within the first three issues. The party began to grow and other chapter locations were opened throughout the United States.”18 The growth of the Black Panther party worked to spread the movement of civil rights, but also worked against the goals of Martin Luther King in that it re-introduced a high level of violence into the equation. Other events that contributed to the rapid rise of the Black Panther Party can be directly attributed to King’s weaknesses in organization. One of the earliest of these was a planned march on Selma, Alabama which was planned as a means of highlighting the need for federal voting-rights laws in the South. Although King organized the initial march, he did not accompany the marchers and they were turned back by nightsticks and tear gas. Following this disappointment, King began organizing a second march, but again stopped just short of the goal. “Heading a procession of 1,500 marchers, black and white, he set out across Pettus Bridge outside Selma until the group came to a barricade of state troopers. But, instead of going on and forcing a confrontation, he led his followers in kneeling in prayer and then unexpectedly turned back.”19 This seeming failure to follow through, as well as a general perception, especially among the young people, that King had made some kind of bargain with the federal government, led many to seek more aggressive means of addressing the problems they were still facing. Although King was ultimately successful in gaining the bill the march was intended to bring about, little credit was given him for the accomplishment and the Black Panther Party grew. While Martin Luther King undoubtedly contributed much to the civil rights movement, it becomes clear through this analysis that his primary contribution was to provide ideas and be a spokesperson for the movement. He had a great deal of knowledge regarding how to bring about change through peaceful means as well as a plan for beneficial social change, but his lack of follow through on many projects led some of his followers to seek more obvious and faster means of forcing equal rights. Most of the events in which he took a major role were collaborative efforts with several other ministers, the great support of a community more than hungry for change and introduced into a culture already primed for change. The great orator indeed provided a great voice in which the people of an entire race could gain recognition, but he was not the ultimate generator of the movement itself. References Brunner, Borgna & Haney, Elissa. (2006). “Civil Rights Timeline: Milestones in the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Fact Monster. Pearson Education. Retrieved April 7, 2007 from < http://www.factmonster.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html> Carson, Clayborne. (1997). “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African-American Social Gospel.” African-American Christianity. Paul E. Johnson (Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 159-177. Colaiaco, James A. (1988). Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Non­violence. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Daniel, Pete. (1990). “Going Among Strangers: Southern Reactions to World War II.” Journal of Southern History. Vol. 77. Garrow, David J. (1987). The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Hampton, Henry; Fayer, Steve; & Flynn, Sarah (Eds.) (1980). Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books. Hollaway, Kevin. (February 8, 1998). “The Legacy of Malcolm.” Documents for the Study of American History. “Martin Luther King Jr.” (2002). African American World. Encyclopedia Britannica. McElrath, Jessica. (2006). “The Black Panthers.” About African American History. Retrieved April 7, 2007 from Rockwell, Paul. (January 11, 2005). “Beyond Elections: Dr. King’s Teachings on Strategy and Tactics.” Motion Magazine. Sowell, Thomas. (29 October, 2005). “Rosa Parks and History.” The Washington Times. Viorst, Milton. (1979). Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s. New York: Simon and Schuster. Woodward, C. Vann. (1986). Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Zimmermann, Gerhard. (1995). “Victory Using Nonviolence – Martin Luther King, 1929-1968.” Sie widerstanden. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1995. . Read More