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Bloody Sunday (1965)

Bloody Sunday (1965)

The Selma to Montgomery marches, which included Bloody Sunday, were three marches that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They were the culmination of the movement in Selma for voting rights, launched by Amelia Boynton Robinson and her husband, who brought many prominent leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement to Selma, including Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Bevel, and Hosea Williams. The first march occurred on "Bloody Sunday", March 7, 1965, when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. Only the third, and last, march successfully made it into Montgomery. The route is memorialized as the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail.

Bloody Sunday - the first march

Montgomery On March 7, 1965, 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. Discrimination and intimidation had prevented Selma's black population, roughly half of the city, from registering and voting; three weeks earlier, February 18, 1965, a trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as he tried to protect his mother in a civil rights demonstration. He died of a massive infection at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital eight days later. The marchers hoped to bring notice to the violations of their rights by marching to the state capitol in Montgomery. In their first march, led by the Reverend Hosea Williams, they made it only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, six blocks away. State troopers and the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, some mounted on horseback, awaited them. In the presence of the news media the lawmen attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips, driving them back into Selma. Edmund Pettus Bridge Brutal televised images of the attack, which left many bloodied and severely injured, roused support for the US civil rights movement. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten and gassed nearly to death -- her photo appeared on the front page of papers and newsmagazines around the world. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized, leading to the naming of the day, "Bloody Sunday".

The second march

Immediately after "Bloody Sunday" Martin Luther King Jr., as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, began organizing a second march to be held on Tuesday, March 9, 1965, calling for people across the country to join him. Hundreds of people responded to his call, shocked by what they had seen on television. To prevent another outbreak of violence the marchers attempted to gain a court order that would prohibit the police from interfering. Instead of issuing the court order Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. issued a restraining order, preventing the march from taking place until he could hold additional hearings later in the week. Rather than abiding by the court order the SCLC decided to hold a partial, "ceremonial", march, taking into consideration that they had gathered hundreds of marchers for the event, but did not want to alienate one of the few southern judges who was often sympathetic to their cause. On March 9th King led the marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and held a short prayer session before turning the marchers back around, thereby not breaking the court order preventing them from marching all the way to Montgomery. Only the SCLC leaders were told of this plan, causing some consternation in the marchers who had traveled long distances to make the march, but many stayed after King asked the crowd to remain for another attempt at the march. On March 9, after the second march, James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston who had come for the second march and had agreed to stay, was attacked with a club in front of the Silver Moon Café, a hangout for whites. Being turned back by the small local hospital in Selma (reported to be full at the time), Reeb's companions were forced to take him to University Hospital in Birmingham, two hours away. Reeb died on Thursday, March 11, at University Hospital with his wife by his side. Reeb's death garnered national attention, much to the chagrin of some blacks after the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson went largely unnoticed. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spokesperson Stokely Carmichael was reported as saying "What you want is the nation to be upset when anybody is killed . . . but it almost [seems that] for this to be recognized, a white person must be killed".

The third march

A week after Reeb's death, the federal judge ruled in favour of the SCLC, preventing the State from blocking the marchers, weighing the right of mobility against the right to march: :The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways. Exactly two weeks, March 21, 1965, after Bloody Sunday, about 3,200 marchers set out from Selma to Montgomery, about 50 miles away. They walked about 12 miles (20 km) a day, sleeping in fields at night. They reached Montgomery on March 24 and camped out at the Catholic complex City of St. Jude. That night, a "Stars for Freedom" rally was held, with singers Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Sammy Davis Jr. all performing. By the time they reached the capitol the next day, Thursday, March 25, their numbers had swollen to 25,000, and King delivered the speech "How Long, Not Long" from the capitol steps. Within five months of the third march, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Amelia Boynton Robinson was present during the ceremony.

External links

- [http://www.crmvet.org/images/imgselma.htm Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Images of Selma]
- [http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_21783.shtml Civil Rights Marches]
- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/7/newsid_4318000/4318021.stm Police attack Alabama marchers] (BBC News)
- [http://www.alabamamoments.state.al.us/sec59det.html Alabama Department of Archives & History]
- The Selma Times-Journal. March 11, March 12, and March 14, 1965, editions. Category:History of the struggle for African-American equality Category:Alabama history Category:Historic trails and roads in the United States

American Civil Rights movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to primarily African American citizens of United States. There have been many movements on behalf of other groups in the U.S. over time, but the term is often used to refer to the struggles between 1955 and 1968 to end discrimination against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. See African American for information on how various terms have been used at that time period for African Americans. This article focuses on that particular struggle, rather than the comparable movements to end discrimination against other ethnic groups within the United States or those struggles, such as the women's liberation, gay liberation, and disabled rights movements, that have used similar tactics in pursuit of similar goals. The civil rights movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, both in its tactics and in increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights. This focus on the years between 1955, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, and 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, is somewhat arbitrary; the civil rights movement continued in different forms after that, and continues today. For a timeline of the events in this movement, see Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement. Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom]]

Background

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, was a key turning point in United States history: after years of campaigning against Jim Crow laws and racial oppression, the Civil Rights Movement had obtained a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court reversing the "separate but equal" doctrine that had justified official racism for the past half century. While Brown itself was only a first step toward disestablishing school segregation in the South—a process that would require decades of litigation to accomplish, with uncertain results—it was even more important for its immediate political significance, as it gave the civil rights movement the added legitimacy of a Supreme Court decision declaring that state-sponsored segregation was both unjustifiable and terribly wrong.

Key Events

- (1954) On May 17th, the Supreme Court rules on the Brown v. Board of Education case.
- (1954) On July 11th, the first White Citizen's Council meeting takes place in Mississippi.
- (1954) On October 30th, the Department of Defense announces that the armed forces have been completely esegregated.
- (1954) In September, public schools in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD are declared desegragated.
- (1954) Bobby Bland becomes the first black man to graduate from University of Virginia engineering school.
- (1954) The White Citizen's Council is organized in Selma, AL.
- (1954) In November, Charles Diggs of Detroit, MI is elected to Congress.
- (1955) The President's Committee on Government Policy is established to elminate discrimination in federal hiring.
- (1955) In April, Roy Wilkins becomes the NAACP general secretary.
- (1955) In May, Richard Daley becomes the mayor of Chicago.
- (1955) On May 7th, NAACP activist Reverand George Wesley is killed in Belzoni, MS.
- (1955) On May 31st, the Supreme Court rules that desegragation must occur with "all deliberate speed".
- (1955) In July, a pupil placement law is enacted in Alabama.
- (1955) On August 13th, activist Lamar Smith is murdered in Brookhaven, MS.
- (1955) On August 28th, Emmitt Till is murdered in Money, Tallahatchie Co. MS.
- (1955) In September, Emmitt Till's murderers are acquitted.
- (1955) On October 10th, the Supreme Court requires University of Alabama to admit Autherine Lucy.
- (1955) In November, the Interstate Commerce Commission bans segregation in interstate travel.
- (1955) On December 1st, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat.
- (1955) On December 2nd, the Montgomery Improvement Association is created at a mass meeting. Martin Luther King is elected president.
- (1955) On December 5th, the Montgomery Bus Boycott begins. It lasts until the December of 1956.
- (1955) On December 12th, the movement organizes carpools to replace the boycotted bus system.
- (1956) The FBI begins the COINTELPRO program to investigate and disrupt dissident groups within the United States. While initially focused on communist consipiracies, the organization eventually targets Martin Luther King and the SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panther Party, and SDS (or Student's for a Democratic Society).
- (1956) On Janury 26th, Martin Luther King experiences an epiphany about sacrifice after receiving a threatening phone call.
- (1956) On January 30th, Martin Luther King's home is bombed.
- (1956) On February 1st, the Montgomery Improvement Association files a suit.
- (1956) On February 3rd, Autherine Lucy is admitted to the University of Alabama. White students and locals riot in protest, and Lucy is suspended "for her own safety". She is later expelled for criticizing the university.
- (1956) On February 21st, Bayard Rustin arrives in Montgomery to advise the MIA.
- (1956) On March 12th, the Southern Manifesto is released.
- (1956) On March 22nd, Martin Luther King is convicted of leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
- (1956) In April, the Supreme Court strikes down bus segregation in Columbia, SC. The mayor of Montgomery refuses to apply the ruling to his city.
- (1956) From May 27th to the March of 1958, the Tallahassee Bus Boycott transpires.
- (1956) On June 1st, Alabama outlaws the NAACP.
- (1956) In June, Reverand Fred Shuttlesworth organizes the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in Birmingham, which will become an important SCLC advocate.
- (1956) In August, the Virginia legislature adopts a policy of "massive resistance" to the desegregation of schools.
- (1956) In September, the National Guard is forced to restore order after white mobs attempt to stop the integration of schools in Clinton, TN.
- (1956) In November, Dwight Eisenhower is elected president of the United States, with Richard Nixon as his vice president.
- (1956) In November, Alabama courts rule that the Montgomery Improvement Association carpool is a violation of the city bussing franchise.
- (1956) On November 13th, the Supreme Court upholds lower court rulings that banned segregation of intrastate buses in Browder v. Gayle.
- (1956) On December 17th, Montgomery city's last appeal was exhausted on segregation of buses.
- (1956) On December 21st, the Montgomery Bus Boycott ends. It had started in the December of 1955.
- (1956) On December 25th, Reverand Fred Shuttlesworth's home in Birmingham is bombed.
- (1956) On December 26th, Fred Shuttlesworth is arrested for breaking Birmingham's bus segregation ordinances.
- (1956) On December 27th, Tallahassee bus segregation is declared illegal.
- (1957) From January 10th to January 11th, the SCLC (or Southern Christian Leadership Conference) is founded. Martin Luther King is named chairman of the organization.
- (1957) On January 23rd, Willie James Edwards is forced off a bridge by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Montgomery, AL.
- (1957) On March 6th, Ghana becomes independent, beginning a wave of decolonization efforts throughout Africa. Martin Luther King attends the independence ceremonies.
- (1957) On April 14th, Malcolm X leads a protest against police brutality outside of a bus station in Harlem.
- (1957) On May 17th, Martin Luther King addresses a crowd of 15,000 in a rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
- (1957) In August, the first SCLC takes place.
- (1957) On August 29th, the Voting Rights Bill of 1957, the first civil rights bill since 1875, is passed. It declares that conpsiring to deny a person from his or her voting right is a federal crime.
- (1957) On September 4th, governor Orval Faubus uses the National Guard to prevent admittance of the Little Rock nine into Central High School.
- (1957) On September 20th, the National Guard is removed from Little Rock High in compliance with a court order.
- (1957) On September 23rd, White mobs drive the Little Rock nine out of Central High.
- (1957) On September 24th, Troops from the Army's 101st Airborne are sent into Little Rock and the National Guard in Arkansas is placed under federal control.
- (1957) On September 25th, the Little Rock nine enter Central High School escorted by armed soldiers.
- (1958) In February, the SCLC's "Crusade for Citizenship" program is launched.
- (1958) In March, the Tallahassee bus boycotts end.
- (1958) On June 23rd, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph meet Dwight Eisenhower.
- (1958) In August, schools in Norfolk and Charlottesville are closed under Virginia's "Massive Resistance" laws to prevent desegregation.
- (1958) The NAACP Youth Council hosts sit-ins at Oklahoma lunch counters.
- (1958) On September 12th, an Atlanta synagogue is bombed.
- (1958) In November, seven-year-old James Hanover Thompson and nine-year-old David "Fuzzy" Simpson are sentenced in North Carolina to indefinite periods in reform school after a nine-year-old white girl tells her parents that a black boy tried to kiss her. After protests around the world, the boys are released without explanation.
- (1959) On January 19th, the Virginia supreme court rules that massive resistance school-closing laws violate the state's constitution.
- (1959) In February, schools in Norfolk and Charlottesville re-open.
- (1959) On April 25th, Mack Charles Parker, accused of raping a white woman, is taken from jail and lynched by a white mob in Poplarville, MS.
- (1959) On June 26th, classes in Prince Edward county, VA are halted in order to prevent desegregation. The schools remain closed until the June of 1964.
- (1960) On February 1st, a sit-in movement begins at a Woolworths lunch counter Greensboro, NC.
- (1960) Starting in February, sit-ins spread through the south (and a few northern cities), lasting until the May of 1961.
- (1960) On February 17th, Martin Luther King is indicted with tax evasion charges in Alabama. He is acquitted in May by an all-white jury.
- (1960) On March 3rd, Vanderbilt University expels James Lawson for participating in sit-ins.
- (1960) On April 17th, SNCC (or the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) is founded at a Shaw University conference.
- (1960) On April 21st, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 passes after being severely weakened by Senate filibusters. It allows federal officials to register voters in cases where a "pattern" of voting discrimination is shown at trial and set criminal penalties for obstruction of related court rulings.
- (1960) In June, Bayard Rustin resigns from the SCLC under pressure from Representative Adam Clayton Powell.
- (1960) In July, membership in the the Nation of Islam reaches the 100,000 point.
- (1960) On October 19th, Martin Luther King and 50 others are arrested at Rich's Department Store during a sit-in in Atlanta.
- (1960) On October 26th, Martin Luther King is sent to Reidsville State Prison.
- (1960) On October 28th, Martin Luther King is freed through an intervention by Robert Kennedy.
- (1960) In November, John F. Kennedy wins the presidential race. The support of African American voters is a key factor in his victory.
- (1960) On December 5th, the Supreme Court rules that segregation of facilities in interstate bus terminals violates the Interstate Commerce Act in Boynton v. Virginia.
- (1961) In January, Federal district courts require that the University of Georgia admit two African-American men. The two are suspended from the university following white-student riots on January 11th, but reinstated by court order on January 13th.
- (1961) In January, nine students from the SNCC and CORE employ a "stay in jail" strategy during the Rockhill Sit-in, staying up to a month in jail.
- (1961) In March, Kennedy issues Executive Order 10925, which establishes the Equal Opportunity Commission and requires equal opportunity in placement and promotion in the military.
- (1961) On May 13th, CORE announces its plans for a "Freedom Ride".
- (1961) On April 17th, the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba fails, disgracing the United States.
- (1961) On May 4th, the first Freedom Ride (organized by CORE) leaves Washington, D.C. in two buses to test the Boyton decision.
- (1961) On May 9th, two freedom riders are beaten in Rockhill, SC.
- (1961) On May 14th, one Freedom Ride bus is attacked and burned by a firebomb outside of Aniston, AL. Injured riders are refused treatment at local hospitals. The second bus is hijacked by white supremacists and then attacked by a mob in Birmingham, AL.
- (1961) On May 15th, Greyhound and Trailways bus drivers in Birmingham refuse to take Freedom Riders further. Riders are forced to finish the trip to New Orleans by plane (after sneaking past a mob at the airport).
- (1961) On May 17th, students from Nashville arrive in Birmingham to finish the Freedom Ride.
- (1961) On May 18th, Eugene Bull Connor arrests new Freedom Riders and drives several out of town, but they immediately return.
- (1961) On May 20th, Freedom Riders depart Birmingham under protection of state officials in accordance with a deal worked out by the Kennedy administration. Outside of Montgomery, the escort falls away. Riders are attacked when they arrive in Montgomery, and the police do not respond for 15 minutes.
- (1961) On May 21st, Martin Luther King organizes a mass meeting at Montgomery Church, and he is surrounded by a mob. Kennedy sends in fire marshalls to protect him and the other protestors.
- (1961) On May 24th, Freedom Riders in Jackson MS are arrested with federal collusion.
- (1961) Starting in May, the Freedom Rides continue throughout the summer, with more than 300 people ultimately being arrested in Jackson, MS.
- (1961) In June, representatives of various civil rights groups meet with President Kennedy to discuss a voter registration project.
- (1961) In July, Robert Moses is arrested in McComb, MS. Moses' letter from prison solidifies the national image of the SNCC.
- (1961) In July, Baker County sheriff Warren "Gator" Johnson kills Charlie Ware. Ware is handcuffed in the back of the police car, and then shot. He had made a pass at a plantation overseer's black mistress the previous day.
- (1961) In August, SNCC worker Marion Barry arrives in McComb, MS and begins training high school students for sit-ins and protests.
- (1961) In September, Robert F. Williams, an advocate of armed self-defense for blacks, flees to Cuba (and later China) to escape charges of kidnapping a white couple (who had actually been seeking refuge in Williams' home). He returns in 1969 when the charges are eventually dropped.
- (1961) In September, James Forman becomes the executive director of the SNCC.
- (1961) On September 25th, Herbert Lee, a farmer and NAACP member who had registered to vote, is shot by white politician E.H. Hurst. Hurst later claimed that he had acted in self defense. A witness to the event (another black man) is also murdered before he can testify, so Hurst is acquitted.
- (1961) In October, SNCC workers Charles Sherrod and Cordel Regon set up a voter registration effort in Albany, GA.
- (1961) On November 1st, the Interstate Commerce Commission rulings ban all interstate carriers from using segregated facilities.
- (1961) On November 16th, the Albany Movement begins in Albany, GA.
- (1961) From December 10th until December 16th, the Albany Movement desmonstrations lead to more than 500 arrests. Albany police chief Laure Pritchett uses a variety of tactics to blunt SNCC tactics.
- (1961) On December 12th, the president of the Albany Movement invited Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy to join the movement.
- (1961) On December 15th, Martin Luther King and 250 othe protestors are arrested Albany, GA.
- (1961) On December 18th, demonstrations are suspended as part of a truce with the city of Albany. Martin Luther King leaves the city.
- (1962) In February, the COFO (or the Council of Federated Organizations) is formed.
- (1962) On February 26th, the Supreme Court bans segregation in all transporation facilities.
- (1962) In March, the Voter Registration Project is founded, and managed by COFO.
- (1962) In June, SNCC voter registration projects begin in southwest Georgia.
- (1962) In July, demonstrations resume in Albany.

The murder of Emmett Till

Murders of African-Americans at the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till, a teenaged boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different, however: the age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28 all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into a cause celebre. As many as 50,000 people may have viewed his body at the funeral home in Chicago and many thousands more were exposed to the evidence of his murder when a photograph of his corpse was published in Jet Magazine. The two murderers were arrested the day after Till's disappearance. They were acquitted a month later after the jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes. The murder and subsequent acquittal galvanized opinion in the North in the same way that the long campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys" had in the 1930s.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1930s On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to get up out of her seat on a public bus to make room for white passengers. Rosa was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest the segregation of blacks and whites on public buses. The boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted. This instance is often credited as the start of the Civil Rights Movement.

Mass action replaces litigation

Up through 1955 the civil rights movement in the South had largely been fought in courtrooms: while the NAACP had chapters throughout the South that attempted to register voters and protested discrimination, those efforts were often uncoordinated, while local authorities regularly harassed those organizations and the activists in them. That strategy shifted after Brown, however, to "direct action"—primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience—from 1955 to 1965. In part this was the unintended result of the local authorities' attempt to outlaw and harass the mainstream civil rights organizations throughout the Deep South. The State of Alabama had effectively barred the NAACP from operating in Alabama in 1956 by requiring it to give the state a list of its members, then enjoining it from operating within the state when it failed to do so. While the United States Supreme Court ultimately reversed the order, for a few years in the mid-1950s the NAACP was unable to operate. Churches and local grassroots organizations stepped in to fill the gap, and brought with them a much more energetic and broad-based style than the more legalistic approach of groups such as the NAACP. The most important step forward was in Montgomery, Alabama, where longtime NAACP activists Rosa Parks and Edgar Nixon prevailed on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. Activists and church leaders in other communities, such as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had used the boycott in recent years, although those efforts often withered away after a few days. In Montgomery, on the other hand, the Montgomery Improvement Association created to lead the boycott managed to keep the boycott going for a year until a federal court order required Montgomery to desegregate its buses. The success in Montgomery made King a nationally known figure and triggered other bus boycotts, such as the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956-1957. The leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Dr. King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as Rev. C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and Rev. T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, and other activists, such as Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters, the way the NAACP did, but offered training and other assistance for local efforts to fight segregation, while raising funds, mostly from northern sources, to support these campaigns. It made non-violence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism. In 1957, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of the Highlander Folk School began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina's Sea Islands, to teach literacy to allow blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success, tripling the number of black voters on St. John Island. The program was taken over by the SCLC and copied in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.

Desegregating Little Rock

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown, the Little Rock, Arkansas school board voted in 1957 to integrate the school system. The NAACP had chosen to press for integration in Little Rock, rather than in the Deep South, because Arkansas was considered a relatively progressive southern state. A crisis erupted, however, when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4 to prevent the nine African-American students who had sued for the right to attend an integrated school from attending Little Rock's Central High School. Faubus himself was not a dyed-in-the-wool segregationist, but he had received significant pressure from the more conservative wing of the Arkansas Democratic Party, which controlled politics in that state at the time, after he had indicated the previous year that he would investigate bringing Arkansas into compliance with the Brown decision. Faubus took his stand against integration and against the federal court order that required it. Faubus's order set him on a collision course with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was determined to enforce the orders of the Federal courts, even though he was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and ordered them to return to their barracks. Eisenhower then deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students. The students were able to attend high school, although they had to pass through a gauntlet of spitting, jeering whites to arrive at school on their first day and to put up with harassment from fellow students for the rest of the year. Faubus was reelected Governor the following year and for three terms after that.

Sit-ins and freedom rides

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy when students in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia began to "sit-in" at lunch counters in local stores to protest those establishments' refusal to desegregate. Protesters were encouraged to dress up, sit quietly, and occupy every other stool so potential white sympathizers could join in. Many of these sit-ins resulted in authority figures physically and brutally escorting them from the lunch facility. The technique was not new—the Congress of Racial Equality had used it to protest segregation in the Midwest in the 1940s—but it brought national attention to the movement in 1960. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns all across the South. Probably the best organized and disciplined of these, and the most immediately effective, was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960 the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio. Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. When they were arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, putting the financial burden of jail space and food on the jailers. The activists who had led these sit-ins formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 to take these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further. Their first campaign, in 1961, was conducting freedom rides, in which activists traveled by bus through the deep South to desegregate these companies' bus terminals, as required by federal law. CORE's leader, James Farmer, supported the freedom rides, but backed out at the last minute. That proved to be an enormously dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, where an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor had encouraged the Ku Klux Klan to attack an incoming group of freedom riders "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them," the riders were severely beaten. In eerily quiet Montgomery, a mob charged another bus load of riders, knocking John Lewis unconscious with a crate and smashing Life photographer Don Urbrock in the face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg, a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase, knocking out his teeth. The freedom riders did not fare much better in jail, where they were crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, Mississippi, some male prisoners were forced to do hard labor in 100-degree heat. Others were transferred to Parchman Penitentiary, where their food was deliberately oversalted and their mattresses were removed. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist breakers" from the walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut tight on hot days, making it hard for them to breathe. The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, the single-minded activist who "kept on" despite many beatings and harassments; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in the most rural—and most dangerous—part of the South; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew; Bernard Lafayette; Charles Jones; Lonnie King; Julian Bond (associated with Atlanta University); Hosea Williams (associated with Brown Chapel); and Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Toure.

Organizing in Mississippi

In 1962 Robert Moses, SNCC's representative in Mississippi, brought together the civil rights organizations in the state—SNCC, the NAACP, and CORE—to form COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations. Mississippi was the most dangerous of all the southern states, yet Moses, Medgar Evers of the NAACP, and local activists embarked on door-to-door voter education projects in rural Mississippi, while trying to recruit students to their cause. Evers was murdered the following year. While COFO was working at the grassroots level in Mississippi, James Meredith was successfully suing for admission to the University of Mississippi. He won that lawsuit in September, 1962, and attempted to enter the campus on September 20, on September 25, and again September 26, 1962, only to be blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett, who proclaimed that "no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor". After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held both Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. in contempt, with fines of more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll, Meredith, escorted by a force of U.S. Marshals, entered the campus on September 30, 1962. White students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks at the U.S. Marshals guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall, then firing on the marshals. Two persons, including a French journalist, were killed, 28 marshals suffered gunshot wounds and 160 others were injured. After the Mississippi Highway Patrol withdrew from the campus, President Kennedy sent the regular Army to the campus to quell the uprising. Meredith was able to begin classes the following day, after the troops arrived.

The Albany movement

The SCLC, which had been criticized along with other mainstream civil rights organizations by some student activists for its failure to participate more fully in the freedom rides, committed much of its prestige and resources to a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. King, who had been criticized personally by some SNCC activists for his distance from the dangers that local organizers faced—and given the derisive nickname "De Lawd" as a result—intervened personally to assist the campaign led by both SNCC organizers and local leaders. The campaign was a failure in the short run, largely due to the canny tactics of Laurie Pritchett, the local police chief, who successfully contained the movement without the sort of violent attacks on demonstrators that inflamed national opinion, and divisions within the black community. Prichett also contacted every prison and jail within 60 miles of Albany and arranged for arrested demonstrators to be taken to one of these jails, allowing plenty of room to remain in his jail. In addition to these arrangements, Prichett also foresaw King's presence as a danger, and allowed his release to avoid King's rallying the black community. King left in 1962 without achieving any dramatic victories. The local movement, however, continued the struggle and obtained significant gains in the next few years.

The Birmingham campaign

The Albany movement proved to be an important education for the SCLC, however, when it undertook the Birmingham campaign in 1963. The campaign focused on one concrete goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants—rather than total desegregation, as in Albany. It was also helped by the brutal response of local authorities, in particular Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety who had lost a recent election for mayor to a less rabidly segregationist candidate, but refused to accept the new mayor's authority. The campaign used a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins, kneel-ins at local churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a drive to register voters. The City, however, obtained an injunction barring all such protests. Convinced that the order was unconstitutional, the campaign defied it and prepared for mass arrests of its supporters. King elected to be among those arrested on April 12, 1963. While in jail, King wrote his famous (April 16) Letter from Birmingham Jail on the margins of a newspaper, since he had not been allowed any writing paper while held in solitary confinement by jail authorities. Supporters pressured the Kennedy administration to intervene to obtain his release or better conditions. King eventually was allowed to call his wife, who was recuperating at home after the birth of their fourth child, and was released on April 19. The campaign, however, was faltering at this time, as the movement was running out of demonstrators willing to risk arrest. SCLC organizers came up with a bold and controversial alternative, calling on high school students to take part in the demonstrators. When more than a thousand students left school on May 2 to join the demonstrations, more than six hundred ended up in jail, this was newsworthy but with this first encounter the police acted with restraint. On the next day however another thousand students gathered at the church and Bull Connor unleashed police dogs on them, then turned the city's fire hoses, set at a level that would peel bark off a tree or separate bricks from mortar, on the children. Television cameras broadcast the scenes of fire hoses knocking down schoolchildren and dogs attacking individual demonstrators, with no means of protecting themselves, to the nation. Widespread public outrage forced the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully in the negotiations between the white business community and the SCLC. On May 10, the parties announced an agreement to desegregate the lunch counters and other public accommodations downtown, to create a committee to eliminate discriminatory hiring practices, to arrange for the release of jailed protesters, and to establish regular means of communication between black and white leaders. Not everyone in the black community approved of the agreement—Fred Shuttlesworth was particularly critical, since he had accumulated a great deal of skepticism about the good faith of Birmingham's power structure from his experience in dealing with them. The reaction from parts of the white community was even more violent. The Gaston Motel, which housed the SCLC's unofficial headquarters, was bombed, as was the home of King's brother, the Reverend A. D. King. Kennedy prepared to federalize the Alabama National Guard, but did not follow through. Four months later, on September 15, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (see 16th Street Baptist Church bombing) in Birmingham, killing four young girls. Other events of the summer of 1963:
On June 11,1963, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy sent enough force to make Governor Wallace step aside, allowing the enrollment of two black students. That evening, JFK addressed the nation on TV and radio with a historic civil rights speech. The next day Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. The next week as promised, on June 19 1963, JFK submitted his Civil Rights bill to Congress.

The March on Washington

1963 to the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963.]] 1963, 1963.]] A. Philip Randolph had planned a March on Washington in 1941 in support of demands for elimination of employment discrimination in defense industries; he called off the march when the Roosevelt administration met the demand by issuing Executive Order 8802 barring racial discrimination and creating an agency to oversee compliance with the Order. Randolph and Bayard Rustin were the chief planners of the second March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which they proposed in 1962. The Kennedy administration applied great pressure on Randolph and King to call it off, but without success. The march was held on August 28, 1963. Unlike the planned 1941 march, for which Randolph included only black-led organizations in the planning, the 1963 march was a collaborative effort of all of the major civil rights organizations, the more progressive wing of the labor movement, and other liberal organizations. The march had six official goals: "meaningful civil rights laws, a massive federal works program, full and fair employment, decent housing, the right to vote, and adequate integrated education." Of these, the March's real focus was on passage of the civil rights law that the Kennedy administration had proposed after the upheavals in Birmingham. The march was a success, although not without controversy. More than 200,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. While many speakers applauded the Kennedy Administration for the (largely ineffective) efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation, John Lewis of SNCC took the Administration to task for how little it had done to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. While he toned down his comments under pressure from others in the movement, his words still stung:

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages…or no wages at all. In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights bill.

This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful protest.

I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a 'cooling-off period'.

After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House. While the Kennedy administration appeared to be sincerely committed to passing the bill, it was not clear that it had the votes to do it. But when President Kennedy was assassinated November 22 1963, the new President Lyndon Johnson decided to and did use his power in Congress to bring about much of JFK's legislative agenda in 1964 and 1965.

Mississippi Freedom Summer

COFO brought more than a hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer") to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The work was as dangerous as ever: three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department, on June 21, 1964. The national uproar caused by their disappearance forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, even though President Johnson had to use indirect threats of political reprisals against Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson (born 1911) was a figure in the American Civil Rights Movement and later became a leader in the Schiller Institute founded by Lyndon LaRouche. Born in Georgia, she became involved as a young woman in campaigning for women's suffrage. She and her husband, Bill Boynton, knew George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1934 she registered to vote, a privilege which later became a right. A few years later she wrote a play, "Through the Years", which told the story of creation of Spritual music, in order to help fund a community center in Selma, Alabama. The Robinsons met Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in 1954 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor. In 1963, Bill Boynton died and Robinson's home and office in Selma became the center of Selma's civil rights battles, used by King and his lieutenants, by Congressmen and attorneys from around the nation, to plan the demonstrations known as the "Selma to Montgomery marches". One of them, held March 7, 1965, became known as Bloody Sunday. Robinson was among the marchers tear-gassed and beaten by Alabama State Troopers. The horror of that event helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Robinson was a guest of honor when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. President Lyndon Johnson Robinson ran for the Congress from Alabama in 1964, the first female African-American ever to do so and the first female of any race to run for the ticket of the Democratic Party in Alabama. She received 10% of the vote. Robinson was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation Medal of Freedom on July 21, 1990, by the New York State Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation. In the preface to her autobiography, Bridge Across Jordan (see references), there are many tributes from friends and colleagues, including J.L. Chestnut, Jr. (author, Black in Selma), Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young. Mrs. King wrote: :In Bridge Across Jordan, Amelia Boynton Robinson has crafted an inspiring, eloquent memoir of her more than five decades on the front lines of the struggle for racial equality and social justice. This work is an important contribution to the history of the black freedom struggle, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who cares about human rights in America. [http://www.schillerinstitute.org/biographys/bio_amelia_new.html] Robinson met Lyndon LaRouche in 1983 and a year later served as a founding board member of the Schiller Institute. She is now the Vice Chair of the Institute, which she says is "following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King", according to the Schiller Institute website. 1983 In 2004 Robinson sued The Walt Disney Company for defamation, asking for between $1 and $10 million in damages. She contended that the 1999 TV movie "Selma, Lord, Selma", a docudrama based on a book written by two young participants in Bloody Sunday, falsely depicted her as a stereotypical "black Mammy" whose key role was to "make religious utterances and to participate in singing spirituals and protest songs." She lost the case. [http://www.al.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/110103250062210.xml?birminghamnews?nmet] [http://www.mgt.smsu.edu/em/profiles/Special%20Events%20Manager.htm][http://www.lfwlaw.com/news-events/story.cfm?id=22]
References

- Robinson, Amelia Boynton: Bridge Across Jordan, 2nd ed., Schiller Institute, 1991. ISBN 0962109541, Library of Congress Catalog Number 90-62730
- [http://www.schillerinstitute.org/biographys/bio_amelia_new.html Amelia Boynton Robinson biography] from the Schiller Institute
- [http://www.al.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/110103250062210.xml?birminghamnews?nmet Civil rights hero loses $1 million suit over film] by Chanda Temple, The Birmingham News, November 21, 2004
External links

- [http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/2001/Labor%20Day/conf_sep_2001_mw_.html#mw Schiller Institute: Tribute to Amelia Boynton Robinson] Robinson, Amelia Robinson, Amelia Robinson, Amelia

Martin Luther King, Jr.

:For other people named Martin Luther King visit Martin Luther King (disambiguation) The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, Ph.D. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) was a Baptist minister and political activist who was the most famous leader of the American civil rights movement. King won the Nobel Peace Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom before being assassinated in 1968. For his promotion of non-violence and racial equality, King is considered a peacemaker and martyr by many people around the world. Martin Luther King Day was established in his honor.

Background and family

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia (Dixie on Auburn Avenue) to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. (Birth records list King's first name as Michael, apparently due to some confusion on the part of the family doctor regarding the true name of his father, who was known as Mike throughout his childhood.) He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948. At Morehouse, King was mentored by President Benjamin Mays, a civil rights leader. Later he graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania [http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=49210#49210] with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston University in 1955. King married Coretta Scott on June 18,1953. The wedding ceremony took place in Scott's parents' house in Marion, Alabama, and was performed by King's father. King and Scott had four children:
- Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)
- Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
- Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
- Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia) The four children all have one thing in common: They have followed their father's footsteps as civil rights activists, although pet issues and opinions differ among the King children.

Civil rights activism

In 1953, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that began when Rosa Parks refused to comply with Jim Crow law and surrender her seat to a white man. The boycott lasted for 381 days. The situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses. Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King continued to dominate the organization until his death. The organization's nonviolent principles were criticized by the younger, more radical blacks and challenged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) then headed by James Foreman. The SCLC derived its membership principally from black communities associated with Baptist churches. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mahatma Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. King correctly recognized that organized, nonviolent protest against the racist system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Indeed, journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that made the Civil Rights Movement the single most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s. 1960s during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom]] King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, fair hiring and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out in often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement in Albany, in 1961 & 1962, where divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts; in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. King and the SCLC joined forces with SNCC in Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for a number of months.

Stance on Affirmative Action

Contrary to popular belief, and despite his call for a colorblind nation, Martin Luther King Jr. may have supported affirmative action. Among his comments: :"Whenever this issue [compensatory treatment] is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up." :"A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. " :"... for two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages — potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro: it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races." As one site puts it: "King actually suggested it might be necessary to have, something akin to "discrimination in reverse" as a form of national "atonement" for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation." [http://www.axiommedia.org/dsmfilmfest/war_for_truth.htm][http://www.laissezfairebooks.com/index.php?deptid=843&parentid=26&stocknumber=CU8994&page=1&itemsperpage=24][http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=687] Scholars argue whether he advocated affirmative action for the poor, blacks, or both. King himself admitted that the vast majority of the poor were black anyway, implying that he could put his proposed programs in terms of class and not race, while still achieving the end of compensatory treatment, albeit via a more agreeable position. While it may seem that he alternates between advocating socioeconomic and racial affirmative action, the latter predominated. In a Playboy interview he proposes a massive public works project of Depression-Era proportions, the likely grounds for Reagan calling King a near communist. [http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1292][http://www.allanfavish.com/mlking.htm]

The March on Washington

King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 25, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day since has become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, but the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the nation and aroused a national sense of public outrage. The second attempt at the march on March 9 was ended when King stopped the procession at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seemed to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Willie Ricks coined the phrase "Black Power" (widely credited to Stokely Carmichael). King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins, NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). For King, this role was another which courted controversy, as he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed. The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the South and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. :As a result, some civil rights activists who felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington," and members of the Nation of Islam who attended the march faced a temporary suspension.[http://www.infoplease.com/spot/marchonwashington.html] The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for the District of Columbia, then governed by congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protestors in Washington's history. King's I Have a Dream speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States.

Chicago

In 1966, after several successes in the South, King and other people in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as its first target. King and Ralph Abernathy moved into its slums on purpose as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor. They were both rather middle class folks, well-educated and of decent means, so they had to figure some way to connect. Abernathy could not stand the slums and secretly moved out after a short period. King stayed and wrote about how Coretta and his children suffered emotional problems from the horrid conditions, inability to play outside. In Chicago, Abernathy would later write, they received a worse reception than they had received in the south. Thrown bottles and screaming throngs met their marches and they were truly afraid of starting a riot. King had always felt a responsibility to the people he was leading to not unnecessarily stage a violent event, something rather unique to him as a radical social leader of the 60s or any other decade. If he had intimations a peaceful march would be put down with violence he would call it off for the safety of people. But he himself still faced death many a time by marching at the front in the face of death threats to his person. And in Chicago the violence was so formidable, it shook the two friends. But worse than the violence was the two facedness of the city leaders; Abernathy and King secured agreements on action to be taken but this action was largely bureaucratically killed after the fact by politicians within mayor Richard J. Daley's corrupt machine. Some of their small successes such as Operation Breadbasket did not translate into anything as large as the desegregation cases of the bus boycott in the South. However they did light the fire of ideas like Affirmative Action and organizing labor as legitimate techniques in the minds of the people. When King and his allies returned to the South, they left Jesse Jackson, then a young Chicago activist, in charge of their organization. While Jackson had a great deal of heart and oratorical skill, he knew very little about running an organization. They asked him for financial information, and he sent them a bag of unorganized receipts. Chicago could be seen as a point where the civil rights movement lost its momentum and began to fade to a shadow of what King had planned for it.

Further challenges

Jesse Jackson Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967 -- exactly one year before his death -- King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes: :A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." [http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html] King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. TIME called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi (a propaganda radio station run by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War)", and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years. He began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism: :You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism.... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. (Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966. Speech in front of his staff.) King also stated in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection." King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness." On April 3, 1968, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd: :It really doesn't matter what happens now.... some began to... talk about the threats that were out -- what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Assassination

1968 King was assassinated the next evening, April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's hospital at 7:05 PM . The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day. Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later). Later, Ray would be sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Ray, a presumed white supremacist and segregationist, allegedy killed King because of the latter's extensive civil rights work. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty although it was highly unlikely that he would have been executed even if he had been sentenced to death, since the US Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the case of Furman v. Georgia invalidated all state death penalty laws then in force. Ray fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

Allegations of conspiracy

Some have speculated that Ray had been used as a "patsy" similar to the way that alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been. Some of the claims used to support this assertion are:
- Ray was a small-time thief and burglar, and had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.
- The weapon that Ray is believed to have used in the assassination (a Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-'06 caliber rifle) had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it.
- According to several fellow prison inmates, Ray had never expressed any political or racial opinions of any kind, casting doubt on Ray's purported motive for committing the crime.
- The rooming-house bathroom from where Ray is said to have fired the fatal shots did not have any of his fingerprints at all.
- Ray was believed to have been an average marksman, and it is claimed by many that Ray had not fired a rifle since his discharge from the U.S. Army in the late 1940s. Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude, he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to that of his shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray, he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation. According to a former Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led conspiracy to kill Dr. King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. After several trips to and from Canada and Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate (allegedly controlled by his mysterious benefactor "Raoul" who reportedly had weeks before while in Birmingham, Alabama ordered Ray to purchase the Remington Gamemaster rifle) in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town--since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Green (who, like Ray, had asserted that FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach headed the assassination plot) had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 4th. Dr. King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow (not white) 1966 Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot. Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee on June 10, 1977 shortly after Ray testified that he did not shoot King to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.[http://knoxville.fbi.gov/hist.htm] More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary.

Recent developments

In 1997 Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial. In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King's wife (and a civil rights leader herself), along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot.[http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFPonMLK.pdf] [http://www.thekingcenter.org/tkc/trial.html] Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted "The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. [And] within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray." [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/1710221&mode=thread&tid=25] King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner. [http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/10325.html]

King and the FBI

Gerald Posner with various civil rights activists including Martin Luther King (second from left).]] King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who had deeply detested the civil rights leader. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. Levison had been suspected by the Bureau of involvement with the Communist Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The Bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"—to which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious liar in the country." The attempt to smear King as a communist was in keeping with the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot, but had been stirred up by "Communists" and "outside agitators." Movement leaders countered that voter disenfranchisement, lack of education and employment opportunities, discrimination and vigilante violence were the reasons for the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, and that blacks had the intelligence and motivation to organize on their own. HUAC later was discredited for its coercion of witnesses and the manner in which it sought to implicate individuals with vague and often sweeping accusations and assumptions of guilt by association. The Committee was renamed in 1969 and eventually abolished. Later, the focus of the Bureau's investigations shifted to attempting to "discredit" King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, demonstrates that he also engaged in numerous extramarital sexual affairs. Accounts of such behavior also have been provided by King's associates, including close friend Ralph Abernathy. The Bureau distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the Black Power movement. On January 31, 1977, in the cases of Bernard S. Lee v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. United States District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968, be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027. Across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the rooming house in which James Earl Ray was staying, was a vacant fire station. The FBI was assigned to observe King during the appearance he was planning to make on the Lorraine Motel second-floor balcony later that day, and utilized the fire station as a makeshift base. Using papered-over windows with peepholes cut into them, the agents watched over the scene until MLK was shot. Immediately following the shooting, all six agents rushed out of the station and were the first people to administer first-aid to Dr. King. Their presence nearby has led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.

Awards and recognition

Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1965 the American Jewish Committee [http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=403 presented] the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the American Liberties Medallion for his "exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty." Reverend King s