Impact of martin luther king on civil rights Essay

Eyes on the Prize, Ameri notifys Civil Rights years, 1954-1965, Juan Williams Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams On the bus ostracizeWhen the trial of the boycott attractership began in Alabama, the national press got its counterbalance good look at Martin Luther superpower Jr., the initial defendant. tetrad years later, mightiness was found guilty. The sentence was a $500 fine and court costs, or 386 daylights of hard labour. The judge explained that he had imposed this minimal penalty because pansy had promoted non-violence. great power was released on pose his indictment and faith became front-page news across the nation Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams, pg 130 from an Interview with Diane Nash who guide the campaign to desegregate the lunch counters of Nashvilles department stores I gauge its sincerely important that young concourse understand that the movement of the sixties was really a volumes movement. The media and history seem to record it as Martin Luthe r powerfulnesss movement, but young race practiced like them, their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually developed the movement. pg195Kennedy delivered a new civilised rightfulnesss bill to Congress on June 19. Stronger than the bill that had suffocated in Congress at the beginning of the year, the new bill would outlaw segregation in all interstate public accommodations, allow the attorney general to initiate suits for school integration, and give the attorney general the important power to shut off funds to any federal programs in which discrepancy occurred. It alike contained a provision that helped ensure the right to vote by declaring that a person who had a sixth-grade precept would be presumed to be literate. King, the SCLC, CORE the NAACP, SNCC, and other civil rights groupings had no intention of allowing this bill to die in Congress. To demonstrate the strength of public demand for this legislation, they would march on Washington. pg262On Febru ary 4 the activist Black Muslim minister Malcolm X came to speak in Selma at the invitation of SNCC. At first, Kings colleagues feared that the controversial leader might incite the local people and jeopardise Kings figure of the movement. King was still in jail was Malcolm X told a capacity crowd at browns Chapel that the white people should thank Dr Kingfor holding people in check, for in that respect are other ( glowering leaders) who do not believe in these (unbloody) measures. Access to History Civil Rights 1945-1968Birmingham was the first time that King had really led the movement.There never was more than skilful purpose of the media than there was in Birmingham, said a leading SCLC staffer. While little changed in Birmingham, SCLC had shown America that southerly segregation was very unpleasantIn the summer of 1963 protests throughout the South owed inspiration to Birmingham. King had shown that he could lead from the front and force desegregation, if through rather artificially engineered violence. The historian Stephen Oates described Selma as the movements finest hour. King thought the national criticism of Bloody Sunday was a shining snatch in the conscience of man. There were sympathetic interracial marches in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, saucy York and Boston. Johnson and Congress probably would not have delivered the Voting Rights Act without Selma.The best way to judge his meaning might be to look at what followed his death the national direct action phase of the civil rights movement died with him. The Poor Peoples Campaign fizzled out under his successor Ralph Abernathy. Without King SCLC collapsed. nevertheless it is not certain that the civil rights movement would have progressed any further had King lived. We have seen that King failed in Chicago. Other black activists were becoming more impatient and their frequent extremism was important in generating a white backlash. If King had never lives, the black struggle would have followed a course of development alike(p) to the one it did. The Montgomery bus boycott would have occurred, because King did not initiate it. Black scholarly personshad sources of tactical and ideological inspiration besides King. Professor Claybourne Carson Access to HistoryWhites and blacks became increasingly critical of him. When he toured riot-stricken Cleveland, Ohio, black teenagers mocked and ignored him. He knew he has raised their hopes but failed to fulfil them. Many blacks thought him too moderate. King admitted that SCLC achieved little in the three years after Montgomery. Then the civil rights movement exploded into liveliness again in February 1960. Initially King had nothing to do with itWhena Greensboro SCLC members contacted him, King quickly arrived to pass on the students and assure them of full SCLC support, saying What is new in your fight it the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students. battle of Atlanta students persuaded King to join them in sit-ins. As in Montgomery, King was led rather than leading.Adam Fairclough, break down Day Coming. Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (Penguin, 2001) In some ways it was the obstinacy of the whites in Montgomery, not the deliberate planning of the blacks, that glowering the boycott into an international cause clbre. After all, blacks in Montgomery asked only for a fairer application of separate but equal, not an end to segregation itself In a similar way, Martin Luther King Jr., only emerged as the symbol of the protest when whites began to persecute him. Whites calculated that by breaking King, they could break the boycott instead they made King a martyr, a hero, and the outstanding symbol of black resistance. (227-228) The sit-in movement made a massive dent in the structure of segregation. In the Deep South, crushed by violence and arrests, they failed to integrate lunch counters. But in the upper South, and in the rim South states of Florida and Texas, they be effective .The disruption caused by the sit-ins themselves, and the economic impact of consumer boycotts, hurt the dime stores the profits of Woolworth, the main target, plummeted. Downtown merchants as a group also suffered. The cash-register logic of the sit-ins proved hard to resist on March 19, 1960, San Antonio, Texas, became the first city in the South to desegregate its lunch counters Nashville did so in May by the end of the year, store owners in at least eighty towns and cities had agreed to serve blacks. (245) The force of the 1963 demonstrations so surprised and disturbed white Americans that the Kennedy administration decided to fundamentally revise its approach to the civil rights question. The passive revolt had riveted the attention of the nation onto the South, revealing the underlying ugliness of the Jim Crow system. The federal government completed that segregation was destabilizing the South and embarrassing the United States in the eyes of the world. The government also worried that racial conflict and violence might engulf the entire nation. (279)William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins and Robert Korstad (eds), Remembering Jim Crow African Americans Tell some Life in the Segregated South (The New Press, 2001) Mai Young on the inequalities in segregated education Lots of these youngsters now dont remember. They really dont. You tell them things that happened, they bonny cant believe it. Thats why they cant appreciate Martin Luther King because they dont get it on what happened. They really dont know what happened during those days. Hard to visualize it. (187) Charles Gratton To challenge white people was exclusively the wrong thing to do. You rightful(prenominal) automatically grow up inferior, and you had the feeling that white people were relegate than youMost blacks in the South felt that way until the late fifties and sixties when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. produce along with his philosophy, and it started giving black people some hope that the way we were being treated wasnt right and this thing can change. Just some hope that we were waiting on. Whenever I would hear Dr. King talk, it seemed like he was touching me from the inside. He could touch your feeling from the inside, things that you would want to say but you just didnt know how, things that were right and wrong but you kept inside of you because you didnt know how to declaim it. So he was a really good leader and a great man, and I think he done a wonderful job in what he done for our people as a whole. (8)Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (Penguin Books, 1977) Franklin McCain (involved in student sit-ins) We knew that probably the most powerful and potent weapon that people have literally no plea for is love, kindness. That is, whip the enemy with something that he doesnt understand. Raines How much was the practice of Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus boycott on your mind in that regard? McCain Not very much. The ind ividual who had probably most go on us was Gandhi, more than any single individual. During the time that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was in effect, we were tots for the most part, and we barely heard of Martin Luther King. Yes, Martin Luther Kings name was well-known when the sit-in movement was in effect, but to pick out Martin Luther King as a hero I dont want you to misunderstand what Im just about to say Yes, Martin Luther King was a hero No, he was not the individual that we had upmost in mind when we started the sit-in movement. (79)Laurie Pritchett (police chief of Albany Georgia in 1961) They came to Montgomery, and I was in Montgomery when they marched there I will never forget one day there I heard the clap, it sounded like thunder, and we looked up, and it was the sheriffs posse on those horses, and the sparks were flyin off of the shoes as they came down the street. And they went into the crowd with bull whips, they run up on the porches some of the horses were cut at, which I cant much blame the people. But this created that problem there, and, as I stated before, Dr. King, when he leftfield Albany, in his own words and in the words of the New York Heral Tribune, was a defeated man. In my opinion, right or wrong, if Birmingham had reacted as Albany, Georgia did theyd never got to Selma. Dr. King, through his efforts, was instrumental in passin the Public Accommodations Act but the people that were most responsible was Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark (366)Taylor carve up, piece the WatersThe SNCC leaders were in a bind. They wanted a peoples movement, like SNCC itself, and yet without King, the Wells march had had little impact on the impertinent world, and without such impact it was nearly impossible to inspire more of Albanys ordinary people to take up the crusade. What they needed was the use of Kings influence without his suffocating glory, and it was all the more galling that they were obliged to ask to King to reform himself accordingly T aylor Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 614 As chairwoman Kennedy and the lawyer General had anxiously awaited the outcome of the showdown with Governor Wallace, a telegram came in from Martin Luther King on the beastly conduct of law enforcement officers at Danville. Asserting once again that the blackamoors endurance may be at breaking point, King implored the Administration to seek a just and moral solution. Given his recent sensitivity to Kings opinions, these urgings may have influenced electric chair Kennedys extraordinary decision to make a civil rights address on national television. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 823Professor Eleanor Holmes Norton, reviewing Parting the Waters, in the New York Times, November 27th 1988 http//www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/branch-waters.html By thetime Mr. Branch left home to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1964, the people I met were already more interested in Vietnam. In his view, however, the civil rights movement was why they cared about Vietnam. It was King and others, he believes, who first opened the door for his generation to look at the world from a moral perspective. It occurred to me that the most fundamental political questions were, in fact, moral questions. It was the awareness of those moral questions that steered Mr. Branch away from his premed major in college and toward political philosophy and an eventual writing career. In Parting the Waters Mr. Branch aims to re-create for others the same sense of King as a man of power and complexity that he experienced in his college years. King was considered passe by 1966, even before people like Stokely Carmichael he was considered almost an Uncle Tom. I knew there was something wrong with that attitude. If he was that shallow, then how did I get here? The chronicle of Martin Luther King, JR. Edited by Clayborne Carson, published in 1999 In 1960 an electrifying movement of Negro students tatterdemalion the placid sur type of campuses and communities across the South.The young students of the South, through sit-ins and other demonstrations, gave America a glowing example of disciplined, dignified nonviolent action against the system of segregation. Though confronted in many places by hoodlums, police guns, force gas, arrests, and jail sentences, the students tenaciously continued to sit down and demand equal service at revolution store lunch counters, and they extended their protest from city to city. Spontaneously born, but guided by the theory of nonviolent resistance, the lunch counter sit-ins accomplished integration in hundreds of communities at the swiftest range of change in the civil rights movement up to that time.This was the time of our greatest stress when the children were used in Birmingham, and the courage and conviction of those students and adults made it our finest hour. We did not fight back, but we did not turn back. We did not give way to bitterness. well-nigh few specta tors, who had not been trained in the discipline of nonviolence, reacted to the brutality of the policemen by throwing rocks and bottles. But the demonstrators remained nonviolent. In the face of this resolution and bravery, the moral conscience of the nation was deeply stirred, and all over the country, our fight becamethe fight of seemly Americans of all races and creeds.Selma brought us a voting rights bill, and it also brought us the grand alliance of the children of light in this nation and made possible changes in our political and economic life heretofore undreamed of. With President Johnson, SCLC viewed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as one of the most monumental laws in the history of American independence. We had a federal law which could be used, and use it we would. Where it fell short, we had our tradition of struggle and the method of nonviolent direct action, and these we would use.Hodgson, Godfrey (2009) Martin Luther King, Quercusp. 5The speech was at once sermon a nd political argument. He was talking to several audiences at once. He was directly addressing the thousands who were there in front of him in Washingtons Mall. Over their heads he was reaching out to southern blacks and northern whites, to the tens of millions of undecided white Americans, willing to be persuaded that the time was ripe to end the embarrassing southern folkways of segregation, yet reluctant to be carried away on radical paths. He was reaching out to the powerless in southern plantations and the angry in northern ghettos, and most of all to the powerful, only just beyond the reach of his voice a mile or so up the Mall on Capitol Hill. So he wove together difference languages for different listeners. He borrowed the emotional power of the Old Testament with an echo of the stately music of Handels Messiah. He also appealed to the sacred texts of the American secular religion, echoing the grand simplicities of Jeffersons Declaration of Independence and Lincolns Gettysb urg address. p. 67Seven years after the Brown judgement, progress for black people was still frustratingly difficult. To be sure, although the white South, or at least most of its leaders in the Deep South, had said never to school desegregation, schools had begun to desegregate, oddly after President Eisenhowers reluctant decisionto send in the hundred-and-first Airborne Division to protect nine black children admitted by court order to Central game Schoolin Little Rock, Arkansas. Around the edges, the segregated south was shrinking. p. 75 second paragraphThe Confederate Christian Leadership Conference found itself, almost immediately after its foundation, the third major Negro organisation the other 2 were NAACP and National Urban League. It was southern, it was dominated by ministers, especially but not entirely Baptists, and it had the advantage of being led by someone as gifted, as dynamic and as well known nationally as Martin Luther King Jr. It lacked the membership and f inancial strength of the cardinal older organisations, as well as suffering from less obvious disadvantages. King was an inspiring leader and, if pointed in the right direction, an effective fundraiser. But he was neither a particularly good administrator, nor especially interested in administration. p. 79The freedom rides represented a new and hard test for Martin Luther King. more(prenominal) than once the SNCC demonstrators raised, directly and in the most personal terms, the question of his personal courage. He argued, and Wyatt Walker argued for him, that he must stay out of jail to raise money, to direct the movement and to lead his people. He was on probation, he said. They said they were on probation too. They expected him to go with them. When, on May 27 in Montgomery, he refused to join them on the bus to Mississippi, he said he must choose the where and when of his own martyrdom. They accused him flatly of cowardice.King had already shown, and would show again and again , that he was no coward. But he did not want to be told when and where he should risk his liberty and his life by a group of passionately committed by somewhat unfriendly students. The freedom rides no only marked a widening gap between King and the students, which grew into institutional rivalry between the SCLC and SNCC and raised deep and breakneck disagreements about the tactics and the strategy of the movement they also prefigured the way the struggle would develop over the future(a) five years, and set the course for the rest of his life. p. 82From the spring of 1961, King found himself between two fires. He had to deal, now , not only with the intransigence of southern white segregationists, but with the impatience and unbelief of young Negroes whowanted to go faster than he was yet ready to go.