Impact of martin luther king on civil rights Essay

eye on the Prize, Ameri fecess civilianized Rights years, 1954-1965, Juan Williams Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams On the bus boycottWhen the trial of the boycott miteership began in Alabama, the demesneal press got its first good look at Martin Luther major power Jr., the first defendant. Four days later, great power was prime guilty. The objurgate was a $500 fine and court costs, or 386 days of voice slight labour. The guess explained that he had imposed this minimal penalty because fagot had promoted non- personnel. office was released on bond his indictment and conviction became front-page freshlys across the nation Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams, pg 130 from an Interview with Diane Nash who led the campaign to ruffle the lunch echos of capital of Tennessees department stores I think its re anyy important that young people understand that the movement of the mid-mid-sixties was really a peoples movement. The media and history seem to temper it as Martin Luther moguls movement, scarce young people bonnie like them, their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually lifted the movement. pg195Kennedy delivered a impertinent accomplished righteousnesss bill to Congress on June 19. Stronger than the bill that had died in Congress at the beginning of the year, the new bill would outlaw separationism in all interstate public accommodations, allow the attorney general to initiate suits for inform integration, and give the attorney general the important power to shut moody funds to any federal programs in which disc shoreination occurred. It as well as contained a provision that helped ensure the right to vote by declaring that a somewhatbody who had a sixth-grade education would be presumed to be literate. superpower, the SCLC, CORE the NAACP, SNCC, and former(a) polished rights sort outs had no intention of allowing this bill to die in Congress. To demonstrate the capacity of public demand for this legislation, they w ould march on Washington. pg262On February 4 the warlike Black Muslim minister Malcolm X came to speak in Selma at the invitation of SNCC. At first, business leaders colleagues feared that the controversial leader might foment the local people and jeopardise Kings control of the movement. King was still in jail was Malcolm X told a capacity crusade at cooks chapel service that the innocence people should thank Dr Kingfor holding people in check, for there are other (black leaders) who do not believe in these (nonviolent) measures. Access to History Civil Rights 1945-1968Birmingham was the first while that King had really led the movement. at that place never was much(prenominal)(prenominal) skilful manipulation of the media than there was in Birmingham, verbalize a leading SCLC staffer. While little changed in Birmingham, SCLC had sh protest America that southern requisition was truly unpleasantIn the summer of 1963 protests through and throughout the southeastward owed warmth to Birmingham. King had shown that he could lead from the front and force desegregation, if through quite a artificially engineered violence. The historian Stephen Oates described Selma as the movements finest hour. King thought the discipline criticism of Bloody Sunday was a shining moment in the conscience of man. There were sympathetic motley marches in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York and Boston. Johnson and Congress belike would not be in posse comitatusssion of delivered the Voting Rights Act without Selma.The best way to judge his significance might be to look at what followed his death the national direct action phase of the civil rights movement died with him. The Poor tidy sums Campaign fizzled out under his successor Ralph Abernathy. Without King SCLC collapsed. just it is not certain that the civil rights movement would defy progressed any throw out had King lived. We have seen that King failed in Chicago. Other black activists were neat m ore impatient and their frequent extremism was important in generating a white backlash. If King had never lives, the black struggle would have followed a variant of development similar to the unmatched it did. The Montgomery bus boycott would have occurred, because King did not initiate it. Black stu wampumshad 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 consummate them. Many blacks thought him too moderate. King admitted that SCLC achieved little in the ternary years after Montgomery. Then the civil rights movement exploded into demeanor again in February 1960. Initially King had no thing to do with itWhena Greensboro SCLC members contacted him, King quickly arrived to encourage the students and assure them of full SCLC suppo rt, saying What is new in your fight it the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students. Atlanta students persuaded King to join them in sit-ins. As in Montgomery, King was led rather than leading.Adam Fairclough, Better 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 turned the boycott into an supranational cause clbre. After all, blacks in Montgomery asked solo for a fairer application of separate but equal, not an end to segregation itself In a similar way, Martin Luther King Jr., unless emerged as the attributeic representation of the protest when whites began to persecute him. Whites calculated that by suspension 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 southeas terly, crushed by violence and arrests, they failed to integrate lunch counters. still in the upper South, and in the rim South states of Florida and Texas, they proved hard-hitting.The disruption ca apply by the sit-ins themselves, and the frugal impact of consumer boycotts, distress the dime stores the profits of Woolworth, the main target, plummeted. Downtown merchants as a gathering also suffered. The cash-register logic of the sit-ins proved hard to resist on contact 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 retool its approach to the civil rights question. The nonviolent revolt had riveted the attention of the nation onto the South, bring out the und erlying ugliness of the Jim Crow system. The federal government realized 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 broad(a) nation. (279)William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins and Robert Korstad (eds), Remembering Jim Crow African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (The New Press, 2001) Mai Young on the inequalities in single out education Lots of these youngsters forthwith preceptort remember. They really dont. You tell them things that happened, they just cant believe it. Thats wherefore they cant appreciate Martin Luther King because they dont whop what happened. They really dont know what happened during those days. Hard to visualize it. (187) Charles Gratton To scrap white people was just the wrong thing to do. You just automatically grow up inferior, and you had the sapidity that white people were better than you al or so blacks in the South felt that way until the late fifties and sixties when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. come 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 try on 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 designate it. So he was a really good leader and a great man, and I think he done a tremendous 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 artillery that people have literally no defense for is love, kindnes s. That is, whip the oppositeness with something that he doesnt understand. Raines How much was the example of Dr. King and the Montgomery flock Boycott on your opinion in that regard? McCain Not very much. The individual who had probably most influence 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 long-familiar 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 more or less 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 u p, 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 diddley 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 left 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 human race Accommodations Act but the people that were most responsible was Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark (366)Taylor Branch, component the amniotic fluidThe SNCC leaders were in a bind. They wanted a peoples movement, like SNCC itself, and in time without King, the Wells march had had little impact on the outside world, and without such impact it was nearly impossible to insp ire more of Albanys ordinary people to take up the crusade. What they infallible 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 Taylor Branch, Parting the waters, p. 614 As President Kennedy and the Attorney General had anxiously awaited the ascendant 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 Negros 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 President Kennedys extraordinary decision to make a civil rights address on national television. Taylor Branch, Parting the wet, p. 823Professor Eleanor Holmes Norton, reviewing Parting the Waters, in the New York Times, November 27th 1988 http//www.nytim es.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 implicated 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 remote 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 wro ng with that attitude. If he was that shallow, then how did I get here? The autobiography of Martin Luther King, JR. Edited by Clayborne Carson, published in 1999 In 1960 an electrifying movement of Negro students shattered the tranquil surface 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, tear gas, arrests, and jail sentences, the students tenaciously continued to sit down and demand equal service at variety store lunch counters, and they extended their protest from city to city. impromptu 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 w hen 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. Some a couple of(prenominal) spectators, 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 decent 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 send 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 exemption. We had a federal law which c ould be used, and use it we would. Where it fell short, we had our usage of struggle and the method of nonviolent direct action, and these we would use.Hodgson, Godfrey (2009) Martin Luther King, Quercusp. 5The quarrel was at once sermon and political argument. He was talking to some(prenominal) 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 undecomposed to end the embarrassing southern folkways of segregation, yet slow 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 in concert difference languages for different listeners. He borrowed th e emotional power of the Old volition with an echo of the stately music of Handels Messiah. He also appealed to the dedicated texts of the American secular religion, echoing the grand simplicities of Jeffersons Declaration of independency and Lincolns Gettysburg 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 utter Never to school desegregation, schools had begun to desegregate, specially after President Eisenhowers reluctant decisionto send in the 101st Airborne Division to value nine black children admitted by court order to Central naughty Schoolin Little Rock, Arkansas. Around the edges, the segregated south was shrinking. p. 75 second paragraphThe Southern Christian Leadership Conference found itself, almost immediately after its foundation, the third major Negro composition the other two were NAACP and National Ur ban 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 know nationally as Martin Luther King Jr. It lacked the membership and financial loudness of the two 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 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(prenominal) 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 Golgotha. 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 dangerous disagreements about the tactics and the strategy of the movement they also prefigured the way the struggle would develop over the next 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 suspicion of young Negroes whowanted to go faster than he was yet ready to go.