How far were disagreements between MLK and Johnson the major reason for the failure of Kings Northern campaigns?

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How far were disagreements between MLK and Johnson the major reason for the failure of King’s Northern campaigns?

The disagreements between Martin Luther King and President Johnson was a major reason behind the failure of King’s Northern campaigns, however, this is only one reason behind why the campaigns failed. Many white Americans as well felt that the civil rights movement had become obsolete as segregation had become outlawed and voting rights guaranteed. Even so, King realized that racial equality required more than just legal change and therefore changed his attention to the social and economic problems of northern states.

Beforehand, MLK had targeted his campaigns in the South, which dealt with different problems such as the segregation in education, housing and employment, while the North had different problems which black people had to face. Instead of having to face legal segregation like in the southern states, the northern states still faced racial discrimination in social and economic forms. For example, employers imposed skill tests on job applicants while the African Americans had never had to face this before and some had been educated in the worse schools in America. The scale and nature of the problems faced in the North is an underlying and a root problem, but a difficult one, as it links all of the problems which will inevitably point to failure in the Northern campaigns. This is because the northern states face racial discrimination, tactics should have been altered to counter this but in the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1966, King decided to use the same tactics of non-violent direct action that had been used successfully in the South. But this had challenged segregation rather than the problem of racial discrimination that they had to face now. Using tactics that worked for southern states was bound to not work successfully, and it could have even been doomed to fail from the start. The North should have been targeted with different tactics that would work specifically for racial discrimination rather than segregation.

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The result of using the same tactics on the Chicago Freedom Campaign had disastrous effects. In a heat wave during the campaign, the people in black neighbourhoods had to use fire hydrants to cool themselves, but the authorities demanded that the fire hydrants would be shut off to preserve water in case of a fire starting. When people arrived to enforce this, a riot erupted. Even though King appealed for calm, the violence only intensified. They faced angry mobs worse than Mississippi and Alabama while marching through all-white areas and even worse violence seemed likely. Because of the threat of ...

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