Martin Luther King Jnr was arguably the most famous face of the Civil Rights Movement, at 26 he had served a year as the pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was well educated becoming a Doctor of Theology at Boston University, after achieving this he returned South as the Civil Rights Campaign grew steadily larger. At the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he was selected to be president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, having been dedicated to Civil Rights for most of his life and excellent at public, Baptist preacher. King urged other civil rights activists to approach issues with non-violent protest, sticking to Christian values. This non-violent approach had strong links to Mohandas Ghandi’s non-violent methods of gaining India’s independence from Britain, such as hunger strikes and peaceful protest. Ghandi used this to gain media attention and public support for his cause. This particular method has been adopted since his campaign in the 1930s and 1940s and can still be seen today used by organisations such as Greenpeace. Martin Luther King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), giving the Civil Rights Movement an official group and a leader to the movement.
The basis for the Civil Rights Movement was the injustice that black soldiers felt when they returned home having fought in WWII, but the campaign for equal rights gained momentum in the 1950s, with a handful of black people giving other blacks hope by standing up to their oppressors. This, together with the formation of a formal group and Martin Luther King as their leader, started the long campaign for Civil Rights for black people.
2. The Civil Rights Movement changed a lot during the 1960s, one of the most important changes being that there were more militant groups in action that had joined the Movement, which obviously had effects on it.
Both the SCLC and the NAACP were still operating, though the SCLC was the more prominent going into the 1960s. The SCLC was formed from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to create a unified movement against segregation and urged non-violence, using petitions, boycotts and marches. The downside of the SCLC was that they had just one sole aim, to get a Civil Rights Bill passed, once this had been achieved in 1964 there were limitations as to what else they could accomplish. The members of this group were generally older and less militant and therefore more reluctant to push boundaries.
A new group, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emerged during the 1960s. This group formed from the Lunch Counter Protests at Woolworths in Greenboro, North Carolina when 4 students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College began ‘sit-ins’ at the white only lunch counter at their local Woolworths. After a series of these protests, there were thousands of black students doing their own sit-ins, the SCLC wanted to control the students but they formed their own group, the SNCC. They had a group leadership system and were more modern in their ideas; they were not violent but a lot more ‘in your face’ and persistent than the SCLC. They did not have any specific set goal, merely to improve black lives in general, another important part of this group was that it was mixed race- a sign of how the Civil Rights Movement was changing in the 60s.
By the mid 1960s there were too many people involved in the campaign for Civil Rights, making it difficult to organise a passive protest. Another problem faced by Martin Luther King in continuing his non-violent policies was the black Americans from the Northern states becoming involved. Up until the mid 1960s, the SCLC and other groups had not addressed the problems faced by black people in the north, the Civil Rights Movement was dedicated to outlawing segregation and letting black people vote, things that Northern blacks already had. They wanted to address issues such as poverty, ghettos and general problems black people faced in the Northern states. These black people were far more confident and confrontational than the Southern groups. There was much frustration in the early 1960s over President Kennedy’s reluctance to pass a Civil Rights Act. President Kennedy was reluctant to pass the Civil Rights Act because this would put him out of favour with the voters in the South. He did not want to lose such a large amount of his supporters. Eventually, civil rights activists became frustrated; freedom riders and marches were no longer getting noticed. This is why many of them turned to a more militant approach.
The Albany Movement of 1961 illustrated how divisions were forming between militant activists and those who still believed in peaceful, non-violent protest. In Albany, Georgia, at this time the SNCC were mobilising local students for a sustained civil rights protest. Martin Luther King and the SCLC arrived to give the protest national media coverage. King himself was arrested and took most of this media attention. Upon his trial in 1962, King said he would rather serve a prison sentence than pay a fine. The white authorities did not want him to be seen as a martyr by the general public and arranged for a black man to pay for his release. The SNCC said he had undermined their authority.
The Birmingham Campaign of 1963 also caused many to seek more militant leadership. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth called on King to help make the Birmingham Alabama movement more effective. King’s strategy was to confront members of white authority, such as the notoriously racist police chief, Eugene T ‘Bull’ Connor. Many sit-ins, marches and rallies led to over 3000 blacks being jailed by May 1963. However, one incident in which school children marched into Birmingham’s business district turned caused many people to turn to the more militant side. The local police used water hoses to disperse the children, angering the civil rights activists. A few days later, after bombs exploded at the home of Martin Luther King’s brother and outside the SCLC office. The protestors became violent. The black people in Birmingham were poor and did not have much sympathy as far as non-violence towards white authorities was concerned. The protestors rioted, throwing rocks and attacking the riot police who subsequently charged back with water hoses, dogs and batons. This was mediated across America on television and newspapers, exactly what the US government did not need. Now many people who were previously indifferent to the Civil Rights Movement were shocked by the ruthlessness that the authorities had shown. This gained lots more support from both white and black people across the USA and people became more concerned. Source G shows us a poll of the public’s view of the most important problem facing the country. In 1963 and 1964 they were racial problems and integration, respectively.
In summer 1963, the civil rights protestors marched on Washington, 250000 people, both white and black, marched on Washington. It was the largest demonstration of the Civil Rights Movement and people gathered at the Lincoln memorial. This was significant because it was under his presidency that slavery was abolished in 1865. There were speeches, black music and Martin Luther King performed his “I have a dream…” speech. The Kennedy administration took a battering, with the SNCC criticising them for failing to protect Southern blacks and King warning of more rioting to come if a Civil Rights Act was not signed. President Kennedy, as most blacks predicted, was too slow in finding a passage to a civil rights bill. A few months later Kennedy was assassinated and replaced by Lyndon Baines Johnson who, to the surprise of many activists, pushed the Civil Rights Act 1964 through Congress almost immediately. The bill outlawed all segregation and also bias towards black people in education and employment, a major breakthrough.
Despite the Civil Rights Act being passed, there were still a number of issues to be faced by the Civil Rights activists. One of these was to get the vote for the southern states, which still did not allow black people to vote. Mississippi in particular was a hard line racist state in which many black people were still lynched for attempting to vote. A white supremacist murdered NAACP leader, Medgar Evans, in 1963 in Jackson Mississippi. The murderer was not charged until 1994.
Martin Luther King began a voting rights movement in Selma Alabama in 1965, his aim was to get national media attention to his cause, and that he did. The protestors from the SCLC and the SNCC gathered and prepared to march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge. They were blocked by police who attacked them with dogs, batons and tear gas when they refused to turn back, provoking national outcry at the number of people injured. Afterwards, the Selma officials obtained a court order banning these marches, the young SNCC activists challenged King to disregard the order, but he and the SCLC felt that it would damage their hopes of gaining a voting rights act. On the second attempt to march over the bridge, King turned back once they reached the police blockade, saying that the activists had made their point. This was a major turning point in the dividing between the peaceful and the militant activists and changed the movement. Many were dismayed at King backing down, leading a lot of people to doubt his methods and turn to more confrontational ones. Eventually, after many court proceedings, they got the go ahead to march and get the Voting Rights Act 1965 passed. Nevertheless, this proved that black people found it difficult to change their lives though the political system, which turned many people towards more radical leaders such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X did not approve of King’s integrationist ideas. He had changed his surname from ‘Little’ to ‘X’ because he believed ‘Little’ was a name given to his family by the slave trade in the 19th century. X had radical ideas and believed that black people should have separate states from white people, but have equal opportunities. Malcolm X was more interested in helping to improve the lives of the Northern blacks. It was a great shame that this powerful public speaker did not achieve his potential because of his assassination in early 1965. Nevertheless, the northern blacks who had been affected by his words rebelled, particularly in the cities. Many blacks died in these violent outbreaks, 43 were killed in Detroit. The northern blacks were now becoming more militant and active, gaining support through their decisive, powerful speeches and actions. Stokeley Carmichael is a prime example of how black people had become frustrated with the pace at which change took place, he left the SCLC to set up the Black Panthers and was later placed in charge of the SNCC because their former chairman, John Lewis was considered insufficiently militant.
The Black Panthers were formed in Oakland in 1966. They were renowned for killing those who stood in their way and became the most widely known black political organisation of the 1960s. The notoriously vicious Black Panthers wore berets and guns on marches, many of them were convicts already and others got imprisoned after violent marches. They were instructed to “pick up the gun” to defend themselves. They also created the Black Power phrase and the salute, which Mohammed Ali famously endorsed whilst on the podium of the 1968 Olympics.
This became known as the Black Power Movement, it gave black people a positive sense of identity and pride that became visible in the 1960s through black music and culture. By 1970 however, too many Panthers had been arrested or killed to keep the movement alive, the FBI had used anonymous phone calls to halt an alliance between the Black Panthers and the SNCC.
Martin Luther King said that the Black Power Movement would decrease support for the black struggle. He began to campaign in Chicago to urge people to continue with his non-violent approach to campaign against poverty, but he was losing support to the more militant northern groups. He lost a lot of his popularity because the government saw him as too militant and the militant groups saw him as too cautious. In April 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee to campaign for black refuse collectors who were on strike, depressed about the opposition he faced from former allies. He was assassinated whilst on the balcony of his motel room, on the evening after a speech to urge non-violence, by a white supremacist. This prompted a surge in of violence across black communities in the US, arguably the most important leader of the Civil Rights Movement had been killed. To this day it is debatable as to who was responsible for his death, and the circumstances surrounding it are still controversial. For many this marked the end of an era and any significance the SCLC had. From his death onwards the black struggle changed for good and took a new, more militant face.
The formation of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam and the new look of the SNCC ensured that the changes were there to stay. This of course had its disadvantages; rioting, violence and confrontation to name a few. The more militant groups got media attention but also lost the respect that both white and black people had for Martin Luther King’s passive methods. On the up side though, the forceful methods of the new groups gave black people a sense of pride, a sense that someone was fighting their cause without tiptoeing around white policies and regulations. Although, it could not have been achieved without King’s passive protests to start the Civil Rights Movement.
3) The Civil Rights Movement had a huge affect on American lives and culture, the activists had changed so much in a relatively short space of time. By the late 1960s, the Movement had been successful in many ways, but had failed in others.
The Civil Rights Act, the main thing Martin Luther King had been campaigning for, was passed in 1964. This was a huge step and can rightfully be described as a major success. It gave blacks the basic human rights and ended segregation. However, black people were still not accepted as equals and there was still discrimination, even when law did not allow it. This is also evident in the case of the Little Rock Nine, even after the law had accepted them as equal, the general public did not. The students had to be escorted into the college because the threat of a racist attack was still there. Gradually racism in education subsided, James Marshall was the first black person to enrol at the University of Mississippi- in the 1950s this would have been unthinkable.
Eventually there were better jobs, better education and better public services for black people. By the 1970s there were a lot more middle class black people than ever before, showing that the Civil Rights Movement had created more opportunities and given many black people a better quality of life. However, this does not apply to all black people, indeed source J tells us that far more blacks still lived in ghettos below the poverty line than whites in 1970. Even today this is apparent in the UK as well as the US and is often portrayed to the rest of the world in the form of black music such as gangster rap, telling the stories of hardship and crime that take place in ghettos and council estates. This is one of the major areas in which the Civil Rights Movement failed.
Even today it is clear to see that black people still don’t occupy the highest positions in society, Colin Powell, the US defence secretary is the highest black person in terms of occupations in society. There has never been a black president in the US or a black prime minister in the UK. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 allowed all black people to vote and gave them the opportunity to change the US in their favour so they could obtain the higher jobs in society and improve their standard of living. This did help and there are more black judges today, for instance, than ever before, but it did take a long time for black people to utilise their voting rights. Source K shows us that there were massive improvements in the amount of black people voting but that there was still a long way to go in the late 1960s. Mississippi showed the biggest improvement, with a jump of 4% of blacks voting in 1964 to 59% in 1968. The lack of voting blacks was because there were many who, despite having a right to education, still could not read and there were still threats of violence and job losses to some of those who voted in the South.
One of the biggest successes of the Movement was not related to politics or passing laws. The Black Power Movement of the late 1960s inspired black people to be proud of their black culture- Black Pride. Organisations such as the Black Panther Party, despite their militancy, showed black people that they were worth something by walking all over the white people who stood in their way. In the late 1960s Black Pride parties lead to an explosion of black art, culture, philosophy and most visibly, sport, music and literature. Many black writers such as Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones helped spread black culture. Sports personalities such as Mohammed Ali were an inspiration in the black struggle. As he stood on the podium at the 1968 Olympics and gave the Black Power salute he gave confidence and belief to the black people of the US. Black athletes often perform better at athletic competitions than white people so sport was a useful medium through which blacks could portray ‘Black Pride’. Music is probably the biggest part in the development of black culture, huge black record companies- notably Motown- also helped to spread black culture. Black music covers many genres, from Blues artists such as John Lee Hooker to gangster rap artists such as Jay-Z. The gangster rap genre has tarnished the reputation of black culture with shootings of famous rappers such as TuPac Shakur, nevertheless this genre makes sure that the hard lives still endured by many blacks in ghetto areas does not go unnoticed. The Black Pride Movement was one of the most important single movements in the black struggle to develop a sense of identity for the millions of downtrodden black people in the US.
A noticeably significant blow to the black struggle was the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; both were successful in their own right, but in different ways. Martin Luther King’s aim when holding protests was to gain media attention and public sympathy for his cause, a tactic that worked very well for him. King and the SCLC were most active in the early 1960s and source G shows how he had succeeded in gaining the public’s attention. Source G is a national poll showing what US citizens believed was the most important problem facing the country and in both 1963 and 1964, racial problems and integration came top. This shows how well King had used the media to his advantage and made sure that no one could ignore the struggle that black people faced. This led to his success in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed and making him arguably the most famous face of the black struggle.
Malcolm X however, took a more radical stance in the black struggle, encouraging violence and preaching hatred towards “white oppressors”. He led the Nation of Islam and took Cassius Clay under his wing, causing Clay to change his name to Mohammed Ali. He had no tolerance of white people and was probably the most famous of the militant leaders. He did not believe in integration and had absolutely no faith in “so called ‘good white people’” (source E). Although not as productive as the SCLC, X was one of the leaders who had no specific goals but served as a powerful spokesman for the black people. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 and Malcolm X in 1965- the loss of two very prominent leaders and role models could well be considered as a failure of the black struggle.
Unfortunately even today the Ku Klux Klan still exists, though to a far lesser extent than it did in the earlier half of the century. They do not have anything like the power or support they had in the 1950s. Nevertheless they managed to commit a horrific racist murder in the late 1990s in which a black man was dragged from the back of a car at high speed for two miles in Texas. The Civil Rights Movement failed to eradicate the KKK during the black struggle. This tells us that there is still racial violence and discrimination even today.
Politically black people had changed the country, overturning laws, getting bills passed and cutting through the red tape that surrounds America’s legal system, changing an amazing amount in just 20 years. However, changing the laws of such a racist country did come at a price- the lynching in gaining the Voting Rights Act and the violence of protests such as the Edmund Pettis Bridge incident. Considering the obstacles that had to be overcome- racist authorities/courts etc, opposition from the public and lack of interest from the government- the black activists did remarkably well in succeeding through America’s political system.
Socially the black people did not fare so well. Once the Civil Rights Act was passed, in the eyes of the law black people were instantly entitled to the same treatment as white people. Unfortunately peoples’ attitudes cannot be changed in the same way the law can and it took a long time for whites -particularly in the South- to get used to seeing black people as equals. Nevertheless blacks were eventually accepted by society, De Facto segregation gradually subsided in the North. But even today some Southern states are still notoriously racist. So, although great strides were taken to improve the way black people were looked upon in society during the Civil Rights Movement, many would say that there is still work to be done even today.
The blacks have not fared very well economically to date either. Many black people still live in ghetto areas in the US, which are famous for their violent, crime-riddled reputations. There are still far more white middle-class people than there are black and white people still obtain the highest positions in society. Having said this however, there are many black judges in the US, a sure sign that there are black people obtaining some of the respectable jobs in American society. It is a sad fact that there are still many more black people living below the poverty line compared to white people, despite the huge efforts and strides made in the 1960s by the Civil Rights Activists.
Perhaps the most important way in which black society has improved since the Civil Rights Act is in their culture. The Black Power Movement caused an upsurge in black culture- everything from the arts to sport. This gave black people a sense of identity, a pride that they had never had as Black Americans before. This was a key factor in helping black people to become accepted by society. They had sports stars, pop stars and a whole range of black literature, having these famous, respected people as ‘representatives’ of their culture helped black people integrate into society.
It would be completely unfair to say that the Civil Rights Movement had been unsuccessful, having accomplished so much within just 20 years. It is fair to say that the Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in many ways. But it must be considered that the movement failed in certain areas and that successes often came at a cost- the lynching during the Voting Rights Movement and the violence of the Edmund Pettis Bridge crossing are prime examples.