Source E and F show Malcolm X’s aims and methods. He wanted a totally separate state to white America, as is shown in his view of people who wanted to be white society, such as Martin Luther King:
‘…these integration-hungry Negroes about their ‘liberal’ white friends…’ (source E)
He also doesn’t think that whites will ever treat blacks equally:
‘Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed’ (source E)
His methods were violent. The title of the book source F comes from is ‘The Black Revolution’. This definitely does not suggest peaceful methods. and he says in this book:
‘The Negro revolt will merge into the world wide black revolution… revolutions overturn systems. And there is no system on earth which had proved itself more corrupt than a system which in 1964 still colonises 22,000,000 Afro-Americans…’
The word ‘revolution’ used here means that he wants huge changes, not just small steps in the right direction, but one or two that will get blacks equality in no time at all. He seems to think that the only way to get black equality, and a separate state, is to use violence. He didn’t want anything to do with the current system and wanted to start a new one so whites no longer got the upper hand. He doesn’t agree with Martin Luther King’s aims and methods, as is shown in source E when he talks about the ‘integration hungry Negros’ (King) with their ‘liberal white friends’ (people such as J.F.Kennedy and R.F.Kennedy who were friends with King). Martin Luther King used peace to show who was really in the wrong, even if a white used violence on him, he would not retaliate, whereas Malcolm X would retaliate. This made people fear Malcolm X, and this gave respect for black people as a whole.
Question 4:
In 1961, the public were more worried about prices and inflation than anything else because they were used to low taxes and prices, but both had started to rise. This meant that they would have to pay more for things, so this was at the top of their minds. Racial problems had not been publicised yet, so most people would have been oblivious to the fact that anything was going on.
In 1962, war, peace and international problems where what most people were thinking about because of the Cuban Missile crisis between the USA and Russia. Cuba had just become a communist country, and Russia, which was already a communist country, tried to take over nuclear bombs. An American spy plane saw this and ships were sent out to prevent the nuclear warheads getting to Cuba. For a while, nuclear warheads, which were powerful enough to blow up the world, were being pointed at America and Russia respectively, while Kennedy and Krushchev tried to bargain with each other. No wonder the public were a bit pre-occupied – the world was nearly blown up.
In 1963, people first realised what was happening to racial problems due to the events being reported by the news – it was the year that everything came to the forefront because of the protests and campaigns. As source I says:
‘[Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor] broke up demonstrations with water cannons, dogs and baton charges…these events were fully reported by the national press and television and many whites who were previously indifferent to the campaign were now sickened by this brutality.’
TV and other media were vital in publicising these events and so people started taking note. Source H is a photograph taken in Birmingham, Alabama, of police ‘dealing’ with black civil rights protestors. The police are using water cannons to keep the protestors up against a wall, as well as dogs and baton charges to keep people in order, but they unjustly beat them anyway, whether they were causing trouble or not. This sort of picture would have shocked people who saw it in newspapers, or on TV and this is how money and support was sent in from around the globe, as well as sympathy for the black protestors and pressure on the government to change the laws.
In 1964 people were talking about integration because the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and people were talking about it. They were more prepared to change now and would accept new ideas much more than they would have done 4 years earlier because so much had happened over those four years. King and X had come to the forefront of civil rights, with their protests and their speeches, especially as in 1964 was the year that King delivered his world famous ‘I have a Dream’ speech. King also got his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and so they were great role models, even if they were black. J.F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, so I think that American people were finally coming to terms with the fact that their country which had been so perfect before DID have some faults of its own, and that things needed to change to make America into the country they thought it was.
Question 5:
Martin Luther King had different ideas and methods to Malcolm X. Whilst his ideas were no violence and peaceful protest, and he wanted to be part of white society, Malcolm X and his followers wanted a total separation from whites, but an equal separation, and they wanted to do this using violence. Therefore, both groups disagreed with each others approach to civil rights.
Martin Luther King said, about how he had planned to get equality:
‘No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro mob and brutally murdered’
In this he was clearly talking about the Ku Klux Klan, where the members would ritually lynch black people, and the members themselves would be wearing big white hoods – surely cowardly in itself?
He believed in making the white people out to be the bad side by not retaliating when being attacked, and certainly not starting violence. This meant that he got public sympathy and it put pressure on the government to sort out the police force
However, Malcolm X believed in meeting violence with violence, and refused to let white people get away with attacking black people for no reason. In source E, he talks about Martin Luther King and his followers as:
‘integration-hungry Negroes’
and he was very wary of integration. He didn’t think that blacks would ever be treated as whites, and wanted a separate black state so he could get away from anything to do with whites.
Therefore, Malcolm X rejected Martin Luther King’s civil rights methods because he thought it was just being taken advantage of, and being trodden all over because he was too friendly to white people. He also thought that his methods were too slow and that X and his followers would never see a change during their life-time. They wanted to get revenge for the hundreds of years that whites had been put in front of blacks, with the slave trade which had first brought African blacks to America and the more recent Jim Crow laws which had hindered blacks for so long. Malcolm X was also an excellent Orator, and many young people were attracted to his pro-active methods and leadership, and he also gave blacks some pride, he made it seem great to be black – ‘Black is beautiful’ – and he helped make black culture how it is today – embraced by all races. However, he never clashed with King’s followers, and they probably needed each other to get what they did, Malcolm X to scare whites in respecting blacks in the short term, and Martin Luther King to change laws for the long term.
Question 6:
I think that the Civil Rights movement up to 1970 has been very successful, but not without its drawbacks.
Source J shows the number of people below the poverty line in the USA. The figures reveal a lot about society. Although there are a larger number in total of white people below the line, 28,500,000, that it still only 11% of the white population. However, the percentage of black people below the poverty line is 56%, showing over half of blacks are below this poverty line, and most of them would probably have been poor anyway, most of them just above this line. This is a huge inequality, and it is reflected in the other factors to do with poverty. Crime rates are higher for blacks than for whites, probably due to the fact that blacks cannot get decent jobs, because employers are more likely to want to take on a white employee, and also the fact that blacks have a worse education. This is to do with the fact that few blacks can afford to go to college, due to them not having not very much money, because of poor jobs, and everything goes around in a viscious circle. Therefore, blacks are more likely to turn to crime to earn some money.
Another reason for the civil rights movement being a failure is that all the important people involved in the movement are now dead. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, J.F. Kennedy, and R.F. Kennedy were all assassinated before the end of the 1960’s. A sobering thought, when you think of all the things they did, and the criticism they faced, to get civil rights into the position they are in now, and they still couldn’t please everyone, so much so that someone killed them.
Also, George Wallace, the ex-governor of Alabama, campaigned in the 1968 presidential election, and even though he didn’t get elected, he still got 10 million votes. That means there are 10 million racists in America prepared to discriminate against people because of their colour.
However, the civil rights movement has also been a huge success. Source K shows the percentage of blacks on the voting lists in some southern states in the years 1964 and 1968. There is a massive difference, for instance, in Alabama, the percentage of blacks voting went from 14% to 56%, and in Mississippi, possibly the most racist state in America, the percentage went from 4% to 59%. This is due to the voting rights and civil rights acts, which are a success in themselves. They were brought about by people such as Martin Luther King protesting to get laws made and changed, and it shows how things were really changed for the better, and how the attitudes of people in government, and the supreme court were changed.
Another reason for this immense change is that black people were less frightened of voting because there was a lesser chance that they would be hunted down and killed or have their house burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, who had previously done this to stop blacks voting in someone who would try to get equal opportunities for blacks and whites.
Desegregation was also brought about by the civil rights movement because of things like the bus boycott and the sit-ins that were staged. This was a huge step forward for civil rights and it proves that the movement was a success, because otherwise it probably would never have happened.
Another sign of success was in the Supreme Court, where Thurgood Marshall was the first ever black Justice in the court. This was an amazing achievement for Civil Rights, because it showed people what blacks could do if they had the chance, and it also opened up a door for blacks because now one black Justice had come in, it would be easier to get other black justices in, because anyone saying they wouldn’t be good enough could be pointed at Marshall, and proved wrong.
Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace prize in 1964, showing that his commitment was recognised.
The Jim Crow laws which had once been in place all through the southern states were abolished in the 1960’s so this meant that blacks could no longer be lawfully penalised for being black – a huge step forward in the civil rights movement.
There were now black role models such as Muhammed Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabaar, Tommie Smith and John Carlos who were brilliant sportsmen and people looked up and respected them, and they publicly supported their beliefs. Muhammed Ali was stripped from his title when he was asked to go to Vietnam and fight and he refused. When asked why he had refused, he simply said:
‘Ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me nigger’
Basically meaning that he had a reason to fight American boxers, because they were racist to him (i.e. calling him ‘nigger’) but no one in Vietnam had done this so he had no reason to fight them. Also, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were Malcolm X supporters and athletes in the 1968 Mexico Olympics. As they listened to the national anthem they gave ‘Black Power’ salutes, and were promptly sent home, but they had got their message across, and people who looked up to Smith and Carlos might have followed Malcolm X because of their heroes.
Although George Wallace got votes in 1968, he did not get enough and that was his last campaign for segregation. This shows that some people would no longer tolerate racism.
Overall, I think that the civil rights movement had been a great success by the end of the 60’s with just a few downfalls. I think that there were definitely more positive aspects than negative and if the positive aspects hadn’t taken place, the negative ones would still have been there, but the black person’s position on civil rights wouldn’t have moved at all since there would not have been publicised because no progress would have been made, and maybe the whole process would have gone backwards.
Question 7:
The author of source L seems to think that television was the only factor in people becoming aware of black racism:
‘Before television the public in the USA had no idea of the abuses blacks suffered in the South.’
He also seems to think that the laws were only changed because of television showing what was happening:
‘We made it impossible for Congress not to act’
I do not totally agree with this view, but partially, because although I think that television played a major role in the civil rights movement and its success, I think there were a few other factors in the laws being changed.
One of these was the fact that the presidents in charge around this time were very liberal towards blacks. J.F. Kennedy was liberal. He was good friends with Martin Luther King, and got him released from jail one of the times he was in there, and this helped greatly because people who looked up to J.F.K might have seen him being friends with King and have been more liberal towards blacks themselves. Another liberal president was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who passed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which also helped blacks because this meant they were less afraid of voting, as the table in source K shows:
(a table showing percentages of blacks of voting age listed in the voting registers of some southern states)
The figures for Mississippi show a dramatic rise in black people registering to vote, in possibly the most racist state in the USA, which is due to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act being passed in 1964, making it less of a hazard for a black to go out and vote, without the danger of being killed.
Another factor was the fact that there was a very liberal Supreme Court, with a liberal chief justice, Earl Warren. He threw out the segregation laws on buses, after the bus boycott, and he also threw out segregation in schools after the case of Brown versus Topeka Board of Education, on the grounds that segregation was unconstitutional – the first line of the constitution is ‘All men are born equal’.
Also, famous black people, such as Muhammed Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos have become role models for not just black people, but also whites, and it has shown black people that they don’t need to be just confined to a low-life job for the rest of their lives, but they can go out, make something of themselves, and be successful, and most of all, respected.
Another reason for the civil rights movement being a success is the fact that the 1960’s were a time of change, so most people were receptive to new ideas, and didn’t immediately reject big changes, similar to the renaissance period, when things happened very quickly then, but this was in a period of about a decade and many things happened in that decade.
Also, other types of media – radio; newspapers; photos; books – were an important part in publicising the civil rights movement, because most blacks would not have been able to afford a television, and they would have relied on newspapers etc. to keep them up to date on the latest news. Sources A, E, F, and I are books, written by Elizabeth Eckford, Malcolm X, and from a school history book, respectively, source B and D were from magazines and newspapers, sources C and H are photos, which may have been published in newspapers or magazines, sources G, J and K are statistics from the USA, and source L is a statement by a network, which may have been read out on television. So there were many other resources to use if information was needed.
Another reason why I don’t completely agree with source L is because it is liable to be very biased – it is written by a representative of NBC, one of the national television networks in America. Source J shows the number of people below the poverty line in the USA. These people definitely wouldn’t have had televisions, and because many of them were blacks, they wouldn’t have been able to see on television how other blacks were getting beaten up, and how X and King gave their speeches, and the number of people in the crowds, so they would have had to rely on newspapers.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were amazing people to be able to get what they did for civil rights, and they were fantastic orators, which made their speeches amazing to listen to, and they struck awe into their audiences. They were also brave to be able to stand up for what they believed in, when everyone else seemed to believe the opposite, so without them, I don’t think the civil rights movement would have come as far as it already has. Sources D, E and F are written by Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and it shows that they were powerful and talented writers/orators.
However, television was a very big factor in the civil rights movement. Television was able to do what no other media could do – it showed people around the world pictures of black people being beaten up for doing nothing wrong, and it shocked them. Audiences saw when C.T. Vivian tried to get a group of black voters into a polling station and a policeman refused them entry. When asked why they had been turned away, the policeman turned away from him, and then he turned around and punched Vivian in the face. They also saw Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor using water cannons on peaceful protestors, and also setting dogs on them. Source G shows that in 1963, people started thinking about racial problems, and this was partly brought about by televisions publicising the movement.
People worldwide also saw the speeches that Martin Luther King gave, such as the ‘I have a Dream’ when half a million people marched to Washington to see the speech – there were probably more people watching it at home in front of the television – and also they saw the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, which ended up in a blood-bath when police turned on the peaceful protestors and used anything they could on them, many blacks died from being beaten in the head with batons. Source I says that the black beatings were ‘fully reported by the national press and television and many whites who were previously indifferent to the campaign were now sickened by this brutality.’ This shows that people were shocked into acting and took an interest after watching the events on television. Martin Luther King was released with the money raised after the footage of policemen hitting blacks was shown on television, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics in Mexico were shown on television making ‘Black Power’ salutes as they listened to the national anthem, showing publicly that they were Malcolm X supporters.
Because so many people saw the pictures, they sent money, which helped funds for keeping the movement going, and support to America. It also meant that more pressure was put on the government to change laws to stop blacks being racially assaulted, and to also sort out their police force. It was free publicity for King and X and everyone saw the pictures, read about it in the newspaper, or heard about the movement in someway or another, so many more people who believed in the cause could send their support.
Overall, I think that television was very influential and played a large part in the civil rights movement, because people in other countries could see what was happening and pressure was put on to get things changed, but it was not the only factor in getting to where the civil rights movement is now, as source L seems to suggest, because most blacks and some whites did not have a television, so they would have relied on newspapers, and other factors also assisted the success of the movement. Therefore, I agree with the view of the author of source L, but not totally, because there were other factors involved.