Peaceful protests-Another way blacks tried to secure civil rights was by peaceful protests, one of these protests was a bus boycott called the Montgomery bus boycott. It was started in 1955 by Rosa Parks, a black woman who travelled home from work by bus (which was segregated) and when all the white seats were taken up the black people on the bus were meant to get up for the white people to sit down, but on this Montgomery bus Rosa Parks refused to get up and so she was arrested. After the arrest, black people urged their leaders to do something. So Martin Luther King organised a bus boycott, the black people who provided 75 percent of the buses income did not ride the buses, instead walked or shared cars, this whole episode was followed by the media and after a year the bus company gave in and the Supreme Courts ruled that just like the schools segregated buses were not allowed.
Sit-ins were another way people, black and white, protested peacefully against segregation; it started off in Woolworth’s where in 1960 four black people asked to be served at the counter reserved for whites. This again was followed all over the USA on the TV and papers and within 18 months 70,000 sit-ins had taken place, and they weren’t just black people, sympathetic whites would go and sit with the black people who did this. Often they would be smeared with sauces and drinks would be poured over them, but they just turned the other cheek and carried on. These peaceful sit-ins would often turn violent with the people sitting there getting hurt by mobs of people, but still they would not retaliate with violence.
Freedom riding was another way blacks and whites tried to protest peacefully. The people who did this were trying to exercise the rights that the Supreme Court had given them in 1946 after the Irene Morgan case, which declared segregated seating “unconstitutional”. The idea was that whites would use only black facilities and blacks would use only white facilities, where they could. The violence was bad and often groups of freedom riders would be mobbed and beaten but despite the beatings the freedom riders were determined to show the world what they were doing. Jim Peck a white freedom rider who had suffered terrible beatings insisted “I think it is particularly important at this time when it has become national news that we continue and show that non-violence can prevail over violence ” Jim was one of many whites who took the brunt of the violence they were seen as traitors and treated as outcasts.
ii) There was increased racial tension in the USA between the years 1964-70 because some black people rejected Martin Luther King’s way of dealing with racist attacks on black people. They thought that King’s way of dealing with his equal rights was too slow because of taking everything through court, and even if he was prepared to wait, they weren’t. These people who rejected the peaceful way started other movement groups who insisted on black power.
The violent protesters, like the peaceful protesters needed leaders, one of these was Malcolm X. He was born on the 19 of May 1925 in Omaha Nebraska. His birth name was Malcolm Little but he discarded the Little part as he said it was a slave name given to his ancestors by their owners. He was brought up in a large family, and was one of 8 children, but that family was torn apart after his father was brutally killed by the KKK, and then his mother was put in to a mental hospital. So all the kids were fostered.
He was an exceptionally bright child with many friends and high goals for life, he wanted to become a lawyer, but his dreams were crushed after a racist white teacher told him to be realistic about being a nigger and to aim to be a carpenter which was a respectable black job. After that encounter he rejected school and went to New York and there got involved with small time crime. He then went to Boston to live with his sister; he started to organize some major robberies and also got in to drug dealing.
In 1946 he was caught robbing a jewellery store, and was sent to prison to serve 10 years. In prison he met a Muslim who showed him that there were two things missing from his life, religion and education, so he started learning about Islam and spent his years in prison educating himself. After changing his ways he was let out three years early on good behaviour and changed his surname and converted.
Now he was a Muslim and became a priest who believed in fighting back both figuratively and literally. Islam, which was beginning to be seen as a black religion, and that was partially because of Malcolm X. He grew to have a lot of power over a lot of people and used that power whenever he could for the black people, calling violence a form of self-defence. Malcolm did not want racial equality, calling instead for black separatism, black pride, and black self-dependence. He made several speeches and in the middle of his last speech promoting his ideas three men shot him down and the wounds were fatal.
In 1963 a civil rights bill, that Kennedy put to congress just before he died but was put down, so Martin Luther King marched with 200,000 people through Washington, in support of the bill that got turned down. On the 22 of November that same year Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and America’s new president Lyndon Johnson who was a southerner forced the Congress to pass an Act of Civil rights which made it illegal to have segregation in all education, housing and it stated that blacks were to have equal employment rights and opportunities. Then in 1965 there was another Act passed saying that it was illegal to stop blacks from voting by setting literacy tests.
On March the 7th 1965 a peaceful protest was held, it was a march in protest of a demonstrator killed by a state trooper in Alabama. This march was to appeal to Governor Wallace to stop police brutality towards peaceful protests. State troopers met the marchers and attacked protesters. The march was meant to be delayed until the 8th because Dr. King had been called to the president, but the people taking part in this march did not want to wait and went ahead anyway. When the troops waiting for them told them to disperse and they did not, the troopers chased and attacked the demonstrators and the black locals who had not taken part in the march. There were two other marches held in that month, in the first one which was held on the 10th one protester died, but the second was more successful and the voting Act was passed in that year.