Continuing the struggle for integration, Students in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia began to ‘sit-in’ at lunch counters in stores to protest against those establishments refusal to desegregate. Keeping with King’s non-violent protest strategy, protesters dressed up, sat quietly and to occupy every other stool so potential white sympathizers could join them. Unfortunately many of the sit-in’s ended with the authorities brutally removing then from the store, however it brought national attention to the movement. By the end of the 1960s the sit-in were at every southern and border state. Protesters focused on other public facilities other than the lunch counters, such as, parks, libraries and museums. This is a key example of how people had banded together; a vital period in civil rights had begun.
Between 1963 and 1965 there was a period of great success for the Civil Rights Movement and this was when events such as Birmingham, the March on Washington and Selma happened. It also saw the introduction of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The Birmingham Campaign challenged the segregation in Birmingham and provoked a violent reaction from Bull Connor, the police chief. This was a significant event in the history of the civil rights as it was where President Kennedy saw that the Civil Rights Act was needed. ‘The March on Washington’ was for jobs and freedom and indicated concerns for black economic conditions as well as issues concerning segregation. The march was regarded as a great success; it was well organised, peaceful and clearly demonstrated the degree of white support for the cause. The march gave Kennedy extra leverage to urge the support for the reform, ‘a moral issue’ and quoted from the American Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal. Kennedy met with over 1500 leaders from various groups and discussed the implications of civil rights. The Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington showed both, the preference of the federal courts in favour of the civil rights movement and demonstrates how the civil rights movement, led by non-violent organizations like SCLC, was becoming more organized, professional, and efficient, which was very successful. The march presented a positive image of the movement and promoted sympathy for the cause of civil rights and was such a success that over 400 members of Congress came out in support of the march. By June 1963, 161 cities had been desegregated. An even more promising end to segregation arose in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed by President Johnson. The Civil Rights Act was an extremely powerful statement of the principle of equality. It was the end of segregation in those areas that had still not been changed after the previous campaigns. By October 1965 a further 53 cities had formally desegregated in addition to the 161 that had already. Even in the Deep South there was much progress being made.
However, the fight for equality and desegregation in the education system was not so much of a success, although it did start of promisingly with the Brown vs. Board of Education case. The Brown vs. Board of Education was when Linda Brown and her family fought to allow Linda to go to the local school instead of having to go to a black school which was quite a distance away. The Browns were represented by Thurgood Marshall who fought for not only Linda, but for all schools to be integrated. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was in favour of Brown and agreed that schools should be integrated and that segregation on a whole was unacceptable. This was a landmark in the development of the civil rights movement. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, the Little Rock school decided to integrate black and white pupils. Integration was chosen in Little Rock in Arkansas rather than in the heart of the South because the deep southern states were extremely racist and segregated, where as, Little Rock was a supposedly a rather progressive southern state; unfortunately this was not the case, and the nine black students who sued for the right to attend a mixed school were viciously attacked. The students were able to attend school although they had to suffer spitting, harassment, and racial slander. The Little Rock incident showed how determined a number of people where to retain segregation and the challenge that the civil rights movement had to face. However, the progress went slower than expected and still did not manage to integrate schools by 1957; in fact only 12% of the 6300 school districts in the south were desegregated.
By 1965 the desegregation aims had been achieved and the civil rights movement turned to the unfairness in the voting system. There were various campaigns to support the right for the vote, for example Selma and the Voting Rights Act. Various campaigns came in to order to claim the vote, one of which being Selma; King came to Selma to lead a number of marches, at which they were met by violent resistance from the authorities and he was arrested along with 250 other demonstrators. Leaders of the SCLC and SNCC led a march of 600 people from Selma to Montgomery, but the peaceful protesters were viciously attacked just a few blocks into the march by local police carrying clubs, gas, barred wire and other such weapons. However, this proved to be extremely significant to the change in the voting system. The national broadcast of the footage of the peaceful, non-violent demonstrators being attacked by authorities when wanting only the right to vote proved to be ‘good publicity’ and provoked a nationwide response, and therefore encouraging Johnson to sign the Voting Rights act. "We have lost the South for a generation.’ said Johnson to an aide directly after signing the Act, he knew that realized that supporting this bill would mean losing the South's support for the democrats, but it was important that he had the support of the black people. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 contributed greatly to the change in the voting system, it outlawed the requirement that possible voters in the United States had to undergo tests, including a literacy test, so they could register to vote. The act also provided for federal registration of voted instead of state registration which often denied poor voters.
After numerous successes in the South, in 1966, King and other civil rights organizations attempted to spread the movement to the North, starting with Chicago. King and Abernathy moved into Chicago's slums as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor. King thought that if Daley could be persuaded on the ‘rightness of open housing and integrated schools that things would be done’ (M. Royko, Boss: Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, 1972) Abernathy secretly moved out after a short period as he could not take it, but King stayed and wrote about how his wife and his children suffered emotional problems from the appalling conditions and inability to play outside. In Chicago, Abernathy wrote about the terrible reactions they received from southerners; masses and thrown bottles were the reaction they received at their marches. King and Abernathy decided to take action but Mayor Richard Daley’s corrupt machine quickly squashed it. Some of their small successes such as Operation breadbasket failed to go on to any real success. However they did come up with the idea of Affirmative Action. Chicago could be seen as a point where the civil rights movement lost its momentum and began to fade to a shadow of what King had planned for it.
In the south, black people were most generally deprived of their civil rights, but it was not only the blacks that were living in poverty, white people were also underprivileged of their rights as a result of poverty. Poverty deprived people of education and decent food, the terrible living conditions seriously affected their health, for example, in Harlem, the death rate among black people was 42% higher than other parts of New York; this was due to very high incidences of childbirth and infant mortality, heart disease, pneumonia and tuberculosis, brought upon by a lack of basic health care. Rev. Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee in March, 1968, in support of a strike by sanitation workers who had started a movement for union representation after two workers were inadvertently killed on the job. Just a day after King said his famed ‘Mountaintop’ sermon at Lawson’s church he was assassinated. Riots broke out in over 110 cities including Chicago and Washington D.C, across the States. Rev. Abernathy became the new head of the SCLC and put forth King’s plan for the ‘Poor People’s March, which was to recruit around three thousand blacks and whites together to protest for changes in society and the economic structure and camp in Washington, but It was seen widely as a failure.
In 1965, the spirit of the movement began to change and King started to express his doubt about the US’s role in the war against Vietnam. Prior to the war, President Johnson initiated a series of reforms, The Great Society Programme, which planned to tackle economic and social problems. However they were compromised by the involvement in the war and, in April, 1967, King spoke out against the war. He labelled the US government ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ King claimed that the budgetary demands of the war in Vietnam are the key hindrance to progress in civil rights,’ (J.J. Ansboro: The Making Of A Mind, 1983,) He also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes. After Kings speech of ‘demagogic slander,’ the media turned against him and the Washington Post declared that King had ‘diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.’ There were signs of division in the movement as blacks were becoming restless with non-violent tactics and finding solutions to only some of their problems. Younger campaigners criticised the non-violent strategies and began to move toward ‘Black Power.’ King pleaded with the group to abandon the slogan and said the name and slogans ‘carried the wrong connotations. I mentioned the implications of violence that the press had already attached to the phrase,’ (King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, 1967,) in fear that they would lose support. In 1968 King was assassinated. His death could have been an act of martyrdom as Floyd McKissick said, ‘the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which incorporated fair housing proposals, was absent from the 1966 Act, this may have been facilitated by King’s murder and the congressional sympathy it evoked.’ This took the civil rights movement one step closer to fulfilling its aims.
Overall, there was massive change in civil rights from 1945 to 1968 and it met many of its proposed aims. Desegregation was the most successful of all the aims of the Civil Rights movement. It saw an end to eating at different counters, segregation on transport and black having to go to different schools. The movement had also won the right to vote, although they did not achieve the elimination of poverty. However, by 1968 blacks where seen by the government and backed by the laws of America. There had been several successes, such as the Albany movement in 1962 which organised huge sit-ins and marching campaigns, the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, the Birmingham campaign, Selma, the passing of the Civil Rights Act, banning discrimination in public facilities, the Voting Rights Act, and the anti-discrimination demonstrations in Chicago. Even though all this progress had been made, much of the Deep South still remained segregated. It could be argued that the civil rights movement saw their most successful years between 1963 and 1965, where the most was done to fulfil the aims of the movement. Even the early 1960s, with the sit-ins, freedom rides, and the Albany Campaign, could be considered a success, or, at least a starting point in securing desegregation, but, as America went into the late 1960s and the war in Vietnam arose, the movement began to fall apart. King spoke out against the US’s role in Vietnam and said that it was taking money away from the social problems, thus, relations with President Johnson deteriorated. The mass media had turned against King and black people were becoming restless with non-violent tactics, thus moving to a more militant approach and losing the respect and support of the whites. Even though the Civil rights Movement ‘fell apart’ towards the end, it could be argued that it indeed achieved its goals. It ended segregation on a whole, black people had the right to vote and although it was not entirely successful in ending the war on poverty for both black and white American’s, it did begin to tackle the issue, and perhaps if the US had not become involved with the Vietnam war, the Great Society Programme may of dealt with the economic and social issues.
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