martin luther king
...a program intended to help register two million black voters in time for the 1960 presidential election. The campaign was over-ambitious, and its failure made clear to the SCLC that cooperation with other black civil rights groups was imperative for success. Major events of this period of King's life outside the SCLC included the birth of his and Coretta's second child, Martin Luther King III, on 23 October, 1957, and King's writing and publication of Stride Toward Freedom (1958), an account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The book sold well, and inspired other African Americans to action. King promoted the book during his speaking engagements, which continued. At a book-signing in Harlem, he was stabbed by a mentally ill black woman, and survived only because the weapon--a letter opener- -slid between his heart and one of his lungs. As part of his convalescence, King took a trip to India in February 1959, where he furthered his knowledge of non-violent tactics at the Gandhi Peace Foundation. When he returned from India, King began to commit himself more fully to the SCLC. He admitted that the Crusade for Citizenship had been a failure, and left his church in Montgomery to move back to Atlanta (SCLC headquarters) at the end of 1959. There he resumed his position of assistant pastor under his father at Ebenezer Church, which freed him from the responsibilities of a full-time minister. The move was well timed, as that winter there occurred a spontaneous campaign of sit-ins, which began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and which spread to scores of Southern cities. African American college students, tired of segregated public facilities, protested with their peaceful presences. The campaign clearly was inspired by tactics associated with King, and the SCLC became directly involved in April, when Ella Baker helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. Later that year, King himself participated in sit-ins in an Atlanta department store, and was arrested. Despite his support and defense of the student actions, some of the protestors disassociated themselves from King, claiming that he was more talk than act, and furthermore, that he took the credit, in terms of money and fame, that others earned through sacrifice. This impression only deepened when King, through the help of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, left the Atlanta jail early. Among the more strident members of SNCC, one's time in jail measured one's devotion to the cause. And the fact that Kennedy agreed to help King was a testament to King's rather mainstream appeal, for Kennedy needed the votes of white Southerners; many blacks now felt that if King could appeal to these white voters, he was not representing them truly. Versions of this criticism--that King compromised with whites, and used his prominence to exempt himself from the tests of dedication--followed him throughout his career. King, however, seemed always to consider how he could best serve the movement, and rightly believed that he could be most effective out of jail. King attracted further criticism for what, by this time, was his strict adherence to principles of absolute pacifism, a course not popular with some members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, despite the name of their organization. In the summer of 1961 King was a supporter of the Freedom Rides, a campaign of bus trips from north to south, intended to desegregate bus stations and lunch counters simply through the use of them. The Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, had organized the Freedom Rides without King's help, and King limited his involvement to training participants in methods of nonviolence, and to negotiating with the Kennedy Administration on their behalf. Riders were being met by violence--their tires slashed, their buses burned, their persons attacked--and King questioned whether it the gains were worth the losses. But when he declined to participate in one of the Freedom Rides, his devotion was again questioned. John F. Kennedy had not yet been President for a full year, but already his handling of civil rights issues disappointed King and other civil rights leaders. Kennedy depended on Southern Democrats, and even had appointed some segregationists to judgeships in the South. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General and brother of the President, was an ally of King, but not unconditionally. He shared his brother's political allegiances to certain Southerners, and was loathe to police the South via the law enforcement agencies at his command. In the case of the Freedom Rides, however, he did intervene to protect protestors, and did so at King's suggestion: the Attorney General ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission, or ICC, to ban segregation in interstate travel, thus giving official federal support to the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides were CORE's program, not King's, and late in 1961, King turned his attention to the situation in Albany, Georgia. With the Albany Movement, as it came to be known, King attached himself to a protest already in progress. This is what he had done in Montgomery and with the Freedom Riders as well. SNCC had already established a voter-registration center in the heavily segregated city, and this, in turn, had provided a base of operations for various sit-ins and protests in Albany's public places. King stepped in when he felt that the movement could not afford to give up any more of its members to the prisons. He arrived 15 December 1961, and the next day, with Ralph Abernathy, led a march of 250 protestors to City Hall. All of the protestors were arrested. Albany Police Chief Laurie Prichett handled his prisoners very courteously, however, which diffused the power of their non-violent protest: with no physical conflict there was no media bonanza and no national outrage. Nevertheless, negotiations followed the mass arrest and appeared to portend victory for the protestors; King, who had vowed to remain in jail until demands were met, left when City authorities made various promises. But appearances were deceiving. For example, the city of Albany promised to desegregate bus and rail terminals as if in response to the protests, even though ICC statutes already required it to do so. And the City circumvented further promises of desegregation by shutting down the public institutions in question. King and Abernathy returned to Albany in February to be tried for the December rally. While they had been away, the media had left too, and the city had refused to negotiate with the SNCC protestors who remained. King and Abernathy were sentence to jail terms in July, and returned again at that time, reviving the interest of the media. King and Abernathy refused to pay the $178 fine that would have exempted them from serving time, but local authorities, sensing the publicity their incarceration would generate, paid the fine for them, effectively kicking them out of jail. While King and Abernathy were still in Albany, violence broke out. Young protestors, who had been fighting nonviolently for months, were becoming impatient and frustrated. A crowd of two thousand threw rocks and bottles at police. King tried to rein in the violence, and held a prayer vigil against it, but was arrested for this. Again he was kept from jail, and, soon after, the City obtained a federal injunction banning King and his followers from protesting. Up until this point, King had fought local laws on the grounds of the federal laws that they contradicted. In this case, protest would mean violation of what King claimed was his legal basis. Between the police chief's gentle methods, the City's refusal to jail King, and pressure from Robert Kennedy, who encouraged King to continue to abide by federal laws, there seemed slim chance for victory in Albany. King left the city in August, having learned what not to do. In his next campaign, in Birmingham, Alabama, he would avoid these mistakes. As early at May 1962 Birmingham minister and SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth had suggested that the SCLC ally with his own organization, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to protest conditions in Birmingham. Birmingham was the wealthiest city in Alabama, and a bastion of segregation. The mayor was a segregationist and the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor was known for his hostile and sometimes violent treatment of blacks. The Governor of the state was George Wallace, who had won office with promises of "segregation forever." In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962 seventeen black churches and homes had been bombed, including the home of Shuttlesworth, who campaigned actively for civil rights. Although the population of Birmingham was 40% African American, there seemed little hope for a political solution to the racial divide: of 80,000 registered voters, only 10,000 were black. King did not adopt Shuttlesworth's suggestion until early 1963, but once he did, he treated it as a major campaign. In March King, along with Ralph Abernathy and a few other SCLC organizers, set up headquarters in a room at a motel in one of Birmingham's black neighborhoods. They began recruiting volunteers for protest rallies and giving workshops in nonviolent techniques. Initially King head scheduled the protests to begin in time to disrupt Easter season shopping, giving them economic bite. He postponed his plans, however, to prevent them from affecting the local mayoral election, in which Bull Conner was a candidate. The campaign began on 3 April with lunch-counter sit-ins. On 6 April, protestors marched on City Hall, and forty-two people were arrested. Demonstrations occurred each day thereafter. While the jails filled with peaceful blacks, King negotiated with white businessmen, whose stores were losing business due to the protests. Although some of these businessmen were willing to consider desegregating their facilities and hiring African Americans, City officials held fast to segregationist policies. On 10 April, these officials obtained an injunction prohibiting the demonstrations. Unlike the injunction in Albany, Georgia, however, this one came from a state court, not a federal one. King felt comfortable violating such an injunction, on the grounds of adhering to the federal laws with which it was at odds. Getting the other leaders of the campaign to violate the injunction, however, took some convincing by King, especially as many of the clergy felt bound to be in the pulpit--and not in jail--on the following Sunday, which was Easter. But King succeeded in persuading them to his cause, and personally led a march on Good Friday, 12 April. All protestors were quickly arrested. Birmingham police separated King and Abernathy, placing each in solitary confinement, and denying each man his rightful phone-calls to the outside world. Disturbed by the unprecedented silence from her husband, Coretta Scott King called the White House. Her call was returned by Robert Kennedy and then by the President himself. The Kennedy Administration sent FBI agents to Birmingham, and King promptly received more hospitable treatment. Moreover, this intervention by Kennedy gave the movement greater momentum. King spent eight days in his cell. During that time he composed his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." The letter was ostensibly conceived in response to a letter that had recently run in a local newspaper, which had claimed that the protests were "unwise and untimely"; however, King also quite deliberately wrote his letter for a national audience. The letter reveals King's strength as a rhetorician and his breadth of learning. It alludes to numerous secular thinkers, as well as to the Bible. It is passionate and controlled, and was subsequently appropriated by many writing textbooks as a model of persuasive writing. At the time, it gave a singular, eloquent voice to a massive, jumbled movement. Once King was released from jail, the protests assumed a larger scale and a more confrontational character. At the suggestion of SCLC member Jim Bevel, the organizers began to recruit younger protestors. They visited high schools, training youth in nonviolent tactics. The method was dangerous--kids could get hurt--but also potentially very symbolically powerful: children were the beneficiaries of the movement; they represented the movement's hope for the future. On 2 May King addressed a young crowd at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Afterward they marched downtown, singing "We Shall Overcome," and nearly a thousand youths were arrested. The next day, more young people had arrived to replenish the ranks, and another march occurred. By this point, the situation had become overwhelming for Bull Conner, whose jails were full. On 3 May he had his forces blast the young protestors with fire-hoses, and released attack dogs against them. It was these acts of violence--broadcast on national television-- that pricked the national conscience, and marked a turning point not only in Birmingham but also in the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. Telegrams flooded the White House conveying outrage, and it became clear that the Kennedy Administration would have to confront civil rights issues more directly. In a day or two the protests had become so massive and volatile that the City was willing to negotiate. It listened to the demands of the SCLC, and set a schedule for the desegregation of lunch counters and other facilities. It also promised to confront the issue of inequality in hiring practices, to grant amnesty to arrested demonstrators, and to create a bi-racial committee for the reconciliation of differences. As had happened in Montgomery, violence followed the concessions. Whites bombed black homes and churches, and blacks retaliated with mob violence. King's activities in Birmingham, therefore, included a final stage, during which he patrolled the city, speaking wherever people had gathered; he implored African Americans to answer violence only with peace. While changes in local policies constituted the Birmingham campaign's immediate outcome, the effort's long-term effects were felt nation-wide. In the weeks that followed, tensions flared, and protests commenced in scores of Southern cities. King's fame as a civil rights leader was redoubled. And on 11 June, President Kennedy voiced his commitment to federal civil rights legislation. He had been holding off, preoccupied by the Cold War, but Birmingham had pressed the issue. Kennedy's commitment culminated in the Civil Rights act of 1964, which was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination. The act mandated federally what had in Birmingham been won locally: a white commitment to desegregation and equal employment opportunities. It also gave the federal government power to enforce desegregation laws in schools by withholding funds from noncompliant districts. On 28 August 1963 roughly 250,000 people, three quarters of them black, marched in Washington D.C., from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to speeches by America's civil rights leaders, including King. Officially called the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," the event was a major success, as the preceding Birmingham campaign had been, and, like that campaign, contributed to the atmosphere in which federal civil rights legislation could pass. The planning of the rally had been a group effort, involving A. Phillip Randolph, King, James Farmer of CORE, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, John Lewis of SNCC, and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women. Bayard Rustin became national coordinator. The plan initially upset the Kennedy Administration, which feared riots would result, and thus endanger the civil rights legislation that had recently come before Congress. Consequently, the Administration became involved in the planning, editing the content of the SNCC speaker's speech, inviting white organizations to participate, and thereby successfully preventing the outbreak of violence. This involvement led some militant blacks to consider the march an inauthentic event; Nation of Islam spokesman Malcom X dismissed it altogether. Attendance of the march exceeded the expectations of its planners: they had counted on 100,000 and got a quarter of a million. At the rally, King was the last speaker to address the marchers, and he delivered the most famous speech of his career. Impassioned, rhythmic, and clear, King described his hopes for the future: I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children one day will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountains of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day. The speech aired on national television, reaching millions of Americans, including the President, who watched from the White House. It aided the Civil Rights Movement by providing a clear articulation of the hopes and wishes behind actions that often seemed chaotic. Even on television, King was a speaker with tremendous presence. But the joy of the Birmingham and Washington victories was tempered by murders throughout the South. In Mississippi on 12 May, Medgar Evers, a friend of King and an active NAACP member, was shot dead at the door to his home. On 15 September at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, from which King had lead marches during the spring campaign, four little black girls died when a bomb exploded. And on 22 November, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. These tragedies grounded all the movement's victories in a feeling of solemnity and necessity. Nevertheless, more victories came. In January 1964, King appeared again on the cover of Time, this time as the magazine's "Man of the Year." During the summer, King spoke in East and West Germany, and met with the Pope. He also campaigned for Johnson's re-election, against Johnson's very conservative Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater. In July, Johnson invited King to the White House when he signed into law the Civil Rights ac of 1964, which King had helped to precipitate with the Birmingham campaign. The meeting reassured King about Johnson's priorities. King's SCLC activities that year took him to St. Augustine, Florida, early in the summer. There, protestors attempting to integrate the town were suffering the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Four people had died in bombings, and the Klan was organizing mobs to attack civil rights workers when they came to segregated sites. King, Abernathy, and others were arrested for attempting to eat at a whites-only restaurant, but King left jail early to receive an honorary degree from Yale University. His absence hurt the campaign in St. Augustine. An injunction was soon passed banning marches, and the federal government refused to intervene. The city thus became the site of another of SCLC's unsuccessful actions. Also fraught with violence and mixed results was that summer's voter- registration campaign in Mississippi, known as "Freedom Summer." "Freedom Summer" involved cooperation between SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, which together pushed to register as many blacks as possible. The murder of three civil rights workers, under suspicious circumstances involving local police, tainted the campaign. And when King initiated a march to protest the atmosphere of hostility and violence, the police halted the event with tear gas and rifle butts. King's fame reached its apex in October of that year, when he was informed that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. On 10 December the Nobel Committee honored him at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. King announced that he accepted the honor on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement, to which he would give all $54,000 of the prize money. And by early 1965 the Nobel Prize Laureate was back in a jail cell in the southern United States. Early in 1965 Lyndon Johnson believed Southern states needed time to absorb the Civil Rights act of 1964, with its comprehensive ban on segregation, before any further action could be taken. King, however, believed a second bill was necessary to secure voting rights for African Americans. Toward this end he decided to launch a major SCLC voter-registration drive. SCLC member Jim Bevel suggested the drive take place in Selma, Alabama, where an unsuccessful SNCC voter-registration drive had been going on for months. Selma was the county seat of Dallas County in the heart of Alabama's black belt. It provided everything that made a media event: a segregationist mayor, a Klan- affiliated police chief, and a very low percentage of blacks registered to vote. Of 30,000 people, slightly more than half were black, but only 350 blacks were registered. And blacks who had tried recently to register had been deflected by slow service, odd courthouse hours, excessively difficult literacy tests, and, of course, the threat of violence. King first visited Selma with other SCLC members in January 1965, shortly after he returned from Oslo, Norway. Early protests were small in number, and resulted in arrests, both in Selma and in nearby towns. On 1 February King and Ralph Abernathy led a march of about 250 people to the Selma Courthouse to protest slow voter-registration. Both King and Abernathy were arrested and spent five days in jail. During that time Malcom X visited Selma. Although he did not meet with King, he wished his best to King through King's wife before departing to engagements elsewhere. Shortly thereafter, Malcolm X was assassinated, and this visit, more supportive of King than earlier encounters, reflected the two leaders' partial reconciliation at the end of Malcolm X's life. The Selma campaign became bloody on the evening of 18 February when a protest march headed for the jail of the town of Marion was attacked by a mob of whites. The streetlights shut off and violence commenced in the dark. A young black man, Jimmy Lee Jackson, was shot, and died eight days later. On 5 March King flew to Washington to encourage Johnson to introduce a Voting Rights Bill. Johnson declined, and King immediately announced plans for a massive march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama's capital, which was 54 miles away. Governor George Wallace issued an order prohibiting the march, but the SCLC proceeded, though King did not lead the march himself. On 7 March, over 500 people began walking up the four-lane highway toward Montgomery. When they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which crossed the Alabama River, they encountered 60 State troopers, some cavalry, and the sheriff of the town. Civilian whites also stood by. The authorities ordered the crowd to disperse, but it refused. Moments later, the troopers began attacking the protestors with teargas, clubs, whips, and electric cattle prods, while the white spectators yelled encouragement. By the time the scuffle had ended, sixteen peopl...