Martin Luther King and peaceful protest

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Martin Luther King and peaceful protest

• What did Martin Luther Kings tactics involve?

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• MLK espoused a philosophy of civil disobedience.
  He often broke the unjust laws of the de jure
  discrimination. He encouraged mass support for
  these actions.
• He insisted that no resistance should be offered
  to those who tried to stop them, whatever the
  treatment meted out.
• He believed in integration that all should live
  together, whatever their colour.
• There were many influences led him to this set of
  beliefs. These included
• The example of Gandhi in India.
• His personal background and the influences of
  Christianity.
• The fact that passive resistance was likely to
  reduce the threat of violence and therefore
  encourage greater participation in the movement
  by ordinary people.
• That where there were violent responses, the
  attendant publicity would undermine those who
  opposed civil rights and encourage support for
  the protestors.

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The Greensboro sit-in
This started in Greensboro,
North Carolina in
1960 when
four black college students sat
down and
ordered food at a
whites-only counter in
Woolworths.

• Others joined these four students so that the
  scale of the protest grew rapidly and eventually
  the store was forced to close.
• What was the importance of this?
• The idea of this sort of protest spread very
  quickly to six more states within a month and
  attracted massive support.

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• To co-ordinate the movement, a new organisation
  was set up. This was the Student Non-violent
  Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This worked with
  MLKs SCLC to extend the range of the movement
  e.g. wade-ins at segregated swimming pools.
• The principle of non-violence was actively
  pursued. Even when protesters were attacked they
  did not retaliate. The televising of some of
  these incidents once again reinforced northern
  white sympathies for the position of southern
  blacks.
• Some progress was made towards the desegregation
  of public facilities in some states such as Texas
  and Tennessee although the Deep South remained
  unaffected.

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Legislation in the Eisenhower years

• Eisenhower introduced two Civil Rights Acts in
  his second term in office. Both were watered down
  in order to get them through Congress.
• The 1957 Civil Rights Act established a Civil
  Rights Commission for two years and a Civil
  Rights Division to investigate attempts to stop
  blacks voting.

President Eisenhower signing the 1957 Civil
Rights Act
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• The 1960 Civil Rights Act extended the life of
  the Civil Rights Commission and introduced
  federal court referees whose responsibility was
  to help register blacks in areas where they had
  previously found it difficult to register.

• Although the content of the legislation was
  limited, it was the first new federal legislation
  designed to protect the rights of black citizens
  since Reconstruction and as such, marked a
  significant shift in attitude.

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Advances during the Kennedy presidency (1961-3)

• JFK was a Democratic Party President. He had won
  the 1960 Election by a very narrow margin and
  faced a Congress that was conservative,
  especially on the issue of civil rights. He was
  also aware of the white southern wing of his
  party and would try not to alienate them too far.

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Freedom Rides

• These represented the continuance of the policy
  of non-violent protest. They were organised in
  1961 by CORE.
• They were designed to test the violation of the
  1960 Supreme Court case of Boynton v Virginia
  that had declared segregation in bus and train
  stations that were used for inter-state transport
  as unconstitutional.

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• Groups of black and white freedom riders
  intended to travel from Washington DC to New
  Orleans. They found themselves subjected to
  considerable violence by southerners.
• In Anniston, Alabama, they were violently
  attacked and the bus they were riding was
  firebombed. Once more this provided evidence to
  liberal northerners of the attitudes that
  prevailed in the south and encouraged sympathy
  for their cause.
• Eventually, in response to the failure of
  southern police to control the violence, Kennedy
  sent in federal marshals and requested the
  Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce Boynton
  v Virginia.

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James Meredith

• The right of James Meredith, a black student, to
  attend Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi)
  was upheld by a federal court in the autumn of
  1962.
• Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, defied
  this order, so Robert Kennedy, the Attorney
  General sent federal marshals to uphold
  Merediths right to attendance.
• Merediths arrival at Ole Miss was accompanied
  by rioting in which two onlookers were killed and
  hundreds were injured. Kennedy had to send in
  federal troops to re-establish order and uphold
  Merediths right to attendance.

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The Albany Movement

• This grew out of the arrest of the Freedom Riders
  in Albany, Georgia. During 1961 62 MLK and
  other leading civil rights activists visited the
  town to lead protests and meetings demanding an
  end to segregation. The tactics pursued were
  entirely those of non-violence.
• The Albany movement failed to trigger any
  significant change in Albany and revealed two
  problems that faced the civil rights movement.

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The first problem was that non-violence would not
necessarily work unless the white response to it
was violent. In Albany, Laurie Pritchett, the
chief of police understood that he needed to
prevent any white violence, which limited the
media interest and hence the effectiveness of the
non-violent strategy. The second problem was that
the various civil rights groups (most notably
SNCC, NAACP and SCLC) had different approaches to
the most appropriate tactics to pursue and were
not following a common policy of co-operation.
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Birmingham

• Many remember the nightmare of seeing Bull Connor
  riding through the streets perched a top of an
  armored tank, yelling through a bullhorn, " Break
  up this demonstration now! I'll demonstrate your
  Black asses all the way to the jailhouse! You
  Niggers get on home now and get off my streets
  before I make you sorry you ever came here!"

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• The momentum of the civil rights movement had
  been lost at Albany and MLK aimed to regain this
  at Birmingham in 1963. He hoped that by engaging
  in acts of non-violence, a confrontation with
  white racists would be triggered that would lead
  to action by the Kennedy administration.
• A range of demonstrations demanding an end to
  segregation in Birmingham were organised. At each
  demonstration, protesters were arrested and the
  jails of Birmingham began to fill up.
• MLK was among those who were arrested. While he
  was in prison, he wrote the Letter from
  Birmingham City Jail. This clearly set out his
  reasons for the use of non-violence.

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• The decision was taken to include children in the
  marches at Birmingham. This coincided with the
  decision of Eugene Bull Connor, the Chief of
  Police of Birmingham, to take more drastic action
  to deter the marchers.
• The Birmingham police subjected the marchers to a
  range of physical attacks. They came under fire
  from high-pressure water hoses and police dogs
  attacked them. The photographs that appeared in
  the media of children being attacked were highly
  damaging to those who wished to protect
  segregation at all costs.

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• The consequence of the events at Birmingham was
  that there was some end to discrimination there
  was to be desegregation in the stores and greater
  rights in employment.
• Furthermore, the events in Birmingham had
  persuaded JFK of the need for federal
  intervention in civil rights in order to prevent
  a complete breakdown in law and order.

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The March on Washington
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• On August 28th 1963, the largest civil rights
  demonstration in American history took place.
  Over 200,000 protesters, black and white, from
  across the entire range of civil rights pressure
  groups, marched to the Lincoln Memorial in
  Washington DC.
• MLK addressed the crowd with his emotional and
  memorable I have a dream speech.
• The event confirmed Kennedys decision to move
  towards civil rights legislation. He was
  beginning to initiate this when he was
  assassinated in November 1963. However, in real
  terms, the period of the Kennedy administration
  saw little advancement in the position of black
  Americans.

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Advances during the Johnson presidency (1963-69)

• Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as President after
  Kennedys assassination. He was re-elected in his
  own right in 1964.
• Johnson brought with him a number of advantages
  that were to aid the passage of civil rights
  legislation in the early years of his Presidency.

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• The mood of the country was favourable to the
  idea of civil rights legislation as a memorial to
  Kennedy. Johnson exploited this mood.
• This mood was further reinforced by the ongoing
  acts of southern violence that outraged popular
  opinion e.g. in the six months before Kennedys
  assassination, Medgar Evers had been murdered in
  Mississippi and four black children had been
  killed while attending Sunday School in
  Birmingham.

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• Johnson had been involved in national politics
  for over twenty years and for ten of these he had
  been the Democratic leader in the Senate. He
  therefore had a very clear understanding of the
  politics of Congress and he used this to good
  effect to create the coalitions that were
  necessary to implement his legislation.
• In July 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed. It
  aimed to eliminate the racial injustice that had
  been experienced by blacks since Reconstruction.
  Among its key terms were the following elements
• Segregation in public places and facilities was
  banned. The desegregation of schools was to be
  speeded up by the intervention of the Attorney
  General.
• Discrimination in the hiring, firing and paying
  of workers was prohibited.
• It was made more difficult to use devices such as
  literacy tests to exclude blacks from voting.
• Any programme that received federal assistance
  was forbidden to discriminate against blacks.
• In the same year as the Civil Rights Act was
  passed, the twenty-fourth amendment to the
  Constitution was ratified. This outlawed the use
  of the poll tax in federal elections, thus
  removing a device that had been used to legally
  exclude blacks from voting.

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Freedom Summer

• In the summer of 1964, SNCC organised a campaign
  of voter registration in Mississippi, the state
  with the lowest level of black registration.
• Both black and white students came to Mississippi
  from the north to take part in this campaign. All
  were subjected to white resistance and violence,
  most notably in Neshoba County where three civil
  rights workers (two white and one black) were
  murdered. This act again confirmed white liberal
  opinion regarding the injustices of southern
  racism.

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Selma, Alabama

• In early 1965, MLK joined the campaign to
  increase voter registration in the south. Selma
  was selected because only 1 of its black
  population were registered to vote.
• There were several months of demonstrations and
  attempts at registration in which a number of
  black protesters were arrested. Sheriff Jim Clark
  was seen on camera behaving in a brutal fashion
  towards the non-violent demonstrators.

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• The climax of the campaign was to be a march from
  Selma to Montgomery. The first attempt was
  violently broken up. This led to a federal order
  to allow the march which went ahead protected by
  the National Guard.
• The positive result of the events at Selma was
  that it led both Johnson and popular opinion to
  the view that further legislation was necessary.
  Thus, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed.
• Literacy tests and all other devices that had
  been used in the past to prevent blacks from
  voting were outlawed.
• Federal examiners were to investigate
  registration in areas of low registration.

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• However, after Selma, problems for the civil
  rights movement began to emerge.
• The various strands that comprised the movement
  were increasingly disagreeing over tactics
  leading to a breakdown in co-operation between
  them.
• The problems of the de jure discrimination such
  as segregation and disenfranchisement (not having
  the right to vote) appeared to have been resolved
  through legislation, but poverty and de facto
  discrimination among blacks remained entrenched.
• It was clear that the tactics of non-violence
  might not find a ready audience in the north and
  west only five days after the Voting Rights Act
  was passed, the Watts riots had erupted in Los
  Angeles leaving thirty-four dead.
• Selma therefore marked the end of the southern
  phase of the civil rights movement. De jure
  discrimination had been addressed now the focus
  shifted to de facto discrimination and the north.
  

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Chicago

• In 1966, MLK took his tactics of non-violence to
  the north to try to address the problem of de
  facto segregation. Chicago was selected as the
  target.
• There were significant problems to be surmounted
  in making this transition from the south to the
  north. King had not fully thought through the
  tactics he intended to use and Richard Daley, the
  Mayor of Chicago, was unlikely to react to
  demonstrations in the same way as Connor or
  Clark.
• The divisions between the SCLC and local Chicago
  activists made organisation difficult. When
  demonstrators entered an area in which whites
  lived they were faced by racist abuse and
  violence.
• In the face of the disturbances, Daley made vague
  commitments to promoting integrated housing, but
  the reality was that little changed in Chicago.
• In the aftermath of his failure in Chicago, King
  turned in other directions. His concerns became
  increasingly focused on the economic plight of
  the poor of all races and at the time of his
  death in 1968 he was planning a Poor Peoples
  March. In the meantime, the civil rights
  movement had moved in new and different
  directions.

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