# data[].attributes.body
1. The National Association of Colored People worked to secure full legal equality and remove barriers for all Americans by challenging segregation laws throughout the country, the legal team was headed by Thurgood Marshall.

2. The NAACP won many legal battles regarding housing and education, the most famous was Brown v. Board of Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Stacy M. Brown NNPA Correspondent The NAACP plans to highlight 110 years of civil rights history, and the current fight for voting rights, criminal justice reform, economic opportunity and education quality during its 110th national convention now happening in Detroit. The five-day event which began on Saturday, July 20, will also include a session […]

# data[].attributes.headline
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) - 1942

# data[].attributes.subject
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) - 1942

# data[].attributes.body
1. CORE was founded in 1942 by black and white student activists in Chicago, Illinois. They were a well known civil rights organization that are said to have popularized the use of nonviolent protests. They put together protests such as freedom rides and sit-ins to fight back against segregation and promote equality throughout the United States but mostly in the South.

2. CORE was significant because it was a key organization in the Civil Rights Movement and one of the first of it's kind. It was also the first to really use nonviolent protests as a way to fight back against racism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A voice for civil rights in San Diego reflects on a half century of halting progress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
San Diego civil rights leader Harold “Hal” Brown hosted a live radio call-in program in 1966 addressing racial justice issues.

# data[].attributes.headline
Malcolm X joins the Nation of Islam - 1952

# data[].attributes.subject
Malcolm X joins the Nation of Islam - 1952

# data[].attributes.body
1. In 1952, black rights activist Malcolm X became a member of the Nation of Islam, which was an organization that that helped advocated for Black nationalism, self-defense, and empowerment while converting to Islam.

2. Malcolm X's new involvement with the Nation of Islam inspired many new African Americans to follow his teachings of black empowerment, the advocacy for self-reliance, racial pride.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Led Up To Malcolm X’s Break With The Nation Of Islam – And Ultimately His Death? | Oxygen Official Site

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Netflix’s new documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” raises many questions about whether the right people were charged in the civil rights activist’s killing, but what is clear is the fractured relationship he’d developed with the leadership of a black Muslim group he was once close to.

# data[].attributes.headline
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas - May 1954

# data[].attributes.subject
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas - May 1954

# data[].attributes.body
1. In 1954 the supreme court led by Earl Warren, ruled segregation in the schools unequal, and therefore unconstitutional. This made it so that all public schools in the United States could no longer segregate

2. The ruling was significant because it reversed the declaration of 1986 in Plessy v Ferguson where schools could be "separate but equal".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brown v. Board of Education Celebrating the 67th Anniversary of LDF's Seminal Case May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history.

# data[].attributes.body
1. Starting in December 1955, Blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, and partly throughout the rest of the South, Boycotted buses for 381 days. This was in response to Rosa Parks getting arrested for refusing to give up her seat; which violated Jim Crow laws.

2. This boycott was very significant because it not only marked the rise of leader Martin Luther King Jr. but it also was the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Montgomery Bus Boycott begins

On this date in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott occurred. This was one of the pivotal starting points of the modern civil rights movement in America.

In Montgomery, Alabama, segregation was a part of everyday life. Blacks who lived there faced segregation in places such as parks, schools, restrooms, theaters, and buses. The laws of the country made it hard for Blacks to register and participate in elections. The justice system discriminated against them, unjustly jailing and prosecuting many, while banning them from holding public office. One particular area of bitterness amongst Montgomery Blacks of that era was the segregation law of the bus system. Although Blacks were the majority of, they were forced to adhere to oppressive conditions on buses. The bus drivers, all of whom were white, treated Blacks with racist and abusive attitudes, often calling their passengers derogatory names such as "nigger," "Black cow," and "Black ape."

They often required blacks to pay their fares in the front of the bus, and then walk to the back door to board the bus. Sometimes, though, bus drivers would take off before the passenger could get on, leaving their passenger behind. While this practice often angered Blacks, the practices of "White-only" seating angered them even more. The law stated that Blacks could not sit in the front of the bus, regardless of whether the seats were empty or not.

After Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, the news of this event spread through the Black community. Community members decided that a boycott of the bus system was long overdue. Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Committee began to organize a one-day protest. When the word spread about the protest, several other Black leaders wanted to convene.

Under the leadership of E.D. Nixon, former chair of the NAACP of Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, H.H. Hubbard, and Ms. A.W. West an organized movement got underway. To resourcefully carry out this goal, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed, with King as their leader. The MIA adopted a plan of action for the protest that was officially to begin on December 5. The resolution stated three demands: 1) Blacks would not ride the buses until polite treatment by bus drivers was guaranteed to them. 2) Segregation must be abolished on buses and a first-come first-served policy adapted and 3) Black bus drivers must be employed. Deciding that they could no longer fight the county of Montgomery, Black leaders filed a federal lawsuit against Montgomery's segregation laws, because they were not in accordance with the 14th amendment.

On May 11, 1956, the case was heard before a three-panel federal court. About three weeks later in a two to one decision, the court decided that the segregation laws were indeed unconstitutional. The Montgomery County lawyers immediately appealed the decision in the Supreme Court. While the boycotters were waiting for the Supreme Court to rule, the protest continued.

During that time, incidents continued to try to intimidate the leaders to end the movement. Reverend Robert Graetz, a white minister, who served a predominately Black church, had his house bombed. The mayor denounced the incident as a publicity stunt by Blacks and reiterated that whites did not care if the boycott lasted forever. Harassment by cops increased and insurance policies continued to be canceled. The law was making it almost impossible for the carpool system to take place and eventually the city filed suit against leaders of the movement, citing that the car pool was a "public nuisance" and an illegal "private enterprise." On November 13, 1956, leaders readied to face one of the darkest days of the movement, knowing that without the car-pool system people might be forced to ride the buses.

While in Montgomery waiting for the decision about the carpools, King received a message from the federal court. It simply stated that "the motion to affirm is granted and the judgment is affirmed," meaning that the Supreme Court supported the decision that segregation on the buses was illegal. The next night the official boycott was called to a conclusion, but it was soon revealed that the order would not reach Montgomery for about a month. Faced with the obstacle of not being able to participate in carpools, a "share a ride" system was worked out and the buses remained empty for another 30 days.

On December 20, 1956, the mandate came to Montgomery. The next day, King, Abernathy, and Nixon were the first to integrate the buses. The boycott was over.

Reference:
Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History
Volume 1, ISBN #0-02-897345-3, Pg 175
Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, Cornel West

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Montgomery Bus Boycott begins - African American Registry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On this date in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott occurred. This was one of the pivotal starting points of the modern civil rights movement in America. In Montgomery, Alabama, segregation was a part of everyday life. Blacks who lived there faced segregation in places such as parks, schools, restrooms, theaters, and buses.

# data[].attributes.headline
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) - January 1957

# data[].attributes.subject
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) - January 1957

# data[].attributes.body
1. SCLC was founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King Jr., and align with his beliefs, they were an African-American civil rights organization that promoted nonviolent protest to fight racial segregation and injustice. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, they focused on desegregation and voter rights.

2. SCLC was significant because of how important it was in the Civil Rights Movement due to the great leadership by Martin Luther King Jr. He was able to organize very important protests through the SCLC like the March on Washington. All this helped lead to change for the better racially.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
SCLC Demonstrations A Possible Prelude To International Boycott Of Florida

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jacksonville is one of a number of Florida cities where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference will hold rallies Tuesday morning.SCLC State…

# data[].attributes.body
1. In response to Brown v. Board of Education, in September 1957, the Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering a white school (Little Rock Central High School). However, with the need to uphold the supreme court ruling, Eisenhower sent U.S. army troops to escort the children to their classes.

2. The Little Rock Nine was significant because they were the first African American students to integrate a school which was a courageous act of defiance in the face of segregation and the first of its kind.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On September 25, 1957, a landmark moment in America's Civil Rights movement took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the so-called Little Rock Nine entered their newly-desegregated high school for the first time. Magnum photographer Burt Glinn documented the history-defining episode; here, we review his notes from the time of the shoot as well as provide the context to these well-known images of a pivotal time in American history.

Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas was set to begin the 1957 school year desegregated. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka had made segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Previously, a 1955 ruling (Brown II) ordered that public schools be desegregated with "all deliberate speed," urging on the move towards desegregation without delays.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the Little Rock School Board agreed to comply with the ruling. A plan to begin the gradual integration was to be implemented in the fall of the 1957 school year, with nine students registered, due to start classes in September 1957. However, the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, defied both of these rulings.

On September 4, 1957, the first day of classes at Central High, Faubus called in the state National Guard to bar the black students' entry into the school.

As the nine African-American students approached the school, they were met by a hostile crowd consisting of students, parents and local people, who prevented them from remaining at school. Remembering that day, one of the nine students, Elizabeth Eckford, recalled:

"They moved closer and closer. ... Somebody started yelling. ... I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd-someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."

Later in the month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the "Little Rock Nine" into the school, and they began their first full day of classes on September 25. According to the late John Morris, former Executive Editor at Magnum Photos, Burt Glinn volunteered to shoot the story for Life magazine. In the book Get The Picture, Morris said that this came during a time when many Life photographers were getting beaten up whilst on assignment.

Burt Glinn 's images capture armed paratroopers escorting the black children into school, and also picture the scenes around the school, where huge tanks have pulled up beside quiet suburban lawns. The journey into school for the black children is traced through onlookers, jeering crowds and reporters.

Glinn also followed the story to a television news studio where Governor Orval Faubus gave a public address, and to the home of Daisy Bates, President of the NAACP's Arkansas branch, who congratulates three of the girls after completing their first day of school.

In his original typed notes for the story, Glinn described witnessing a scuffle between a group of white boys who chased black student Lawrence Coley. He also provided context to a shot where children are seen to be happily clapping whilst the young black male student seems disengaged. He wrote that "to pass the time (30 minutes) during a fire drill, students practice school songs and cheers used at football games...Terrence Roberts stands off to one side, in a world of his own."

At around 10am on September 25 th a bomb threat caused an evacuation. Glinn captured the students waiting outside, picturing black student Minnijean Brown talking to a group of white girls during the drill. "Minnijean Brown continues to talk to other girls during a fire drill," say Glinn's notes "but soldiers of the 101 st airborne division in the background serve as reminder of surrounding tension."

Craig Rains, a white student at Central High, who argued that he was opposed to integration on the grounds relating to state-law issues, remembered the National Guard's arrival in an interview archived by Washington University:

"I had gone down to the school, the night before it opened, and just kind of a tradition, I was going to meet some friends down there, and I was sitting there, outside the school, waiting for them, and I heard some pretty loud noises coming down the street. And I looked up and saw a convoy coming down. And I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was military vehicles, and they started rolling by me, and started parking in all of the intersections, all around the school... I didn't know whether they were the good guys or the bad guys. I didn't know whether they were National Guard or federal troops, what they were. And didn't know until I got home, and it was all on television about the fact that Governor Faubus had called out the National Guard."

Glinn's notes portray the seriousness with which the troops took to their role to enforce integration: "soldiers of the 101 st Air-borne division order a gang of 3 high school boys who opposed integration and had gathered near the school in protest to 'move on'. Soldiers showed with pointed bayonets that they meant business," he wrote.

See more of Magnum Photographers' coverage of the civil rights movement in America here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On This Day in History: The Little Rock Nine Start School * Burt Glinn * Magnum Photos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On September 25, 1957, a landmark moment in America's Civil Rights movement took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the so-called Little Rock Nine entered their newly-desegregated high school for the first time.

# data[].attributes.body
1. Starting in the 1960s, African American civilians, but mainly students, began to sit-in at restaurants. A sit-in is a nonviolent protest where blacks sat at segregated lunch counters and demanded to be served. This peacefully challenged racial segregation, although it didn't always end peacefully for them as they would often get beat and even arrested.

2. Sit-ins were significant because they challenged segregation in public spaces, and helped spread civil rights activism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
#tbt: sit-in movement sparks social change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
#tbt: Sit-in movement sparks social change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Four African-American college students made history when they sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960.

# data[].attributes.headline
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - April 1960

# data[].attributes.subject
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - April 1960

# data[].attributes.body
1. SNCC was founded by Ella Baker in April 1960 at Shaw University in North Carolina. The organization was student-led and focused on nonviolent protests and direct action to challenge segregation. They participated in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, and voter registration drives.

2. SNCC was significant because it empowered young people to lead nonviolent protests; playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began as an organization of students from black colleges in the South to integrate lunch counters that refused service to blacks. The tactic they used was the nonviolent direct action sit-in. What began with a handful of students in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, sixty years ago, became a mass movement. This is the story of how SNCC changed from a mass reform movement to a revolutionary Black Power cadre organization. It was destroyed by a combination of strategic errors and miscalculations, internal discord, external repression, and, indirectly, by its own successes.

In a period of 60 days the sit-ins spread to nearly 80 communities from Ohio to Florida. By March 1961 some 138 municipalities and businesses had desegregated at least some facilities, often despite intense hostility and brutal attacks by local whites. Nearly 1,000 blacks and white sympathizers were arrested in February and March 1960 alone. Hundreds of students suffered tear gas, police dogs, and beatings. Dozens were expelled or suspended from their schools. But very significant progress in changing segregationist patterns in restaurants, public libraries, swimming pools, and even churches were made in just a few years.

In spring 1961 an allied organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized "Freedom Rides" to challenge segregation in interstate busing. Two SNCC members, including future SNCC chair John Lewis, were part of the integrated group that rode the buses (which were attacked by mobs, with one bus burned). This would eventually lead to an Interstate Commerce Commission ruling barring segregated facilities in bus and train terminals, although enforcement was sporadic.

SNCC's activities in voter registration campaigns, especially as the leading edge of "Freedom Summer" in 1964 and in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the Lowndes County (Alabama) Freedom Organization, led to increasingly effective black political participation and the gaining of political offices in parts of the South where there had been no black officials since the Reconstruction Period (1867-1877). Julian Bond's campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives, for example, promoted social issues such as increasing the minimum wage and even abolishing the death penalty that were far in advance of the national Democratic Party. SNCC helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, with several thousand members, mainly among day laborers in cotton fields. The MFLU advocated a number of progressive reforms including equality in wages and job opportunities for black and white workers. SNCC was involved in the campaign for "home rule" in Washington DC, which was then directly under the rule of the U.S. Congress and had no independent political power. (A SNCC veteran, Marion Barry, later became mayor.) SNCC supported and worked for numerous black candidates for public office including the U.S. Congress, in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and North Carolina. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, promoted by President Johnson, would not have been possible without SNCC, although of course other civil rights organizations such as CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were also involved.

However, as Cleveland Sellers of SNCC puts it, "When the federal government passed bills that supposedly supported Black voting and outlawed segregation, SNCC lost the initiative in those areas." A number of SNCC workers had trouble adjusting to roles in various anti-poverty programs. "They sneered at professional reformers who worked regular hours and submitted to organizational restraints." In November 1965, some of the more pragmatically oriented SNCC workers left to work with the MFDP, which others saw as in danger of taking on the very values of the political system it was designed to change. But SNCC's own organizing efforts were lagging and failing to produce clear benefits to blacks in both the North and South. Supporters, including financial ones, were drifting away. Differences between SNCC and the SCLC, a more church-based group closely associated with Martin Luther King Jr., grew after the Selma, Alabama, demonstrations for voting rights. One activist wrote, "By the close of 1965, the compounded conflicts ... had reached the point of no return: Communication between various elements of the movement had become virtually nonexistent, diminishing contributions, and widening schisms between North and South, black and white, poor and not poor, took their final toll."

SNCC faced some strategic decisions at the height of its strength, following the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi. It had at that time a large cadre of organizers, many followers, and a reputation for courage and determination. SNCC might have chosen to continue to work through political avenues such as electoral politics and disciplined nonviolent demonstrations. No one forced SNCC to move in a direction that would inevitably lead to clashes with the state that it was bound to lose. No one forced SNCC to replace the "Freedom Now" slogan with "Black Power" in June 1966, during the march supporting James Meredith's solo march for voting rights (he was wounded by a sniper on his first day out). It was at this point that John Lewis and other advocates of nonviolence began to distance themselves from SNCC, and when liberal and mainstream civil rights organizational financial support began to dry up.

But could SNCC really have gone a more conventional route, thus avoiding repression and perhaps again becoming a major factor in civil rights and American politics more generally? Many of its staff and its followers, after abandoning SNCC, did continue the fight for equal rights through participation in the Democratic Party and in mainstream civil rights organizations. Julian Bond was later elected to three terms as president of the NAACP. On the other hand, SNCC's experience of conventional politics, of step-by-step reform, of attempts to work within the Democratic Party (as when it tried to have the MFDP seated at the Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964), led many SNCC workers to conclude that traditional ways (including the nonviolent and religious-based strategy of King and the SCLC) led nowhere, or at best to gains so minimal that they could be considered little more than trickery. The conditions of everyday life, especially for the many black poor, were still too desperate for many in SNCC to accept "crumbs." Voting did little to change this. Nor can it be argued, given the evidence, that the government would have left SNCC alone even if it had gone a more "respectable" route; all the mainstream civil rights organizations were not only under surveillance, but, as in Martin Luther King's case, the victims of government-planted rumors intended to disrupt completely legal activities. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover made little distinction between respectable and revolutionary black activists.

After 1964, SNCC, rather than following any sort of thought-out political strategy to cope with new conditions, seemed to lurch forward step by step, with each step of its apparent choosing closing off alliances and financial support, leading to further isolation. If it had a strategy it was to mistake state repression for a sign of weakness on the part of the power structure. It failed to see that repression together with its partner, cooptation, indicated strength even as the American war in Vietnam intensified and peace forces against the war grew more militant. In this SNCC was not alone. The Black Panther Party, as well as segments of Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left groups, also made this mistake. For a few older observers on the left this did not come as a surprise. It would have been difficult for the relatively theoretically naive members of SNCC (some of whom rejected most theory, especially Marxism, as "white") to have clearly understood that state repression was at that moment a sign of state strength and not weakness, that the revolution was not around the corner. But SNCC only slowly came to understand that repression as carried out by the state via local police and the FBI was undergirded by a "well-organized white conservative backlash against black activism," in particular against advocates of Black Power. SNCC workers "refused to soften the tone of their rhetoric even while recognizing that outspoken militancy often unified whites in support of police repression while dividing blacks."

Bob Zellner, a white Southern former SNCC activist, summarizes the dilemma.SNCC began by working with three important and effective tools. One was nonviolent direct action, religiously motivated, superbly suited for public relations (outside the South and throughout the entire observant world), and effective in changing "race relations" in upper southern states in significant ways, if not completely. The second, also important in public relations and fundraising, was its interracial composition. The third was its commitment to long-term community organizing and the training of local leaders. The first was displaced with an acceptance, initially only informally, but finally with full commitment, of armed defense. The second was finally abandoned in December 1966 with the expulsion of white SNCC staffers. The third, grass-roots organizing, was gradually whittled away by the "defection" of SNCC workers to anti-poverty programs and Democratic Party political activity. As more and more SNCC workers abandoned the organization to take the route of working in reform campaigns, the remaining militants felt increasingly isolated, yet were left more convinced than ever that the revolutionary road was correct. But that rhetoric led even further to the abandonment of SNCC by liberal and mainstream civil rights organizations.

Contributing to this abandonment, Zellner argues, were two radical decisions that many, perhaps most, liberals could not countenance at that time: SNCC was the first civil rights organization actively to oppose the American war in Vietnam, even to the point of advocating draft resistance. Martin Luther King came out against the war later and also suffered the loss of support of many liberal and labor allies as a result. And many Jewish supporters turned away because of SNCC's publishing an article supporting Palestinians' right to self-determination even though this was not an official position.Three issues, the expulsion of whites, Vietnam, and Palestine, Zellner argues, "together spelled the eventual doom of the organization."

Yet SNCC's sympathies with the Palestinian people should not have come as a surprise since by 1967 SNCC had become, in its own view, part of the worldwide anti-imperialist cause. As James Forman, one of SNCC's most perceptive leaders, saw it later, "[f]or SNCC to see the struggle against racism, capitalism, and imperialism as being indivisible made it inevitable for SNCC to take a position against the greatest imperialist power in the Middle East, and in favor of liberation and dignity for the Arab people." Compromise on this issue would have been considered a betrayal of the anti-imperialist cause.

The effects of repression, in the view not only of movement participants but also of almost all observers, cannot be underestimated when considering SNCC's gradual demise. As Lewis Killian-a white sociologist of Southern background long involved with civil rights activities-observed in 1975, insurgency "has subsided not because the racial crisis has passed but because white power has demonstrated that open black defiance is extremely dangerous and often suicidal. The ranks of the most dramatically defiant black leaders were decimated by imprisonment, emigration, and assassination." Surely this contributed to "battle fatigue" and to the exhaustion of older members (and the lack of a cohort of younger militants to replace them). One student of SNCC found that the time of participation in SNCC by the average worker was "no more than one year." Although this is hard to believe, it is true that membership declined dramatically after 1966.

The Black Panther Party suffered the most extreme example of this repression. By the time the party was founded in late 1966 SNCC was already on its downward trajectory. In 1970, the very year it suffered the most repression, the BPP had offices in 68 cities, but it too had begun to decline. Unlike SNCC, the party, with its roots in California and in northern urban locations, was not the victim of mobs or vigilante organizations such as the KKK. Instead the agent of repression was the state, from local police to the FBI's Cointelpro project (which also targeted SNCC). Advocacy for armed defense was the party's original reason for existence, which undoubtedly created more angst within the "law-and-order community," but SNCC had also come to share that strategy. Both organizations suffered from infighting but the Panthers' internal battles were more severe and more violent.

It is fair to say that SNCC's legacy is a proud one. Many of SNCC's veterans have gone on to important public-service careers, including an ambassadorship to the UN and seats in Congress. Their survivors compose a significant sector of a civil rights veterans website, reunions are frequent, and deaths are publicized and mourned. The Panthers, meanwhile, have become mythologized as heroic martyrs, but those stories have been increasingly contested over the years. Farber details the party's "promising beginnings," but cites autobiographies of some of their former leaders and members, describing "an organization that mixed its political actions with a great deal of victimizing criminal activity ... with a high quotient of bullying and outright gangster behavior." By 1971 the BPP leadership was split between those advocating community-based reforms such as breakfast programs and an armed self-defense faction that accused the former of opportunism. Many Panthers still "wanted to stand up to the police. ... But the boundaries between revolutionary action, adventurism, and criminal activity were not always clear." Meanwhile, government-sponsored breakfast programs grew rapidly as part of President Johnson's "War on Poverty," undercutting the Panthers' appeal.

Did the class composition of the Panthers contribute to its dismaying demise? Farber makes a convincing case that the Panthers' base, disproportionally drawn from an urban "lumpenproletariat" of (mostly) men outside the labor force and including ex-cons led almost inevitably to an "authoritarian internal structure" and later to a "relationship to the criminal underworld." The class base of SNCC's workers was distinctly different. Most of the activists came from stable working-class and middle-class, often religious, backgrounds.

How much did the slogan of Black Power and more generally the rhetoric of black nationalism (not only by SNCC) contribute to the defection of liberal organizations and to the "white backlash" that led to the victory of the Republican Party in 1968 and subsequent years? (It should be noted that the Panthers did not use anti-white black nationalist rhetoric and did have financial support from liberals until the Panthers' thuggish behavior finally turned off the faucets.) Countryman argues that Black Power as it was carried out in practice (and in Carmichael's original meaning) succeeded in constructing "a vital and effective social movement that remade the political and cultural landscape of American cities during the late 1960s and 1970s in ways that postwar liberalism could not and did not accomplish," by mobilizing the black vote and electing black politicians. But this strategy failed to accomplish major changes in the living and working conditions of many if not most black families because of "urban deindustrialization and of suburban anti-tax politics." That anti-tax sentiment was itself a component of white backlash against the rather minimal welfare state of the Johnson era, which many whites saw as benefiting the "undeserving" welfare-receiving (and mostly black, in the white public's incorrect perception) poor.

In fact the skin color of mayors and other public officials did not matter. They were (and are) constrained in their ability to create change, just as their liberal reformist white predecessors had been. In this context neither the conventional civil rights organizations nor the more militant groups such as SNCC and CORE could be effective. Black urban politics had little relevance to the fight for significant social change, and this surely affected low voter turnouts at least until the Obama era.

Did SNCC fail? In the 1970s, with black nationalism still on the rise, many black university students dismissed the nonviolent integrationist movement, including SNCC (by then gone from the scene) and Martin Luther King (also gone), as having been irrelevant to the long-term goal of full equality, not to mention liberation as a people or nation. The Panthers' revolutionary rhetoric seemed an attractive alternative to some. But this view is surely simplistic. On a day-to-day level, by 1970 the South was a vastly different place compared to just ten and certainly twenty years before. "In the South," as Piven and Cloward said in 1977, "the deepest meaning of the winning of democratic rights is that the historical primacy of terror as a means of social control has been substantially diminished. The reduction of terror in the everyday life of a people is always in itself an important gain." This diminishment of terror went hand in hand with the undermining of segregation in many dimensions of public life. "The South," noted Aldon Morris, a black sociologist, "is a different place today. ...Southern blacks now live in a world ... that does not automatically strip them of human dignity." SNCC was central to this progressive development.

With the election of Barack Obama it was hoped by many that he would take action to ameliorate the continuing economic stagnation in many black communities and challenge the "prison-industrial complex" and the way police target young black men. But he proved to be a disappointment. Very little changed in the conditions facing African Americans. Obama failed to intervene in the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia in 2011, who many believed innocent of murder. He failed to protest the acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2013. Soon #BlackLivesMatter joined with several other new groups such as Chicago's Black Youth Project 100 to help fill a void in black political organizing left by the demise of SNCC, the Panthers, and other militant groups some 40 years earlier. The movement grew rapidly following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 8, 2014, and the horrified response when his body was left in the street for four and a half hours while the police kept his parents away at gunpoint and with dogs. This tragedy among several others that made headlines "tipped the scales." Ferguson Action soon joined what was now a broad movement that spread throughout the country. Its component groups avoided entanglement with the traditional civil rights organizations seen by the black youth at the center of the movement as "too little too late." Its demands range from demanding police accountability (civilian review boards, body cameras, better recruitment and training of police) to the beginning of moves to focus on the structural problems (segregated housing, chronic unemployment, collapse of educational infrastructure, high crime rates, and so on) that create the context in which police feel free to exercise lethal force to protect themselves and "society."

The movement's multiple organizations and its decentralized and proudly leaderless structure (similar to Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots), using the tools of social media and large-scale demonstrations, have brought attention to every new police atrocity. But as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor rightly points out, "The long-term strength of the movement will depend on its ability to reach large numbers of people by connecting the issue of police violence to the other ways that Black people are oppressed." This is the only path to turning small-scale reforms into a long-term strategy that strikes at the heart of the social system. If and as this occurs, there will need to be coordinating bodies, which will be a challenge to the informality that is so valued by young activists today.

At this point police violence has been considered a black and Latinx issue almost exclusively. I think the reality is that the movement will not be able to go beyond small-scale (and necessary) reforms in this area until whites also protest police shootings. Although black men are about two and a half times as likely to be shot by police as whites, it is nevertheless true that about twice as many whites are killed every year. Official data, which are surely an undercount, say that a total of about 1,000 people are killed and 2,000 more wounded every year. This figure has changed very little in recent years. In 2018 the fairly accurate Washington Post data base reported 452 whites, 229 blacks, and about 147 others including Latinx killed.

Whether the new movement will translate into the kind of social change agent we saw in the civil rights movement of the 1960s remains to be seen. Whether it will move beyond reform to a deeper challenge to the social system is an even more open question. The civil rights movement overall was never intended to be more than a reform struggle, except in the eyes of the radicals in SNCC, CORE, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and Malcolm X. Martin Luther King and the handful of his adherents who saw the philosophy of nonviolence as a way of life more than merely a tactic intended the movement to go far beyond integration as a goal. All of these understood in some way that if real equality in all spheres of life, including the economic dimension, was to be achieved for the whole of the black population, nothing short of a revolutionary change in the social system would be required. The political state correctly understood and feared these elements of the civil rights struggle and destroyed them piece by piece.

The political reforms envisioned by civil rights activists decades before the 1960s have been substantially won. The movement to alter, much less abolish, the "prison-industrial complex" and its associated police systems has as yet made little progress. Beyond that, the revolutionary changes required for full equality and liberation from racism and oppression will require far larger movements than we see at this moment.
Notes

1. Quoted by Doug McAdam, "The Decline of the Civil Rights Movement," in Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, (eds.), Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 343. For more, see Oppenheimer, "Mobs, Vigilantes, Cops, and Feds: The Repression of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee" in New Politics v. XIV No. 1 (Summer 2012).

2. Emily Stoper, "The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Rise and Fall of a Redemptive Organization," in Freeman and Johnson, 360.

3. Counterintelligence Program: "This program has as its objective the neutralization of black extremist groups, the prevention of violence by these groups and the prevention of coalition of black extremist organizations." Neutralization meant, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, efforts to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups including CORE, SNCC, even the SCLC plus others including the Nation of Islam and of course the Black Panther Party. For more details see Carson, 260-264.

4. Countryman, 9. Deindustrialization refers mainly to the decline of manufacturing in urban areas.

5. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (Free Press, 1985), 287.

6. Taylor, 182-183.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On SNCC's 60th Anniversary - New Politics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began as an organization of students from black colleges in the South to integrate lunch counters that refused service to blacks. The tactic they used was the nonviolent direct action sit-in. What began

# data[].attributes.body
1. The Freedom Riders were a group of interracial activists that traveled on interstate buses through the South in 1961 to challenge segregation at bus terminals.

2. The Freedom Riders were significant because the attention they brought, led to the federal enforcement of desegregation laws in bus terminals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
LOST IN HISTORY - Posts, Podcasts, Mini-Docs & Novels - PAUL ANDREWS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Forgotten Freedom Riders of 1961 - LOST IN HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the spring of 1961, both African American and white student activists launched the Freedom Rides. Their goal was to challenge U.S. segregation on public transportation in the dangerous Deep South. Traveling on buses from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, MS, the Freedom Riders met VIOLENT racial opposition from white mobs in Alabama and Mississippi.

# data[].attributes.body
1. In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the college of Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) in Oxford, Mississippi.

2. This enrollment was a major victory for blacks desegregation in higher education, however, it brought on violent protests as result.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Integration at Ole Miss[issippi] Univ[ersity] / MST.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1 negative : film. | Photograph shows James Meredith walking on the campus of the University of Mississippi, accompanied by U.S. marshals.

# data[].attributes.headline
Birmingham Marches and Boycotts - All of 1963

# data[].attributes.subject
Birmingham Marches and Boycotts - All of 1963

# data[].attributes.body
1. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and his SCLC organized protests and boycotts throughout Birmingham, Alabama as an act against segregation. These protests resulted in violent police lash back that drew national attention.

2. The protests and boycotts exposed the brutal tactics used against peaceful protesters and helped to get national support for civil rights legislation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The climax of the modern civil rights movement occurred in Birmingham. The city's violent response to the spring 1963 demonstrations against white supremacy forced the federal government to intervene on behalf of race reform. City Commissioner T. Eugene "Bull" Connor's use of police dogs and fire hoses against nonviolent black activists, led by Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr., enraged the nation. The public outcry provoked Pres. John F. Kennedy to propose civil rights legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act opened America's social, economic, and political system to African Americans and other minorities, including women, the disabled, and gays and lesbians. The legislation addressed the principal goal of the movement of gaining access to the system as consumers but also set in motion strategies to gain equality through affirmative action policies.

Having witnessed the organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Shuttlesworth organized his own group, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in June 1956 after the state outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In December 1956, when the federal courts ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, Shuttlesworth asked the officials of Birmingham's transit system to end segregated seating, setting a December 26 deadline. He intended to challenge the laws on a bus on that day, but on the night of December 25, Klansmen bombed Bethel Baptist Church and parsonage, nearly assassinating Shuttlesworth. He emerged out of the rubble of his dynamited house and led a protest the next morning that resulted in a legal case against the city's segregation ordinance. Coinciding with school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shuttlesworth arranged a challenge to Birmingham's all-white Phillips High School in September 1957, nearly suffering death at the hands of an angry mob. Segregationist vigilantes again greeted Shuttlesworth when he desegregated the train station. In 1958, Shuttlesworth organized a boycott of Birmingham's buses in support of the ACMHR legal case against segregated seating. Shuttlesworth's aggressive strategy of direct action alienated him from Birmingham's established black leadership. Many people in the black middle class found as too extreme the intense religious belief held by ACMHR members that God was going to end segregation.

Prompted by the national sit-in movement begun by four black college men in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, a group of black students in Birmingham from Miles College and Daniel Payne College held a prayer vigil. Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR supported their efforts. When a national group of black and white demonstrators undertook the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR provided assistance, rescuing the stranded protesters outside Anniston as well as those who suffered a Klan attack at the Birmingham Trailways Station. In spring 1962, Birmingham's black college students initiated the Selective Buying Campaign and, with support from Shuttlesworth and ACMHR, it became the catalyst for the spring 1963 demonstrations.

Chosen as secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it organized in 1957, Shutttlesworth had been an active member of the region's leading civil rights group. But he was frustrated because he believed that the SCLC lacked clear direction under King's leadership. Shuttlesworth watched the SCLC intervene in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and fail to successfully challenge segregation in a manner that forced reforms in local race relations. Aware that King's reputation had suffered from this defeat, Shuttlesworth invited the SCLC to assist him and the ACMHR in Birmingham. Believing that a success would restore his reputation as a national civil rights leader, King agreed. Shuttlesworth hoped King's prestige would attract the black masses and thus mobilize Birmingham's black community behind the joint ACMHR-SCLC campaign.

Leaders from the ACMHR met with SCLC officials to plan strategy. Having learned from prior mistakes, King's lieutenant, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, proposed a limited campaign of sit-ins and pickets designed to pressure merchants and local business leaders into demanding the city commission repeal the municipal segregation ordinances. Some scholars have argued that the strategy called for violent confrontations with Bull Connor leading to mass arrests that would force the Kennedy Administration to intervene on behalf of civil rights, but this was not the case. The tactic of filling the jail had failed to alter race relations in Albany, and the noncommittal Kennedy Administration had yet to offer support for the movement and in fact had aided the segregationists. Indeed, the best ACMHR-SCLC could hope to achieve was some modicum of change in local race relations that might point the way toward regional reform of the South's segregated social structure.

The joint ACMHR-SCLC Birmingham campaign began quietly with sit-ins on April 3, 1963, at several downtown "whites-only" lunch counters. From the outset, the campaign confronted an apathetic black community, an openly hostile established black leadership, and Bull Connor's "nonviolent resistance" in the form of polite arrests of the offenders of the city's segregation ordinances. With no sensational news, the national media found nothing to report, and the campaign floundered. But when Connor ordered out police dogs to disperse a crowd of black bystanders, journalists recorded the attack of a German shepherd on a nonviolent protester, thereby revealing the brutality that underpinned segregation. The episode convinced Walker and King to use direct-action tactics to generate creative tension for the sake of media coverage. The ease with which the campaign changed directions reflected the fluidity of the movement. Shuttlesworth led the first of many protest marches on City Hall to emphasize the refusal of the city commission to issue parade permits to the protestors. As the number of demonstrations increased, police arrested more ACMHR members, consequently draining the financial resources of the campaign. Black bystanders gave the campaign the appearance of mass support, but the vast majority of Birmingham's black residents remained uninvolved. A more serious threat came from established black leaders who opposed the civil rights campaign and actively worked to undermine Shuttlesworth by negotiating with the white power structure. Although King's decision to seek arrest marked a turning point in his life as a leader, it did little to increase support for the faltering ACMHR-SCLC campaign. From behind bars, he penned the " Letter From Birmingham Jail," which became the clearest statement on the righteousness of civil rights protest. But after a month of exhaustive demonstrations, the stalemate with white authorities suggested another Albany and the looming defeat of the Birmingham Campaign.

In a desperate bid to generate media coverage and to keep the campaign alive, King's lieutenants launched the Children's Crusade on May 2, 1963, in which black youth from area schools served as demonstrators. Trying to avoid the use of force, Bull Connor arrested hundreds of school children and hauled them off to jail on school buses. When the jails were filled, he called out fire hoses and police dogs to contain large protests in the black business district along the city's Kelly Ingram Park. African American spectators responded with outrage, pelting police with bricks and bottles as firemen opened up the hoses on not just the nonviolent youngsters but also on enraged black bystanders who had nearly begun a riot. The media captured the negative images of Connor and his men suppressing the nonviolent protest of school children with brutal blasts from water cannons and attacks from police dogs. Front-page photographs in the nation's newspapers convinced Kennedy to send Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Burke Marshall to Birmingham to secure negotiations that would end the violent demonstrations. Previous federal policy regarding civil rights issues had left enforcement to local law and order officials without direct intervention by the national government. At first, Marshall succeeded in fashioning a similar resolution by convincing King to call off the protests without winning any real concessions from the local white power structure. Shuttlesworth held out for more concrete results, and his opposition led to a re-evaluation of the terms for an ultimate truce that announced limited local race reforms.

The national media attention helped to spread the fervor of the ACMHR-SCLC Birmingham Campaign well beyond the city's borders, and national demonstrations, international pressure, and inner city riots followed in the wake of the agreement. These actions convinced a reluctant Kennedy administration to propose sweeping reforms that Congress ultimately passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With this legislation, the civil rights movement achieved its goals of gaining access to public accommodations and equal employment opportunities, thereby ending acquiescence to white supremacy and opening the system to African Americans and other minorities. In hindsight the moderate success of inclusion only expanded access and did not alter or challenge the class structure, thus leaving movement members with a wistful sense for the need for economic justice. In the years that followed, white resistance exaggerated the significance of the limited racial inclusion.

White vigilantes attempted to scuttle the race reforms by bombing sites related to the civil rights struggle. When court-ordered school desegregation arrived in the city in September 1963, Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls. Only with the implementation of the Civil Rights Act, adopted the next year, did the city completely desegregate, and then only following the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Heart of Atlanta Motel v. the United States case, which also involved Birmingham's Ollie's Barbecue. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 many African Americans in Birmingham won the right to vote for the first time, foreshadowing a sea change in local politics. Although members of the black middle class and working class enjoyed access to the system, many African Americans remained shut out, having gained little from the reforms won in Birmingham. Nevertheless, the appointment of Arthur Shores to the city council in 1968 and the election of Richard Arrington as mayor in 1979 represented the strength of the growing black electorate and the success of black political empowerment that grew directly out of the Birmingham campaign.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Birmingham Campaign of 1963 - Encyclopedia of Alabama

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The climax of the modern civil rights movement occurred in Birmingham. The city's violent response to the spring 1963 demonstrations against white supremacy forced the federal government to intervene on behalf of race reform. City Commissioner T. Eugene "Bull" Connor's use of police dogs and fire hoses against nonviolent black activists, led by Fred L.

# data[].attributes.body
1. On August 28th, 1963, over 250,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, which advocated for racial equality.

2. The "I Have a Dream" speech became a defining moment in the African-American civil rights movement across the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
March on Washington - Date, Facts & Significance | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered i…

# data[].attributes.body
1. Congress, with a signature from President Lyndon B. Johnson, ratified the 24th Amendment, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in federal elections.

2. The 24th amendment removed a key barrier that had prevented many African Americans from voting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Two Amendments were ratified on January 23rd: the 20th Amendment in 1933 and the 24th Amendment in 1964. The 20th Amendment moved presidential inaugurations to January. This uncontroversial amendment shortened the lame-duck period for politicians and replaced an outdated calendar-with advances in transportation technology, elected officials could assume their roles in Washington much sooner. Hardship for Americans during the winter of 1932-33, at the height of the Great Depression, further highlighted the need for this revision. Franklin Roosevelt had defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election, but neither Roosevelt, not yet in office, nor Hoover, essentially politically powerless following his defeat, could take action.

The 24th Amendment of 1964 abolished poll taxes in federal elections: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax." This abolition, along with the Voting Rights Act (passed the following year), helped make voting possible for a larger and more diverse group of American citizens. Southern states often aimed to limit the number of black voters with poll taxes. Poll taxes were usually $1 or $2, which would be about $20 to $40 today-enough to effectively discourage poor citizens, black or white, from turning out to vote. While the Amendment prohibited poll taxes in federal elections, it was not until two years later, in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, that the Supreme Court found poll taxes unconstitutional in all elections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
January 23: The 20th Amendment and 24th Amendment | Grateful American Kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 20th Amendment moved presidential inaugurations to January. The 24th Amendment of 1964 abolished poll taxes.

# data[].attributes.body
1. In July of 1964, while in Washington, D.C., President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin.

2. This major legislation was crucial in the fight to end segregation and inequality in public and at work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Civil Rights Act of 1964 | American Experience | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The historic law that promoted equality for all Americans.

# data[].attributes.body
1. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. with the help of activists from SCLC and SNCC led a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama in order to demand black voting rights.

2. The march helped to bring even more light to the violence Blacks faced to attempt to get voting rights, which then led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

# data[].attributes.body
1. In Washington, D.C., President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned all discriminatory voting practices, ensuring oversight in Southern states to protect African American voters.

2. The law gave blacks a sure voice in the government as they would finally be able to vote normally.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Voting Rights Act: Why Federal legislation was needed in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment | Milwaukee Independent

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fifty-six years ago, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

# data[].attributes.body
1. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in 1966. Their group addressed police brutality, promoted Black self-defense, and created community programs for empowerment.

2. The Black Panther Party utilized the carrying of arms for self-defense, the confrontation of police brutality, and in order to become a symbol of militant black resistance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
13 things you probably didn’t know about the Black Panther Party

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Created to monitor police, the Panthers sponsored free breakfasts for kids, no-cost medical clinics, and dozens of other social programs.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr - April 1968

# data[].attributes.subject
The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr - April 1968

# data[].attributes.body
1. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray, in Memphis, Tennessee on his second-floor motel balcony.

2. The assassination was a pivotal moment in American history, as it led to widespread riots, grief, and most importantly, a greatly renewed push for civil rights legislation and justice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Date:

April 4, 1968

(Show more)

assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a march by striking sanitation workers. In response to King's death, more than 100 American inner cities exploded in rioting, looting, and violence. James Earl Ray, a career small-time criminal who became the object of a more than two-month manhunt before he was captured in England, pled guilty to the shooting and received a 99-year prison sentence. He quickly recanted his plea and spent the rest of his life claiming that he had been framed by a conspiracy that was really responsible for King's assassination.

Context: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the United States in April 1968

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the earthshaking events of 1968 that made it among the most tumultuous and momentous years in American history. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the antiwar movement all were in full swing as the year began. King's opposition to the Vietnam War had been building steadily since 1965, though initially he was reluctant to prominently criticize the conduct of the war by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been a key ally in the effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the war effort began to rob funding from Johnson's Great Society plan, however, King became a more vocal critic, and his opposition to the war grew to embrace a more radical critique of what he saw as U.S. militarism and imperialism. King also took American capitalism to task and began portraying inequality in economic as well as racial terms. "Beyond Vietnam," the address that he gave at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, brought all of these elements together in a speech that made manifest his opposition to the war.

A number of mainstream publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, thought King had gone too far with the speech. He had already begun to find himself betwixt and between. Many whites saw him as a dangerous radical. On the other hand, despite his increasingly radical message, a growing number of militant African Americans had become impatient with his nonviolent methods and what they saw as a lack of success in his civil rights efforts in northern cities. It had been several years since his southern triumphs in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma March.

In November 1967 King's concern with economic inequality led him and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to mount a Poor People's Campaign, which was to culminate in a massive march on Washington, D.C. Before that could happen, other events of early 1968 interceded. On January 30, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, a widespread attack in South Vietnam that put the Americans and South Vietnamese on their heels for weeks. The pervasiveness of this shocking assault and especially the images of fighting in and around the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) dramatically belied the U.S. government's contention that the Americans and the South Vietnamese had the war well in hand. Opposition to the war led to Johnson's defeat by antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the March 12, 1968, Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, followed by the announcement of the candidacy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (March 16) and the withdrawal of Johnson's candidacy (March 31). Meanwhile, Republican front-runner Richard Nixon's popularity grew with the "silent majority" who opposed social change and supported the war. Against this backdrop and that of the previous year's rioting in Detroit and Newark, King interrupted the planning of the Poor People's March to travel to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers.

The Memphis sanitation workers strike

Sanitation workers in Memphis-most of whom were African American and received a paltry wage of about $1.00 per hour-conducted a strike for better wages and working conditions in 1966 but failed to gain sufficient community support. The situation changed after a pair of sanitation workers who had been sheltering from the rain by crouching inside the loading hopper of their garbage truck were crushed because of a malfunctioning switch. This time the strike that resulted in response to their deaths was supported by some 150 local clergymen. The group's leader, the Rev. James Lawson, asked King, his friend, for support, and on March 18 King addressed a crowd of between 15,000 and 25,000 people, which was said to be the largest indoor gathering in the history of the civil rights movement to that date. King returned to Memphis on March 28 to join Lawson in leading a march in support of the strike. Violence erupted early in the demonstration: looting broke out, and police shot and killed a 16-year-old boy. King was reluctantly spirited away to safety. Dozens of others were injured as police dispensed tear gas and wielded batons while pursuing demonstrators inside the Clayborn Temple. Blame for the outbreak of violence, which marred King's reputation for nonviolent protest, was placed by many on the Black Organizing Project (better known as the Invaders), a local Black Panther Party-inspired organization. The next day, strikers returned to their daily demonstrations carrying placards that read "I Am a Man," and reporters asked King if he would be able to keep the Poor People's Campaign in Washington peaceful. He met with representatives of the Invaders, who claimed not to have instigated the violence and with whom King agreed to coordinate efforts as plans began for a follow-up march.

Having returned to his home base in Atlanta, King contemplated not going back to Memphis. The planning for the Poor People's Campaign was escalating. At a meeting on March 30, however, he decided that he needed to see through his commitment to the effort in Memphis, and, after some dissent, the leadership of the SCLC agreed. King had come to see the struggle in Memphis as emblematic of the objectives of the Poor People's Campaign.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. | History & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about the background, details, and aftermath of the assassination in this article.