Martin Luther King, Jr.

« disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation to restore normal business relations.

The strategy did not work in Albany.

During months ofprotests, Albany’s police chief jailed hundreds of demonstrators without visible police violence.

Eventually the protesters’ energy, and the money to bail out protesters,ran out. The strategy did work, however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local protest during the spring of 1963.

The protest was led by SCLC member FredShuttlesworth, one of the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC.

Shuttlesworth believed that the Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene“Bull” Connor, would meet protesters with violence.

In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagersand school children to join.

Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of downtown Birmingham, angering Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs andfirefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers.

Scenes of young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents of waterfrom fire hoses were shown in newspapers and on televisions around the world. During the demonstrations, King was arrested and sent to jail.

He wrote a letter from his jail cell to local clergymen who had criticized him for creating disorder in thecity.

His “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which argued that individuals had the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time andadded to King’s standing as a moral leader. National reaction to the Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights.

The demonstrations forced white leaders to negotiate an end to someforms of segregation in Birmingham.

Even more important, the protests encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation. VI “I HAVE A DREAM” King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights.

On August 28, 1963, Kingdelivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters.

His “I Have a Dream” speech expressed the hopes of the civil rights movementin oratory as moving as any in American history: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truthsto be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color oftheir skin but by the content of their character.” The speech and the march built on the Birmingham demonstrations to create the political momentum that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibitedsegregation in public accommodations, as well as discrimination in education and employment.

As a result of King’s effectiveness as a leader of the American civil rightsmovement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace. VII SELMA MARCHES In 1965 SCLC joined a voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away.The goal of the march was to draw national attention to the struggle for black voting rights in the state.

Police beat and tear-gassed the marchers just outside of Selma,and televised scenes of the violence, on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, resulted in an outpouring of support to continue the march.

SCLC petitionedfor and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery.

Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3,000 people,including a core of 300 marchers who would make the entire trip, set out toward Montgomery.

They arrived in Montgomery five days later, where King addressed a rallyof more than 20,000 people in front of the capitol building. The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in August.

The act suspended (and amendments to theact later banned) the use of literacy tests and other voter qualification tests that often had been used to prevent blacks from registering to vote. After the Selma protests, King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights.

Many white Americans who had supported his work believed that thejob was done.

In many ways, the nation’s appetite for civil rights progress had been filled.

King also lost support among white Americans when he joined the growingnumber of antiwar activists in 1965 and began to criticize publicly American foreign policy in Vietnam.

King’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975) alsoangered President Johnson.

On the other hand, some of King’s white supporters agreed with his criticisms of United States involvement in Vietnam so strongly that theyshifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar movement. VIII BLACK POWER By the mid-1960s King’s role as the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement was questioned by many younger blacks.

Activists such as Stokely Carmichael ofthe Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that King’s nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face ofsustained violence by whites.

Some also rejected the leadership of ministers.

In addition, many SNCC organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put in thehard work of planning and organizing protests, only to have the charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit.

In 1966 the Black Power movement,advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the nation’s attention and suggested that King’s influence among blacks was waning.

Black Power advocates lookedmore to the beliefs of the recently assassinated black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselvesagainst violent attacks had been embraced by many African Americans. With internal divisions beginning to divide the civil rights movement, King shifted his focus to racial injustice in the North.

Realizing that the economic difficulties ofblacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty.

King established aheadquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city.

Black Baptistministers who disagreed with many of SCLC’s tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King’sefforts.

The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counterdemonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku KluxKlan, a secret terrorist organization that was opposed to integration. Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues.

He began to argue for redistributionof the nation’s economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty.

In 1967 he began planning a Poor People’s Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to addressthe issue of economic justice. IX ASSASSINATION This emphasis on economic rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers in the spring of 1968.

He was assassinated in Memphisby a sniper on April 4.

News of the assassination resulted in an outpouring of shock and anger throughout the nation and the world, prompting riots in more than 100United States cities in the days following King’s death.

In 1969 James Earl Ray, an escaped white convict, pleaded guilty to the murder of King and was sentenced to 99years in prison.

Ray later recanted his confession.

Although over the years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have everbeen identified.

In 1999 a jury in a Memphis civil trial brought by King’s family found that a widespread conspiracy not involving Ray led to King’s assassination.. »