By the time of Martin Luther King Jr. New black power activists did not accept his philosophy of nonviolence as a way to achieve their goals. After successfully campaigning for Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of Cleveland, King was not invited to the victory celebration. The next civil rights challenges, such as fighting poverty, were more abstract compared with the clarity of issues like discrimination in hiring and the use of public amenities.
These new concerns would likely have proven more difficult for him to achieve the same levels of success as he had in his previous campaigns for equality and justice. On the last Saturday of his life, he mused about quitting his full-time role in the movement, though he seemed to talk himself out of that, according to one of his fellow activists, Jesse Jackson. Yet, the lasting legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Among the prominent legacies of his ability to organize and energize the movement for equality are the Civil Rights Act of and the Voting Rights Act of His birthday has become a national holiday, when government offices and many private businesses close to honor his memory.
A portion of the Lorraine Motel, including two persevered rooms and the balcony on which he was assassinated, are part of the National Civil Rights Museum. His eloquent words live on, inspiring others who see injustices and seek to change them. It is impossible to imagine such sweeping change would occur as quickly as it did without a leader like Martin Luther King Jr. Philip Randolph, a longtime trade union activist and the senior statesman among African American civil rights leaders, who first suggested such an event early that year.
Indeed, Randolph had planned a similar mass descent upon Washington two decades earlier, in , before canceling the demonstration after President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to stronger federal anti-discrimination policies. Randolph and Rustin imagined as many as , protesters besieging Congress on one day in May and then a public mass rally the following day.
Up until May of , President John F. The Birmingham protests, however, drew the Kennedy administration into daily, face-to-face attempts to arrange a truce in a local crisis that had rapidly spiraled into a major national news story and then an international embarrassment to the United States.
Birmingham, and the worldwide news coverage its violence received, catapulted the Southern civil rights struggle to greater national prominence than it had ever before attained.
The transcripts of those wiretaps were released to me, pursuant to the federal Freedom of Information Act, in the mids. But neither King nor the press knew that privately, for more than two weeks, the president, his attorney general brother and their closest civil rights advisers had been secretly putting together an outline for a dramatically far-reaching civil rights bill that the administration would place before Congress.
On the evening of June 11, John F. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. But two important entities were unpersuaded of the political wisdom of any such march. The other was the Kennedy administration, which quickly invited King, Randolph, Young and other civil rights leaders to a private meeting with the president on June The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation—and this may give some members of Congress an out.
Yet other civil rights supporters remained extremely worried about the march; African-American Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr. In early July, the march organizers announced that no sit-ins or civil disobedience would be part of the August 28 gathering, and worries about what would occur began to recede. On July 17, President Kennedy, choosing to embrace the inevitable, publicly endorsed the march, and administration officials quietly began assisting march planners in innumerable ways.
As August 28 drew close, planners agreed on an afternoon rally at the Lincoln Memorial where speeches by march leaders would be interspersed among musical performances by noted entertainers.
When typed out and mimeographed for advance distribution to the press, it came to less than three legal-size, double-spaced pages. Yet for King to produce any sort of an advance text for a speech was almost in itself unprecedented, since whether at civil rights rallies or in Sunday morning church sermons, Martin Luther King Jr.
After master of ceremonies A. After quoting the prophet Amos on justice and righteousness, King was close to the end of his prepared text. He later recalled that moment:.
King had indeed used it before—in Albany, Georgia, and in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in the fall of , and in both Birmingham and in Detroit a few months earlier—but on none of those occasions had it had anywhere near the impact that it did on August It was a gift that King had polished in black Southern churches for more than a decade, a gift that movement colleagues had encountered from the onset of the —56 Montgomery bus boycott forward, but only on August 28 did such a huge crowd, plus a live national television audience, hear the extemporaneous genius that made King such a remarkable preacher.
Johnson—was signed into law as the landmark Civil Rights Act of , and one year after that the other bookend legislative achievement of the Southern civil rights struggle, the Voting Rights Act of , also became law. But in the years after , the glow of the march, and of the entire —65 civil rights apex, rapidly receded. This article was written by David J.
Garrow and originally published in August issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to American History magazine today! A nation that could rarely agree on anything found itself in rare agreement about the March on Washington.
Everyone, it seemed, could agree on that. When the dust had settled and discipline had been reestablished, the Bureau embarked on a campaign to utterly discredit King, to destroy him personally and as a public figure. It was a war that the FBI would continue to wage against King as long as he lived. It would continue, obsessively, almost maniacally, even after King was dead. Right after the march, William C.
We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security…. For the past two years, the FBI had been watching King with mounting hostility.
After the march, the Bureau shifted from a hostile—but relatively passive—surveillance of King to an aggressive—at times violently aggressive—campaign to destroy him. Then he had apparently dropped out of the party. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was baffled. You contended then that Castro and his cohorts were not communists and not influenced by communists.
Time alone proved you wrong. A few months went by before he would speak to me. Everything was conducted by exchange of written communications. It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street. At this point, Sullivan evidently panicked. We were completely wrong about believing the evidence was not sufficient to determine some years ago that Fidel Castro was not a communist or under communist influence.
On investigating and writing about communism and the American Negro, we had better remember this and profit by the lesson it should teach us. Stripped of euphemisms, Sullivan was proposing unleashing on Martin Luther King the aggressive and disruptive techniques the Bureau had been using against foreign intelligence agents and Communists.
In a letter to the Special Agents in Charge in the field, Hoover wrote:. Baumgardner, three other headquarters officials and two agents from Atlanta, met to draw up plans against King. We will, at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.
It should be clear to all of us that Martin Luther King must, at some propitious point in the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers as being what he actually is—a fraud, demagogue and scoundrel. When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence. When this is done, and it can be and will be done, obviously much confusion will reign, particularly among the Negro people….
The Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction. This is what could happen, but need not happen if the right kind of national Negro leader could at this time be gradually developed so as to overshadow Dr. King and be in the position to assume the role of the leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited. King responded with a press release that in effect called Hoover senile.
We are never taking the aggressive, but above lies [i. In , he joined Black college students in a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter.
Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy interceded to have King released from jail, an action that is credited with helping Kennedy win the presidency. King inspires a large crowd with one of his many speeches. Raised in a family of preachers, he's considered one of the greatest speakers in U. King waves to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.
There, he delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech, which boosted public support for civil rights. President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes King's hand at the signing of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation in publicly owned facilities.
King his wife, Coretta Scott King, sit with three of their four children in their Atlanta, Georgia, home in His wife shared the same commitment to ending the racist system they had both grown up under.
A crowd of mourners follows the casket of King through the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, after his assassination in April 4, While studying for King served as an assistant minister at Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church, which was renowned for its abolitionist origins. After finishing his doctorate, King returned to the South at the age of 25, becoming pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Shortly after King took up residence in the town, Rosa Parks made history when she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger on a Montgomery bus.
Starting in , Montgomery's Black community staged an extremely successful bus boycott that lasted for over a year. King, played a pivotal leadership role in organizing the protest. His arrest and imprisonment as the boycott's leader propelled King onto the national stage as a lead figure in the civil rights movement.
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's model of nonviolent resistance, King believed that peaceful protest for civil rights would lead to sympathetic media coverage and public opinion. His instincts proved correct when civil rights activists were subjected to violent attacks by white officials in widely televised episodes that drew nationwide outrage. With King at its helm, the civil rights movement ultimately achieved victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in and the Voting Rights Act in In , King returned to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
His involvement in a sit-in at a department presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Pressure from Kennedy led to King's release. Again, the protests drew nationwide attention when televised footage showed Birmingham police deploying pressurized water jets and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators.
The campaign was ultimately successful, forcing the infamous Birmingham police chief Bull Connor to resign and the city to desegregate public spaces. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for.
It's worth dying for.
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