Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)

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demonstrations. The goal was to goad police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor

to suppress the demonstratio ns, probably violently. T he SCLC wanted national

attention and sympathy. Connor used dogs and ﬁre hoses. King went to jail on

April 12, Good Friday. When Birmingham’s white ministers asked King to end

the demonstrations and boycotts, King issued his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

The SCLC was in danger of being bypassed by more radical a nd aggressive

organizations in 1961, so it committed major resources to the Albany, Georgia,

desegregation campaign. King, criticized for his long-distance leadership and deri-

sively called “De Lawd,” involved himself closely in Albany. The effort failed

because the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett, did not take the bait, but rather

arranged to house demonstrators in all the prisons and jails within 60 miles and to

keep King from sitting in jail and becoming a martyr. There was no adverse public-

ity because there was no dramatic confrontation. Albany was an education for the

SCLC, and in Birmingham there would be dramatic confrontation in abundance.

On September 15, 1963, the bomb explosion at Birmingham’s 16th Stree t

Baptist church killed four young girls and wounded 20 other people. Four

Klansmen were identiﬁed as suspects, but FBI head J. Edgar Hoover refused to

prosecute, claiming that the bombing was the work of civil rights advocates want-

ing sympathy. The FBI closed the case in 1968, but local ofﬁcials reopened the

case and got one conviction in 1977. Another Klansman died in 1994 as the case

against him was being p repared. A third was convicted by a Birmingham jury in

2001, and the fourth in 2002. Both received life terms, and Birmingham rehabili-

tated itself.

Politics, Legislation, and Recognition

In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the regu-

lar Democrats, chosen at an all-white convention, at the national convention. The

MFDP, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, was an embarrassment at the convention,

intended as a love feast for Lyndon Johnson. Not wanting a ﬁght over r acism to

aid Barry Goldwater’s inroads in the formerly solid South (George Wallace had

picked up a lot of northern support in the primaries, too), Johnson attempted to

downplay the MFDP and deny it press coverage. His effort failed, as did his weak

compromise offer of two seats. The convention was disillusioning for many in the

MFDP and the movement itself. The MFDF and many others radicalized after the

convention. King won his Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964.

Black players boycotted the 1965 American Football League all-star game in

New Orleans after many were refused service in hotels, businesses, and cabs

during the 1964 season. Black and white players alike forced the league to move

the game to Houston. This was the ﬁrst boycott of a ci ty by a professional sports

event. Spur ring the boycott was passage of the Civil Rights Act, which Congress

898 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)

passed in 1964, that outlawed race-based discrimination. A 75-day ﬁlibuster

preceded enactment. That year, three civil rights workers in Mississippi disap-

peared after being stopped for speeding. Their bodies were found after six weeks.

The same year, riots occurred in Philadelphia a nd Harlem. After two civil rights

workers were murdered in Selma, Alabama, civil rights advocates marched from

Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand enforcement of the voting rights laws.

Watts, California, rioted. Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was murdered.

Congress then enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law barred state use

of literacy tests, interpretation of the Constitution, and other tactics that histori-

cally had blocked would-be black voters. Before 1965, about 23 percent of blacks

nationally were registered to vote. By 1969, 61 percent were registered. In Missis-

sippi, registration rose from 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent in the same time. Increased

registration resulted in election of blacks to state, local, and national ofﬁces.

Before the Voting Rights Act, about 100 bla cks had held elective ofﬁce in the

United States. By 1989, there were over 7,200, including 4,800 in the South.

Changes in the Movement

Meredith reappeared in 1966 when he launched his 220-mile March against Fear

from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. His goal of showing how the racial climate

had improved was foiled when someone shot him. Civil rights leaders picked up

the march from the point at which Meredith was wounded.

In 1966, Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, became the ﬁrst

black U.S. senator in 85 years. By that year, the civil rights movement had peaked,

having won its legislative victories. Blacks were shifting toward the black power

movement, which dominated from 1966 through 1975, because it sought goals

beyond civil rights. Blacks demanded dignity, self-sufﬁciency both economically

and politically, and freedom from white inﬂuence. Newark rioted in 1967, as did

Detroit. Thurgood Marshall became the ﬁrst black Supreme Court justice. Cleve-

land, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, choose the ﬁrst black mayors of major U.S. cities.

Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, enacted in 1968, required fairness in housing.

In 1 968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. James

Earl Ray received 99 years in prison for the crime. Riots ensued. The Poor

People’s March on Washington, a King idea, went on despite his death.

The movement was technically still alive, but attention was turned to the

Vietnam War and student demonstrations well before 1973, when Maynard Jackson

became mayor of Atlanta, the ﬁrst major southern city to elect a black as mayor. In

1975, Congress renewed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1978 a more conservative

Supreme Court ruled in the Bakke case that race-based set-asides for medical school

admission were unconstitutional. Violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979

resulted in ﬁve anti-Klan protesters dead and 12 Klansmen indicted for murder.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 899

The Martin Luther King federal holiday became law in 1983. In 1988, over

President Ronald Reagan’s veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act.

In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the ﬁrst black elected governor,

and C olin Powell became the ﬁrst black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

President George H. W. Bush vetoed a civil rights bill in 1990 because he regarded

it as establishing employment quotas; a weaker bill passed in 1991, the year that

the Civil Rights Museum opened at the motel in Memphis where King was assas-

sinated. Three years later, i n 1994, Byro n D e La Beckwith was convicted of the

1963 Evers murder. In 1996, the Supreme Court re stricted afﬁrmative actio n by

requiring that federal programs must show a “comp elling government in terest,”

and the Court banned congressional districts formed using race as a factor.

The anthem of the movement, “We Shall Overcome,” was ﬁrst sung by striking

tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1945. It became the move-

ment’s anthem in the 1960s. Authorship includes Silphia Horton of the Highlander

Folk School and others. Horton learned the song fr om the to bacco workers. Pete

Seeger, another coauthor, helped to popularize the song. Seeger modiﬁed the origi-

nal title, “We Will Overcome.” When calling for enactment of the Voting Rights

Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson closed a speech with “and we shall over-

come.” Many of his listeners were taken aback.

Conclusion

The NAACP effort culminated in the 1954 Brown decision. The movement moved

from the courts to the media, and televised nonviolent confrontation pressed

Congress to act. The 1964 and 1965 laws e nded outlawed second-class status.

The movement won equal access to public accommodations, equal employment,

equal justice, equal housing, and equal education. Blacks were allowed access to

hig her education and the arts. The civil rights movement was the inspiration for

similar efforts by Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and women.

American blacks also supported liberation struggles in Africa. . The major failure

of the movement was its inability to achieve signiﬁcant economic justice for

mino ritie s. That required afﬁrm ative action, and by 1996, afﬁrmative acti on was

at risk. When the Voting Rights Act came due for renewal in 2006, it passed, and

the president signed it almost as a matter of course. On the darker side, resegrega-

tion was ongoing in the ﬁnal quarter of the century.

—John H. Barnhill

See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741);

Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s R ebellion (1831);

New Orleans Riot (1866); Women’s Movement (1870s); New Orleans Race Riot

(1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); S pringﬁeld Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917);

900 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)

Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Watts Riot (196 5); Detroit Riots (1 967);

Feminist Movement (1970s–1980s); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Further Reading

Belknap, Michal R. Federal Law and Southern Order. Athens: University of Georgia

Press, 1987.

“The Civil Rights Era, Part 1.” African American Odyssey. http://memory.loc.gov/

ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html (accessed December 2008).

“The Civil Rights Movement.” CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1997/mlk/

links.html (accessed December 2008).

Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Logan, Rayford. The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 187 7–1901.

New York: Dial Press, 1954.

Simon, Dennis M. “The Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1963.” August 2002. http://

faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Civ%20Rts.html (accessed August 2010).

“Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Demonstrations.” African American Odyssey. http://

memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9b.html (accessed December 2008).

“The State Responds: Massive Resistance.” Brown v. Bo ard of Edu cation:Virginia

Responds, an exhibition at the Library of Virginia. http:/ /www.lva.lib.va.us/

whoweare/exhibits/brown/resistance.htm (accessed July 21, 2010).

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 901

Carmichael, Stokely/Kwame Ture

(1941–1998)

Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, was a leading student activist in the

1960s and Black Power spokesman. Born in Trinidad in 1941, he moved with his

family to New York City in 1952. In February 1960, four African American stu-

dents attending the North Carolin a A&T College began a sit-in at the segregated

Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro. This action sparked student action all

over the South, and 3,600 similar student sit-ins were started. This increased stu-

dent activism led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Commit-

tee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As a philosophy student attending Howard University, Carmichael joined the

campus afﬁliate of the SNCC. As a student activist, Carmichael participated in the

Freedom Rides on segregated southern buses started by the Congress of Racial

Equality (CORE). In 1964, he also acted as a SNCC ﬁeld organizer in the Mississippi

Freedom Summer and later h elped organize a black electoral registration drive

in Lownes County, Alabama. It was in Lownes County in 1966 that Carmichael

ﬁrst used the Black Panther as a political symbol. By the time of his election as

chairman of th e SNCC in 1966, he was bec oming increasingly disillusioned

with the principle of nonviolence and cooperation with white liberals to achieve

black civil rights. Just weeks after his election as the SNCC c hairman, James

Meredith was shot on the second day of his March against Fear, a lone march

from Jackson, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee. With other civil rights lead-

ers, Carmichael went to see Meredith in a Memphis hospital, and together with

King, Carmichael planne d to continue the march. Following a confrontation

with the police in Greenwood, Tennessee, Carmichael was arres ted. Upon his

release, he used for the ﬁrst time the raised clenched-ﬁst salute and used the

term Black Power. Carmichael would later elaborate on this concept t o mean

that black American s al one should struggl e fo r the lib eration and own self-

consciousness as African Americans.

The continuing war in Vietnam and the draft at home made Carmichael a more

militant voice in the United States , and in 1966, he publicly stated that he found

the notion of white people sending black people to make war on yellow people

to defend land stolen from red people as ridiculous. In New York City in

April 1967, he, together with King, led a massive anti–Vietnam War demonstra-

tion, an event that attracted over 200,000 participants. His increasingl y mi litant

public proﬁle eventually led to his break with the SNCC in 1967, the year he coau-

thored Black Power with Charles V. Hamilton. The assassination of King in

903

Memphis in April 1968 shocked Carmichael, who proclaimed that white America

had ﬁnally declared war on black America.

Increasingly disillusioned with the idea of progress in the United States as well

as the Black Panther Party itself, Carmichael left for Guinea, Africa, in 1969. An

aide to the prime minister, Sekou Ture, Carmichael would change his name and

continue to be a spokesman for left-wing organizations, and the cause of Pan-

Africanism. In 1971, he published Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-

Africanism as a record of his views. His radicalism and continued prominence

led the CIA to continually monitor his movements before his untimely death from

cancer in 1998.

—Rory T. Cornish

Further Reading

Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism. New York: Random

House, 1971.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening in the 1960’s.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

VanDeburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American

Culture, 1965–1979. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1929–1968)

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American theologian, orator, and civil

rights leader during the 1950s and 1960s. Born on January 15, 1 929, King grew

up in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended Morehouse College. Following his

graduation from the academic institution, King continued his studies by earning

a doctoral degree in philosophy from Boston University in 1953. As pastor of the

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King preached a policy of passive resistance and

nonviolence.

Following the arrest of Rosa Parks, who had violated an Alabama bus segrega-

tion law, King endorsed a boycott of Montgomery’s transportation system. By

November 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott represented a successful victory

in the civil rights movement because the Supreme Court ru led that the city ordi-

nance was unconstitutional.

Campaigning against racial discrimination and inequality, King and other

African American ministers established the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC) in Ja nuary 1957. The n ew organization was responsible for

coordinating demonstrations against segregation and disenfranchisement.

904 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)

During the 1960s, King continued to ﬁght racial prejudices when he led civil

rights demonstrators on a protest march in Birmingham, Alabama, which was

viewed as th e nation’s most s egregated city. In the spring of 1963, near ly

1,000 protesters assembled at Birmingham’s City Hall, wher e they advocated

equal employment opportunities and the integration of public facilities. On

April 12, 1963, King and 50 individuals were arrested because their actions vio-

lated a state court inj unction. Local police ofﬁcers caused the remaining crowd

members in the downtown area to disperse when they used attack dogs, electric

cattle prods, high-pressure water hoses, and clubs. As news reporters covered the

demonstration, the event’s brutality caused federal leaders to urge city ofﬁcials

to end the violence.

With segregation and disenfranchisement still existing within American society,

civil rights leaders organized a peaceful demonstration in the nation’s capital. On

August 28, 1963, King, along with Whitney Young of the National Urban League

and National Association for the Advancement of Colored Pe ople (NAACP)

president Roy Wilkins, led individuals from across the nation on a march on

Washington, D.C. Known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,

the event represented one of the largest demonstrations in American history,

as nearly 250,000 individuals assembled in the nation’s capital. During the mass

demonstration, King delivered his noted “I Have a Dream” speech. King’s remarks

as well as the March on Washington appealed to the American public’s conscience

for economic justice and racial equality.

Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 905

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference,

and Mathew Ahmann, executive director

of the National Catholic Conference for

Interrracial Justice, during the CIvil Rights

March on Washington, D.C., on August 28,

1963. (National Archives)

By the late 1960s, King also criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson for escalat-

ing the Vietnam War. He maintained that the conﬂict’s increasing ﬁnancial c osts

reduced resources and funds, which were utilized for federal welfare programs.

Additionally, King viewed the war as unjust because the federal government had

drafted African Americans to ﬁght for freedoms and civil rights in Southeast Asia

while these same liberties did not exist in America.

Aside from King’s antiwar views, he also argued that the nation’s racial prob-

lems were linked with poverty and living conditions. Therefore, he urged the

federal government to fund antipoverty programs, which would improve African

Americans’ economic conditions. By the late 1960s, King initiated plans for a Poor

People’s Campaign, which would emphasize the issue of economic inequality and

injustice among African Americans.

In March 1968, King supported a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Ten-

nessee. Prior to King’s participation in the garbage workers’ walkout, James Earl

Ray, who was an escaped convict, shot and killed King at the Lorraine Motel on

April 4, 1968. Following King’s assassination, he became a martyr for the civil

rights movement.

The news of King’s death caused racial violence and unrest to erupt across the

nation. For example, r iots broke out in nearly 110 cities, including Baltimore,

Louisville, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. National leaders called upon local

police ofﬁcers and armed guards to restore order throughout the country. Civic

ofﬁcials reported that the riots’ death tolls totaled 46 individuals.

During the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. played a vital role in the civil

rights movement. King’s efforts led to the e stab lish ment of several federal laws,

including the Civil R ights Act of 1964, t he Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the

Civil Right Act of 1968. These achievements were recognized on November 2,

1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that established a

national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The holiday was ﬁrst observed

on January 20, 1986.

—Kevin M. Brady