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Civil Rights Movement
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Civil Rights Movement
Jamie J. Wilson
Landmarks of the American Mosaic
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Copyright 2013 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion
of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Jamie Jaywann.
Civil rights movement / Jamie J. Wilson.
p. cm.— (Landmarks of the American mosaic)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4408-0426-7 (hardcopy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4408-0427-4
(ebook) 1. African Americans—Civil rights—History. 2. Civil rights
movements—United States—History. 3. United States—Race
relations. I. Title.
E185.61.W744 2012
323.1196’073—dc23
2012038013
ISBN: 978-1-4408-0426-7
EISBN: 978-1-4408-0427-4
17
16
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Contents
Series Foreword, vii
Introduction, ix
Chronology of the Movement, xv
ONE
“I’ve Been ’buked and I’ve Been Scorned”:
The Rise of Jim Crow and Its Implications for African
Americans, 1
TWO
“I Want to Be Ready to Put on My Long White Robe”:
The Political Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 19
THREE “We Shall Overcome”: The Movement in Alabama, 35
FOUR
“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’round”:
The Movement in Mississippi, 51
FIVE
“A Right Denied”: Court Decisions and the Civil
Rights Movement, 67
Staci M. Rubin
SIX
“We Shall Not Be Moved”: The Quest for Civil Rights
outside the Deep South, 85
SEVEN “All Power to the People”: Black Power Politics
during and after the Civil Rights Movement, 101
EIGHT
From Amos ’n’ Andy to I Spy: African Americans
in Television and Film in the 1960s, 119
Conclusion, 133
Biographies of Figures, 137
Primary Documents, 153
v
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vi
Contents
Glossary, 207
Annotated Bibliography, 211
Index, 225
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Series Foreword
THE LANDMARKS OF THE AMERICAN MOSAIC series comprises individual volumes
devoted to exploring an event or development central to this country’s
multicultural heritage. The topics illuminate the struggles and triumphs
of American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans,
from European contact through the turbulent last half of the 20th century.
The series covers landmark court cases, laws, government programs, civil
rights infringements, riots, battles, movements, and more. Written by historians especially for high school students, undergraduates, and general
readers, these content-rich references satisfy thorough research needs
and provide a deeper understanding of material that students might only
be exposed to in a short section of a textbook or a superficial explanation
online.
Each book on a particular topic is a one-stop reference source. The series format includes
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Narrative chapters that trace the evolution of the event or topic
chronologically
• Biographical profiles of key figures
• Selection of crucial primary documents
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
This landmark series promotes respect for cultural diversity and supports the social studies curriculum by helping students understand multicultural American history.
vii
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Introduction
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT is a reference work for students. As one reads,
they will note that the Civil Rights Movement includes more than Rosa
Parks’ refusal to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus. It is also more
than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. These two events
are iconic indeed, and most students know about them even without knowing Parks’ contexts or the texts of King’s speech. But if we want to understand the extent of the movement, it is necessary to include a discussion of
Parks’ determination and King’s charisma without deifying them and ignoring other important aspects of the struggle for black equality.
What lies ahead in this book is a bird’s eye and telescopic view of the
black freedom struggle. It is a bird’s eye view in that it provides a breadth
of discussion and survey of important campaigns and highlights significant
contributions by activists. It is telescopic in that it provides a narrative
depth that moves beyond the surface discussion and encyclopedic trivia.
It is impossible to detail every event that occurred in what historians have
often called the second Reconstruction, but this book attempts to provide
the reader with a narrative as comprehensive as possible and a point of
departure that includes some of the major campaigns waged by African
Americans for full citizenship, justice, and equality. In its totality the Civil
Rights Movement was the political and social reaction to years of white
supremacy in the United States. Interlocking and overlapping attempts to
physically, emotionally, spiritually, politically, and economically dominate
black people began when the first Africans were traded in the Chesapeake
region for goods and supplies from a Dutch Man-of-War in 1619. Though
it included white allies, it was a decentralized, mass political movement
comprised primarily of African Americans who sought to undermine and
overturn the humiliating and oppressive system of segregation, often called
Jim Crow, throughout the United States. Efforts were sometimes centralized in one location, but overall the movement included local, state, and
nationwide organizations and individuals who at times worked in tandem
and at other times in isolation.
ix
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x
Introduction
As the astute reader will notice, several chapters are titled after an African American gospel or freedom song. I include them for two reasons. The
first is to honor the African American musical tradition, which has been,
when all else has failed, a salve for those individuals who struggled to maintain their humanity in a society which sought to strip them of it. They are
also included to remind the reader that the Civil Rights Movement is both a
political movement and a religious movement, as it was based in the church
and led largely by clergymen. To invoke black sacred and secular music is to
invoke the religious and political heritage of a people who sought to create a
little bit of heaven on earth for themselves and their offspring.
Chapter one, “I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned,” examines the
rise of segregation policies and society throughout the South. The enthusiasm and seemingly unlimited opportunities that marked the Reconstruction era were reversed when Reconstruction ended in 1877. Slowly, law
by law, in place after place, African American political life entered into
what many have called the nadir, or lowest ebb. The chapter notes that
customs and laws demanding the separation of whites and blacks in all aspects of life have their roots in the closing decades of the 19th century, and
demonstrate that during this era, African Americans were economically,
politically, residentially, and educationally circumscribed. “I want to be
ready to put on my long white robe,” Chapter two, examines the ways African
Americans challenged segregation in the 1930s and the 1940s, the decades
preceding the zenith of the Civil Rights Movement. The chapter argues
that though they may not have been able to dismantle segregation policies
and recreate southern society, African Americans joined and created political organizations, challenged federal policies, reversed state laws, and
strategized for change. They worked within the political and social limitations of the time. Though they may have imagined a world wherein every
individual was protected by basic constitutional rights, the ruling elite did
not allow their hegemony to be toppled. In the end, the social and political
milieu was not ready and did not allow for fundamental change in the opportunities and life chances of black Americans.
“We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,”
Chapter three and Chapter four, respectively, discuss the major campaigns
in Alabama and Mississippi. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 may
not be the start of African Americans’ struggle for justice and equality, but
it is one of the most important political contestations of the 1950s. The
boycott is considered in chapter three, along with other major campaigns
in Alabama, including the Birmingham campaign, the march from Selma
to Montgomery, and black experimentation with third party politics, with
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Introduction
xi
the creation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The state of
Mississippi was considered by many to be a closed society and impervious to outside change and influence. Local and state officials were not as
open to change as their counterparts in Alabama. Their reluctance, however, did not discourage black activism. Chapter four looks at some of the
not-so-successful attempts at creating equality in the state. In so doing, it
discusses how local activists, students, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked for civil rights. The highlight of the Mississippi movement was the Freedom Summer of 1964, when white and black
college-age activists descended upon Mississippi to work in voter registration drives and create Freedom Schools. In both states, nonviolent direct
action, negotiations between black and white elites, and litigation forced
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to side with the black activists.
Chapter five, “ ‘A Right Denied’: Court Decisions’ Impacts on the Civil
Rights of African Americans” is written by Staci M. Rubin, a public interest
attorney and scholar. It uses a legal history approach to discuss the impact of litigation’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, how legal challenges
brought by African Americans to the courts led to the creation of important
civil rights legislation, as well as the implications of these decisions for
African Americans. Cases including, but not limited to, Shelley v. Kramer
(1948), Sweatt v. Painter (1950), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and
Boynton v. Virginia (1960) are discussed.
“We Shall Not be Moved,” chapter six, argues that the oppression of African Americans was not limited to the Deep South. Consequently, African
American political activity was not limited to this area. If one were driving
up and down the eastern seaboard states throughout the 1950s and the
1960s, they would have witnessed a hotbed of activism: sit-ins, boycotts,
threats of boycotts, prayer meetings, etc. In places like Greensboro, North
Carolina; Cambridge, Maryland; Louisville, Kentucky; and in northern locations like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn, New York, African
Americans and their white allies fomented change. In southern and border
states, they challenged de jure segregation, but in places likes Philadelphia
and Brooklyn, they challenged de facto segregation. A discussion of campaigns outside of the Deep South and lesser known individuals highlights
the decentralized nature of the movement as well as the scope of African
American political activity throughout the country.
Chapter seven, “Power to the People” examines what is often understood as more radical black activity in the mid-to-late 1960s and the early
1970s. During these years, civil rights work was replaced by more militant black power activism. Contrary to the lay persons’ and sometimes
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xii
Introduction
scholarly rendition that the black power movement was somehow the evil
twin of the civil rights movement, wherein violence-prone and angry black
youth wanted to destroy America, the chapter argues that black power advocacy paralleled civil rights work. While civil rights activism focused on
the removal of boundaries to constitutional rights, black power proponents
were more focused on remedying the problems that constrained the life
chances of African Americans, including employment, police brutality, and
continued black exploitation in the light of civil rights advances. Malcolm X,
Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and the ways in which blacks strove
to achieve self determination in urban areas are discussed.
The final narrative chapter, “From Amos ’n’ Andy to I Spy” discusses
African Americans in television and film. Television was an important ally
in the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights organizations used it to dramatize
and show the atrocities meted out to black protestors and black people
throughout the country. With television’s growing influence in the 1960s, it
was no longer possible for many people to ignore what was happening to
black people. Equally important, as African Americans struggled to change
their political positions in the United States of America, black actors depicted new images of black people on the small and large screens. Particular attention is given to the accomplished actor Sidney Poitier and the
comedian Bill Cosby, though other actors are also discussed. The images
African Americans portrayed on television were not always a reflection of
the lived realities of most black people. Some were criticized while others
were praised. However, the actors discussed showed African Americans
who were not subservient and offered whites and blacks news ways of
thinking about what it means to be black in America.
In addition to the eight narrative chapters, this reference includes biographical profiles of important people and the cultural developments during the Civil Rights Movement. Primary documents follow the biography
section. These documents provide the reader with an inside glimpse into
specific movement activity, the thinking of policy makers, and the work
of people in the movement. Each selection is preceded by an explanatory
head note that contextualizes the document and aids in its comprehension.
An annotated bibliography section is included, which cites and assesses
the most important print, electronic sources, and documentaries that discuss the Civil Rights Movement. A brief glossary in this reference guide
explains terms likely to be unfamiliar to high school students and general
readers.
Throughout this reference book, the terms African American(s), people
of color, black(s), and black American(s) are used interchangeably. For
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Introduction
xiii
some, this may be obvious. For those unfamiliar with racial nomenclature,
however, such terms may be unsettling. Recently, a student of European
American ancestry approached me after a class and asked me to explain to
her why some people of African descent do not want to be called African
American. In another instance, in a class populated by students of European American ancestry, students were shaken when I described myself
as black. When I asked why they were so perturbed, a student responded
that she was told never to use the word black because black people find
it offensive. In yet another class, when discussing people of African descent from the Caribbean, a student classified a Haitian and a Jamaican
as African American. It seems that the term African American is used by
segments of white America to describe any person of African descent. So
as not to confuse the reader, I use the terms African American(s), people
of color, black(s), and black American(s) to refer to people of African descent who reside in the United States whose ancestors were the enslaved
or subordinate class, and who belong to a specific racial history, culture,
or ethnicity throughout most of U.S. history. More to the point, I use them
interchangeably because black people use them interchangeably. Despite
the re-emergence of “Negro” as a term of classification in the 2010 federal
census, I have not, in my research, social interactions, and personal experience, come across someone who self-describes as such. Consequently,
Negro is excluded unless used in the context of a direct quote.
I end this introduction with a few words of thanks. Had it not been for
others, this book could not have been written. Thank you to my dear wife
and partner, Shula. Several of my students deserve my gratitude: Courtney L.
Anderson, Emily L. Mercer, Casey L. Castro, Brian A. Kibler, Katherine R.
Murphy, and Desiree Sharlee Marquant. Their input helped me clarify the
narrative. Kenneth Sterrett and Ashley M. Windsor provided valuable
research assistance. Many thanks to the editorial and marketing staff at
ABC-CLIO, especially Kim Kennedy-White. They were courteous, responsive, professional, and informative.
Finally, thank you to all those who struggled so that we may all inherit a
more just society. We are not where we should be. We are not who we will
be. However, as Civil Rights Movement activists have shown through their
determination and willingness to challenge the status quo, a better world
is possible.
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Chronology of the Movement
1954 May 17: Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. U.S. Supreme
Court unanimously agrees that racial segregation in public education is
unconstitutional.
June: Malcolm X becomes head minister at the Nation of Islam’s
Temple No. 7 in Harlem, New York.
July: Mississippi residents convene the first meeting of the White
Citizens’ Council.
1955 January 7: Marian Anderson, a contralto, is the first African American woman to perform at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
May 7: Reverend George Lee is murdered as a result of his civil
rights work in Belzoni, Mississippi.
January 18: President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Executive
Order 10590 prohibiting racial discrimination in federal employment.
April 18: Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian States opens in Bandung, Indonesia.
August 28: Emmett Till, a teenager from Chicago, Illinois, is beaten,
shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River outside of Money, Mississippi,
for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
November 25: The Interstate Commerce Commission prohibits segregation in interstate travel.
December 1: Rosa Parks refuses to relinquish her seat to a white
passenger on a segregated bus. Her refusal sparks the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, which lasts 381 days.
1956 April 4: Jazz singer and pianist Nat King Cole is assaulted after performing for an integrated audience in Birmingham, Alabama.
May 2: Tallahassee Bus Boycott begins. The boycott lasts until
March 1958, when the city ended the practice of segregation on public
buses throughout the city.
xv
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Chronology of the Movement
December 17: U.S. Supreme Court upholds a lower court decision in Gayle vs. Browder, ending segregation on buses in Montgomery,
Alabama.
1957 Malcolm X is named national spokesperson of the Nation of Islam
by the organization’s leader, Elijah Muhammad.
Stax Records is founded in Memphis, Tennessee. Though the company was founded by two white record producers, it would come to produce some of the most important soul, funk, jazz, and rhythm and blues
artists in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
January–February: Reverend Martin Luther King, Reverend Fred
Shuttlesworth, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and other clergy from southern
states form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
March 6: Ghana achieves independence.
May 17: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other
civil rights groups stage the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington,
D.C., seeking enforcement of the 1954 Brown Decision.
September 9: President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights
Act of 1957 into law. The Act marked the first of such laws since Reconstruction. The law established a Civil Rights Commission and made it illegal to prevent citizens from practicing their right to vote.
September 24: The National Guard descends upon Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of Little Rock Arkansas’ Central High
School.
1958 Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics is named the league’s Most Valuable Player.
January 18: William O’Ree integrates the National Hockey League.
June 29: Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, is bombed
by the Ku Klux Klan.
1959 March 11: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun premieres on
Broadway in New York City.
June 26: Rather than desegregate its schools, school officials in
Prince Edward County, Maryland, dismantle the public school system.
July 13–17: The Hate That Hate Produced, an exposé about the Nation of Islam, airs on WNTA-TV in New York City.
December: Berry Gordy founds Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan. Employing some of the best-known rhythm and blues and soul artists
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Chronology of the Movement
xvii
of the 1960s and the 1970s, the company helped produce the sound track
for the 1960s.
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird is published. The fictional work tells the story
of a white lawyer who defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.
Eleven African nations achieve independence, providing encouragement for activists involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
February 1: Students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College stage a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter,
which begins a wave of sit-ins around the country.
April: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded
at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
May 6: President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of
1960.
August–September: Max Roach records We Insist! Max Roach’s
Freedom Jazz Suite featuring Abbey Lincoln.
September 19: Fidel Castro visits Harlem and stays in the Hotel
Theresa.
November 14: Ruby Bridges integrates William Frantz Public School
in New Orleans, Louisiana.
1961 Journalist John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me is published. The
nonfiction work details the travels of a white man who passes as black in
the Deep South.
February 16: Black Nationalists take over the United Nations Building in New York City.
March 6: President John F. Kennedy signs Executive Order 10925.
The Order establishes the President’s Committee on Equal Employment
Opportunity. The law prohibits racial discrimination in employment by all
government contracting agencies.
May: An interracial group of activists affiliated with the Congress
of Racial Equality embarks on Freedom Rides to challenge continued segregation in interstate transit. In Alabama, their bus is attacked by a white
mob. In Mississippi, riders are jailed when they attempt to integrate a
whites-only rest area.
July–December: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s attempts to desegregate
Albany, Georgia, fail.
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Chronology of the Movement
September 25: Herbert Lee, farmer, father of nine, and member of
the Amite County, Mississippi, National Association for the Advancement
of Colored people is murdered by E. H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi
state legislature.
December 1961–January 1962: Students at Southern University in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the New Orleans branch of the Congress of
Racial Equality organize boycotts and protests throughout Baton Rouge to
desegregate stores.
1962 June: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference starts Operation Breadbasket—the economic wing of the organization—in an effort to
change discriminatory hiring practices and boycott stores that continued
to practice segregation.
June 24: James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll
at the University of Mississippi.
1963 January 1: The nation marks the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
April–May: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference carries
out Project Confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama, demanding an end to
segregation in downtown department stores and restaurants, the elimination of discriminatory hiring practices in businesses throughout the city,
and the creation of an oversight committee that would implement desegregation policies.
April 16: Martin Luther King Jr. writes Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
May: James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time is published in which he offers his commentary on the civil rights struggle.
June 12: Medgar Evers, field secretary for the NAACP branch in
Jackson, Mississippi, is murdered by Byron de la Beckwith.
June 23: Organizers, politicians, and activists stage the Great March
to Freedom in Detroit, Michigan. Martin Luther King Jr. gives the keynote
address at the event and calls it the “greatest demonstration for freedom
ever held in this United States.”
August 17: W.E.B. Du Bois dies at the age of 95.
August 28: The March on Washington is held with over 250,000 people in attendance. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous “I Have
a Dream Speech.”
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Chronology of the Movement
xix
September 15: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama, is bombed.
November 22: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.
December: Malcolm X is suspended from the Nation of Islam.
1964 January 23: The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is
ratified, eliminating the use of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting.
February 25: Muhammad Ali defeats Sonny Liston to become the
world heavyweight champion.
March: Malcolm X officially breaks from the Nation of Islam and
establishes the Muslim Mosque Incorporated.
March–June: Southern Christian Leadership Conference stages
mass demonstrations in St. Augustine, Florida.
April 12: Malcolm X delivers his address “The Ballot or the Bullet”
at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan.
April 13: Sidney Poitier is presented with an Academy Award for his
portrayal of Homer Smith in the 1963 film Lilies of the Field.
June 2: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of
1964 into law.
June–September: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizes and commences Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
July 18: Riots erupt in Brooklyn and Harlem, New York.
August 4: The bodies of slain civil rights workers James Chaney,
Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman are recovered.
August 21–26: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation attempts to unseat the all-white Democratic Party delegation in Atlantic City,
New Jersey, at the Democratic National Convention.
December 10: Martin Luther King Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in Oslo, Norway.
1965 John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is released.
Malcolm X’s Autobiography is published.
February 21: Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in
Harlem, New York.
March 7: Scores of protesters are beaten by police while trying to
cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on their way to the
state’s capital.
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Chronology of the Movement
March 11: James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, dies from head
injuries suffered at the hands of white segregationists during a civil rights
demonstration in Selma, Alabama.
March 16–25: Martin Luther King Jr. members of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee lead thousands of activists on a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson.
August 6: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act,
outlawing discriminatory voting practices.
August 11–15: Riots erupt in the Watts section of Los Angeles,
California.
September 28: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Executive Order
11246, prohibiting federal employment discrimination based on “race,
creed, color or national origin.”
1966 Kwanzaa, the African American cultural heritage celebration, is created by Ron Karenga.
June 6: James Meredith is shot and injured in Hernando, Mississippi, on his March Against Fear.
June: Members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Student
Nonviolence Coordinating Committee continue Meredith’s march to Jackson, Mississippi. During the march, Stokely Carmichael popularizes the
phrase “Black Power.”
September 22: Stokely Carmichael’s “What we Want” is published in
the New York Review of Books.
October: The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.
November: Edward William Brooke, III, is elected to the U.S. Senate
as a Republican from Massachusetts. He is the first African American since
the Reconstruction era to be elected to the U.S. Senate. He served until
1979.
1967 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a film which examines attitudes
about interracial marriage, is released, with Sidney Poitier in the lead role.
Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is published.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here: Community
or Chaos? is published.
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Chronology of the Movement
xxi
March 25: Martin Luther King Jr. pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock,
and other activists march in Chicago against the Vietnam War.
April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “A Time to Break Silence” speech before the group Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church, New York City.
April 28: Muhammad Ali refuses induction into the military, noting
that “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.”
June 12: U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decides in Loving vs.
Virginia that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage are unconstitutional.
July 12–17: Race riots erupt in Newark, New Jersey.
July 17: John Coltrane dies.
July 23–30: Race riots erupt in Detroit, Michigan.
August 30: Thurgood Marshall is confirmed by the U.S. Senate and
becomes the first African American Supreme Court Justice.
September 12: Stokely Carmichael publishes Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, with sociologist Charles Hamilton
November: Carl Stokes becomes the 51st mayor of Cleveland, Ohio,
and the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.
1968 James Brown’s Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud is released.
February 8: Three students die and 27 are wounded after police fire
into a crowd on the South Carolina State College campus in Orangeburg,
South Carolina.
April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
May: Black workers and activists form the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement in Detroit, Michigan.
June 5: Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated.
July 22: Black Panthers in New York march in protest against Huey
Newton’s murder trial.
October 16: 200 meter dash sprinters Tommie Smith and John
Carlos give the black power salute during the medals ceremony at the Mexico City Olympic Games.
1969 Maya Angelou publishes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
December 4: Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago Black Panther
Party, is killed by the Chicago Police Department.
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