INFO POST: In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day tomorrow (US), let's have ourselves a little 101 post in remembrance of his work.
Info posts may contain triggering elements, so please be mindful of the topic and read at your own discretion. Specific triggers and warnings are listed below, but if any additional warnings are needed please don't be shy about making the suggestion. Thanks!
SPECIFIC TRIGGER WARNINGS: Racism, racial violence, hate speech, police brutality, etc.
IMAGE WARNINGS: See trigger warnings.
NOTES: A black Civil Rights history post is scheduled for February
DISCLAIMER: It's not pretty.
These posts are a "safe space" to ask questions you might otherwise be too shy to. Please do not reply to people with "Plz Google" or "educate yourself". Everyone should enter these posts with a learn and teach mindset (in that order). WITH THAT SAID, HOWEVER, please remain mindful of your questions and phrasing, be open-minded, learn, and know when to be quiet. If you are flippant with your ignorance, I will not stop angered members from telling you about yourself.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King Jr.'s maternal grandfather. King Jr. was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.
King's public-speaking abilities - which would become renowned as his stature grew in the Civil Rights Movement - developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches.
Throughout his education, King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in shaping King's theological development.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC's president, King became the organization's dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization's fund raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.
King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that would bolster his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King's closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North.
In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Satyagraha, Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become co-pastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated anti-segregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of downtown Birmingham, angering Sheriff Bull Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents of water from 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 the city. His "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," which argued that individuals had the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time and added 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 some forms of segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
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, King delivered the keynote 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 Movement in 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 truths to 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 of their 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 prohibited segregation 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 Rights Movement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.
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 petitioned for and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3000 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 rally of 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 the act 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 the job 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 growing number 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) also angered 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 they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar movement.
By the mid-1960s King's role as the unchallenged leader of the Civil Rights Movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee argued that King's nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers. In addition, many organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put in the hard 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 captured the nation's attention and suggested that King's influence among blacks was waning. Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselves against 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 of blacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC's tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King's efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counter-demonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, 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 redistribution of 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 address the issue of economic justice.
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 Memphis by 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 100 United 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 99 years in prison. Although over the years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified.
After King's death, historians researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) often tapped King's phone line and reported on his private life to the president and other government officials. The FBI's reason for invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other "radicals."
After his death, King came to represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the ability of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring rhetoric calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as familiar to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of Independence.
King's historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Justice, a research institute in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta is the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, which includes his birthplace, the Ebenezer Church, and the King Center, where his tomb is located. Perhaps the most important memorial is the National Holiday in King's honor, designated by the Congress of the United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King's birthday of January 15.
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The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, from blacks predominately living in urban ghettos.
Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800-1866 Black Codes, which also restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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OP Note: Fuck it, Jim Crow is actually best explained and easiest understood with pictures. It's hard to understand to magnitude of what Dr. King and other civil rights leaders have done without first understanding what the racial climate in the United States was like at the time....
You know, I'll bet this kid is still alive. I wonder how he feels about being a historically archived racist.
This is a wedding photo, btw.
"Work Songs", the original "blame it on hip-hop".
Ahem, this is a huge reason why there are entire generations of black people that can't swim fyi, before we start going on diatribes about how we're too poor or made of lead and don't float something.
A lot of people seem to think that Jim Crow and Civil Rights were just about black people...
Personal Influences
"In an age when whites viewed black neighborhoods as hellholes of vice and social disorganization, Daddy King's church stood like an anchor in a stable and respectable community. And in a dominant culture that stereotyped blacks as childish, sycophantic clowns, King's father prided himself on being the equal of any white person."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Sr., quite often referred to simply as "Daddy King," served as the first role model for young Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of the principal influences in molding his personality. King's father was constantly concerned with social and political issues. He assisted in the organization of voter registration drives, participated in the NAACP, and sat on the board of Morehouse College. As pastor of the local church, he embedded strong religious ideals in his son and linked him to the church. The lectures from both King's parents on the subject of racial harmony stuck with Martin Luther and armed him against all forms of prejudice.
King soon left to begin his formal education at Morehouse College, where he became acquainted with the remarkable president of the school, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who influenced generations of black students. This propensity to shape the minds of black students was not lost on young King. In Mays's strength of purpose and religious commitment, young men like Martin found a role model. Later on, he publicly recognized Dr. Mays as an enormous influence on him in his formative years. He confirmed the religious convictions that the young man had already developed through his father's influences. King is said to have believed that without God, nonviolence lacked substance and potency.
It was with a strong Christian faith in hand that Martin Luther King embarked upon his formal education. He said that Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience," was his "first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolence and resistance." It was primarily Thoreau's concept of refusing to cooperate with an evil system which so intrigued Dr. King.
As Martin moved on to the seminary, he began to pass countless hours studying social philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. Next came Hegel and his contention that "truth is the whole." This fascinated King and convinced him that growth comes through struggle, an idea that would later prove very important in his life. While King deplored the substituting of materialism for religious values, he applauded Marx for exposing the injustices of capitalism, promoting class consciousness among the workers, and challenging the complacency of the Christian churches. It was in part due to his reading of Marx that King became convinced that capitalism had failed the needs of the masses and that it had outlived its usefulness. When it comes to identifying his greatest influence, however, I think King might place Walter Rauschenbush ahead of all of these philosophers, for his bookChristianity and the Social Crisis. It was this work which made King realize that a person's day-to-day socioeconomic environment was important to Christianity.
In King's later career, he came to be associated to certain thinkers by the content of his speeches and writings. For example, he used the concept "agape" (Christian brotherly love) in ways that showed the unmistakable influence of Paul Ramsey. Ramsey has coined the phrase "enemy-neighbor" (the neighbor includes the enemy) and referred to regarding him with love as the ultimate in agape, for in such cases nothing can be expected in return. King's own words closely echo this statement when he professes that, "the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution."
As well, in later years, King talks of nonviolence as a way of catching or drawing one's opponent off balance and, as a result, potentially changing his or her mind. When nonviolent resistance is practiced effectively, it can disarm one's opponent by weakening his moral defences and disturbing his conscience. In this description of nonviolent resistance, King draws on Richard Gregg's doctrine of "moral jiu-jitsu," as Gene Sharp and others will also do later.
In his final year at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania (where he obtained a bachelor's degree in divinity), King studied Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian who impressed him profoundly. Niebuhr played a vital part in stimulating the renaissance of theology in the United States. King was intrigued by the key ideas in Niebuhr's theological book, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941). He later recalled having been excited by Niebuhr's concept of man representing both a child of nature and a spirit who stood outside it. He felt that Niebuhr led him to a fuller understanding of group behavior, human motives, and the connection between power and morality. In King's own words: "Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glowing reality of collective evil."
In what is perhaps Niebuhr's most relevant statement on the subject of non-violent direct action, he professes, "Even in a just and free society, there must be forms of pressure short of violence, but more potent than the vote, to establish justice in collective relations." This is obviously a thought that King both liked and followed. It is interesting to note that Niebuhr was critical of using anything except force to combat imperialism, territorial aggression, and class exploitation. Even Gandhian nonviolence was viewed by Niebuhr as a form of coercion. At this phase of his intellectual development, King had accepted Niebuhr's argument that coercion is absolutely required to restrain evil and combat oppression, but he remained unpersuaded of the relevance of Gandhian nonviolence. Even though King recognized how greatly Black Americans were outnumbered and that it was, in effect, hopeless to attempt violence as a solution, he was skeptical of pacifism at this point. His warming toward nonviolence began on a Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, where in 1948, he attended a lecture by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, who discussed the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
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Howard Thurman
“Don’t ask what the world needs;
ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is
more people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman
Thurman was born and raised in Daytona, Fl. He was raised by his grandmother, who had been enslaved. In 1925, he became and ordained Baptist minister. His first pastorate, at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio, was followed by a joint appointment as professor of religion and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman colleges in Atlanta, Georgia. Thurman spent the spring semester of 1929 studying at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, a Quaker mystic and leader of the pacifist, interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation. Here he began his journey towards a philosophy that stressed an activism rooted in faith, guided by spirit, and maintained in peace.
Three years later, he began to articulate these views. In an essay entitled "Peace Tactics and a Racial Minority," Thurman depicted white America as characterized by the "will to dominate and control the Negro minority," a situation which engendered among blacks a spiritually crippling hatred of their would-be dominators. He suggested that a "technique of relaxation," might break this cycle.
In 1936, Thurman led a "Negro Delegation of Friendship" to South Asia. There he met the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. His conversations with Gandhi broadened his theological and international vision. In his autobiography, Thurman said that in his meeting with Ghandi, the Mahatma expressed his wish that the message of non-violence be sent to the world by African-Americans.
In his seminal 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman provided an interpretation of the New Testament gospels that laid the foundation for a nonviolent civil rights movement. Thurman presented the basic goal of Jesus' life as helping the disinherited of the world change from within so they would be empowered to survive in the face of oppression. A love rooted in the "deep river of faith," wrote Thurman, would help oppressed peoples overcome persecution. "It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea."
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Gandhi
"As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Indian nationalist leader. Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on October 2, 1869 in Porbandar, Kathiawar, West India. He studied law in London, but in 1893 went to South Africa, where he spent 20 years opposing discriminatory legislation against Indians. As a pioneer of Satyagraha, or resistance through mass non-violent civil disobedience, he became one of the major political and spiritual leaders of his time. Satyagraha remains one of the most potent philosophies in freedom struggles throughout the world today.
In 1914, Gandhi returned to India, where he supported the Home Rule movement, and became leader of the Indian National Congress, advocating a policy of non-violent non-co-operation to achieve independence. His goal was to help poor farmers and laborers protest oppressive taxation and discrimination. He struggled to alleviate poverty, liberate women and put an end to caste discrimination, with the ultimate objective being self-rule for India.
Following his civil disobedience campaign (1919-22), he was jailed for conspiracy (1922-4). In 1930, he led a landmark 320 km/200 mi march to the sea to collect salt in symbolic defiance of the government monopoly. On his release from prison (1931), he attended the London Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform. In 1946, he negotiated with the Cabinet Mission which recommended the new constitutional structure. After independence (1947), he tried to stop the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Bengal, a policy which led to his assassination in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic.
Even after his death, Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and his belief in simple living--making his own clothes, eating a vegetarian diet, and using fasts for self-purification as well as a means of protest--have been a beacon of hope for oppressed and marginalized people throughout the world.
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Bayard Rustin
A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Five years in the making and the winner of numerous awards, BROTHER OUTSIDER presents a feature-length documentary portrait, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.
Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and 60s.
Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbian and gay Americans, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in America. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans. In a nation still torn by racial hatred and violence, bigotry against homosexuals, and extraordinary divides between rich and poor, his eloquent voice is needed today.
In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest.
Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin the man was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as an art collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New York City trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement.
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The Montgomery Bus Movement
This is a segregated bus.
The Supreme Court had struck down the "separate but equal" precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson with their decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, making segregation illegal. But were states actually following orders?
Many people know the story of Rosa Parks. On Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, after a long day at work as a seamstress, Mrs. Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery to go home. She sat in the fifth row with three other blacks, the farthest row forward blacks could legally occupy. As the bus filled up along the route, however, more whites entered the bus. Eventually, one white was left standing. According to Alabama law during the '50s, blacks and whites couldn't occupy the same row. When told by the bus driver to give up the row to the white man, three of the blacks left for the back of the bus, but Mrs. Parks simply refused. She was quickly arrested and sent to jail.
Rosa Parks remains one of the most iconic figures of the civil rights movement, and the steps she took changed American life. But her story isn't as improvised as it sounds. In fact, Mrs. Parks' arrest, which led to the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, was planned from the beginning. Parks was an NAACP member with interest in the segregation situation, and she had completed a workshop on civil disobedience before she was arrested. After hearing of the Supreme Court's decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Jo Ann Robinson, a black woman and professor at the all-black Alabama State College, had decided the time was right to test the law.
After the arrest, Robinson and other prominent ministers and civil rights activists, including E.D. Nixon and the young minister Martin Luther King Jr., gathered to discuss a boycott. Handouts were made urging blacks to stay off of buses the following Monday.
The first day of the boycott was a huge success, with empty buses rolling through the streets of Montgomery. The group met again that night and quickly formed an organization, calling themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and electing King as president. After some discussion, the MIA agreed to continue the boycott, which would last for a little more than a year.
This is not a march, these women are walking to work.
More boycotters making the long treks to work on foot.
GIT IT GURL!
A waiting area for carpoolers.
Dr. King assisting the carpool to get boycotters to work as they all say "FUCK YOU" to that empty bus parked across the street.
Whites tried every way possible to break up the boycott. First they tried nonviolent means. When black cab services began undercharging other blacks with a 10-cent fare, the city announced that any cab charging less than 45 cents would be stopped. Companies began canceling insurance policies on cars used for carpooling. Mrs. Parks was arrested for not paying her fine, and King was arrested several times, usually for minor traffic offenses. When these tactics didn't work, whites then turned to violence. Bombs went off in black homes, King's house was shot at and the Ku Klux Klan marched around to protest.
The city was beginning to suffer financially from the boycott, and news of the case made its way to the Supreme Court, which had recently declared segregation illegal in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court ordered full integration in November 1956, and by Dec. 21 of that year, blacks ended the boycott and started riding the buses again.
The boycott marked the first important involvement of the public in the civil rights movement and the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. After success in Montgomery and gaining national attention, King soon became a major leader of the movement, moving to Atlanta and starting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
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Sit Ins and Freedom Rides
By the beginning of the '60s, schools and universities across the country were integrated, and the success in Montgomery had sprouted civil rights organizations in cities everywhere. Not every business or school complied with the changes, though, and black students started to demonstrate the fact that inequalities still existed, staging what were called sit-ins.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr., sat down at the counter of a Woolworth's and asked to be served. They knew they wouldn't be, because the lunch counter at which they sat was for whites only. Still, they continued to sit and refused to get up until they were forced out when the store closed for the night. The next day, a much larger group of students showed up either to participate or witness the sit-in, and after newspapers and civil rights groups heard about the activity, sit-ins were held in several cities across the country.
These sit-ins were very simple in nature. A group of students would sit down at a lunch counter and ask to be served. If they were given food or coffee, they'd move on down to the next counter. Once they were refused service, they would remain seated until served. The key during the sit-ins was nonviolence -- if participants were hit, they couldn't hit back. If they were taunted, they remained silent. Students also dressed in their Sunday best to set themselves apart from the heckling white students. They were met with the usual share of beatings and imprisonments, and by August 1961, more than 3,000 students across the country were arrested.
Black protesters being gassed with insecticide during a sit-in.
The stools were removed to prevent black people from sitting at them.
They had to close to fountain because dirty colored folks were trying to use it.
Too big to post, but a photo of a group of young housekeepers reading a front page spread about 218 student arrests.
Another group that set out to test the judgment of the Supreme Court was the Freedom Riders. On May 4, 1961, a racially mixed group of people left Washington, D.C., on a bus and headed for New Orleans, La. Along the way, groups mixed up their seating -- whites moved to the blacks-only section and vice versa. They knew what they were doing was perfectly legal according to recent Supreme Court cases, but they also knew they'd meet heavy opposition from the public. They simply wanted to make sure the government would respond in a moment of crisis. With rising tensions and the possibility of violence, the Freedom Riders were even prepared for death.
Almost everywhere the riders stopped along their trip, they were met with angry protesters and violence. Black and white Freedom Riders were beaten, buses were stoned and tires were slashed. More than 300 riders were arrested during the trip, which never finished its trip to New Orleans. The Freedom Riders raised civil rights awareness, however, and especially caught the attention of the young Kennedy Administration.
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Birmingham and Martin Luther King
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. chose Birmingham, Ala., as a new place of focus for his campaign. The city was notorious for its violence against blacks -- 18 unsolved bombings had occurred over six years, and several Freedom Riders were hurt thanks to then-governor Bull Connor's failure to station guards at the bus stations. King felt it was time for a change in Birmingham.
After a series of sit-ins and arrests, however, King didn't know what else to do; the arrests weren't getting anything done except to fill up the already overcrowded jails. So King decided to get himself arrested on Good Friday, April 12. When placed in solitary confinement, he read an advertisement taken out by white ministers that derided his efforts in Birmingham, calling his actions "unwise and untimely." Using the margins of the newspaper and toilet paper and a pencil, King wrote the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," one of the most famous documents from the civil rights era. In it, he wrote:
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. […] For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piecing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'"
After officials released King on April 20, he and the SCLC worked out a new tactic: the use of children in protests. The reason for this, according to James Bevel, was that "most adults have bills to pay -- house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills -- but the young people … are not hooked with all those responsibilities." On May 2, black children between the ages of 6 and 18 left in waves from Kelly Ingram Park and marched downtown singing "We Shall Overcome." The children were arrested and carted over to the jails in vans and buses. Within three hours, the jails were overcrowded with 959 young blacks. The next day, more children showed up to march downtown, and Bull Connor ordered firefighters to turn high-pressure hoses on the young, nonviolent protesters. Blasts from the hoses hit the children so hard they were sent tumbling down the street. Television cameras were capturing it all, of course, and the nation watched in shock.
The attention led President Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill, and to demonstrate the bill's support, the March on Washington was set up. 250,000 people of all races gathered in Washington, D.C. -- it was here Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Although Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, making sure blacks were included in all public facilities. A year later Johnson also signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting illegal legislation such as literacy tests and poll taxes.
Despite gains made from the new legislation, violence and frustration were just around the corner.
These children are being taken to jail, fyi.
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
The remains of a church following a bombing by people who were, of course, not classified as terrorists.
Yes, that is a little boy.
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Watts Riots, Black Power and MLK's Legacy
Martin Luther King Jr.'s main strategy during the civil rights campaign was one of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest, and it worked for most of the movement. Gathering inspiration from the writings of Henry Thoreau and the nonviolent of Mahatma Gandhi, King spent much of the '50s and early ‘60s successfully campaigning for peaceful change
But in 1965, when actions taken by civil rights leaders and organizers were still heavily protested by racists, often in the form of beatings or worse, some people had just had enough. Malcolm X, assassinated early in the year in February, was leading the Black Power movement, which grew out of the civil rights movement and encouraged blacks to assert their rights more forcefully, sometimes with violence. Marquette Frye and the citizens of Watts, a racially segregated neighborhood near Los Angeles, Calif., were the first to display this kind of frustration to the nation on a larger scale during the violent Watts Riots.
Malcolm X
On Aug. 11, 1965, 21-year-old Frye and his older brother, 22-year-old Ronald, were driving near the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts around 7 p.m. when they were pulled over by California highway patrolman Lee W. Minikus. A black motorist had allegedly informed Minikus that Frye was driving recklessly, so he gave chase, pulled the car over and administered a sobriety test. Frye failed and was placed under arrest for drunk driving.
Because it was a hot night during an unusually hot summer, many people were sitting outside their homes and witnessed the event. A small crowd of about 30 people eventually grew to more than 250. On top of this, Frye's mother, Rena Price, had to come to the scene to claim the car once Frye was under arrest. Once Mrs. Price began scolding her son for drinking, a previously compliant Frye became belligerent, moving toward the crowd and shouting at the officers. When officers pursued him, Frye attempted to run off. The officers gave chase and caught him again, and the crowd became more and more aggressive.
News of police brutality spread throughout Watts, and the event, combined with the uncomfortably hot weather, cramped conditions and rampant poverty, sparked several riots in the neighborhood over five days. Thirty-four people were killed, and there were 1,032 reported injuries. Of those injuries, 118 were from gunshots. Rioters also caused an estimated $40 million in damage to buildings, mostly from fires and looting. During the five-day stretch, 3,438 people were arrested. Most of the riots were televised, and a nation watched as Watts was reduced to ruins.
The event quickly changed the tone of the movement. When Martin Luther King Jr. visited Watts, people heckled him instead of welcoming him, rejecting his message of nonviolence. When King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, riots sprang up in several cities around the U.S.
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King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, owned by businessman Walter Bailey (and named after his wife). King's close friend and colleague Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, who was King's roommate in the motel room the day of the assassination, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often that it was known as the "King-Abernathy Suite."
According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's last words were to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was going to attend: "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."
At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, while he was standing on the motel's second floor balcony, King was struck by a single .30 bullet fired from a Remington 760 Gamemaster. The bullet entered through his right cheek, breaking his jaw, neck and several vertebrae as it travelled down, severing the jugular vein and major arteries in the process before lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor unconscious.
The unconscious King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where doctors opened his chest and performed manual heart massage. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. According to Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though he was only 39 years old, he had the heart of a 60 year old man.
Shortly after the assassination, witnesses saw James Earl Ray fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel where he was renting a room. A package was dumped close to the site that included a rifle and binoculars with Ray's fingerprints on them. The rifle had been purchased by Ray under an alias six days before. A worldwide manhunt was triggered that culminated in the arrest of Ray at London Heathrow Airport two months later.
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James Earl Ray
In the early evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a single shot which struck his face and neck. He was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a peaceful march in support of striking sanitation workers. About an hour later, he was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM at St. Joseph Hospital.
Shortly after the murder, a bundle was dropped near the door of Canipe's Amusement Co. near the assassination scene, and a white Mustang sped away. Memphis police officers found the bundle to contain a .30-06 rifle, ammunition, a pair of binoculars, and other items. The rifle had been purchased in Birmingham by a Harvey Lowmeyer, later determined to be one of several aliases used by Ray.
Pursuit of the white Mustang was thwarted by CB radio transmissions which described a high-speed chase between the occupants of a blue Pontiac and the white Mustang, and even describing gunplay between the vehicles. These broadcasts appear to have been a hoax or diversion. The broadcaster of these CB radio transmissions has never been identified.
Authorities at first had little to go on. "Harvey Lowmeyer," the purchaser of the rifle found in the bundle, was described as a "white male, 36 years old, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 150 to 160 pounds, black or dark brown hair," a description fitting many people. The FBI's investigation soon focused on an Eric S. Galt, a name used on a registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. On April 19, fingerprints on the rifle and other items were matched to James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary. More than a month passed without Ray being located. Finally, on June 1 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found a possible photographic match between Ray and a George Raymon Sneyd's Canadian passport. A week later, on June 8, Ray was arrested in Heathrow Airport in London, apparently on his way to Rhodesia.
Ray was extradited to the US to face trial. He replaced his first attorney, Arthur Hanes, with Percy Foreman. Foreman, who had represented more than 400 murder-case defendants, convinced Ray to plead guilty as the only way of avoiding the death penalty. On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A "mini-trial" on that day settled few of the questions which had arisen during the preceding year. And Ray himself hinted at a conspiracy, interrupting the proceedings to saying that while he "agreed to all these stipulations," he did not "exactly accept the theories of Mr. Clark" (the Attorney General)..."I mean on the conspiracy thing." Three days later, Ray recanted his plea and requested a new trial in two letters to Judge Battle. The judge did not act upon these letters, and was found dead at his desk of a heart attack three weeks later, literally with Ray's appeal under his body.
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And in case you're interested, some conspiracy stuff...
Home/MLK Assassination
The Martin Luther King Assassination
Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Mall.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the opening acts which plunged 1968 into a year of turmoil. Coming on the heels of the Tet Offensive which showed the war in Vietnam to be in disarray, and President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, King's assassination was itself soon followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy, violence at the Democratic National Convention, and a general unraveling of the country into a period of violence and despair.
Like the other assassinations of the 1960s, the King murder had its "lone nut," in this case James Earl Ray, an escaped convict who purchased the rifle found near the assassination scene and was caught in flight two months later. But, also like the other assassinations, evidence of conspiracy was easily found, despite being ignored by government investigators.
The Assassination
Aides on Lorraine Motel balcony with the stricken Dr. King.
In the early evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a single shot which struck his face and neck. He was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a peaceful march in support of striking sanitation workers. About an hour later, he was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM at St. Joseph Hospital.
Shortly after the murder, a bundle was dropped near the door of Canipe's Amusement Co. near the assassination scene, and a white Mustang sped away. Memphis police officers found the bundle to contain a .30-06 rifle, ammunition, a pair of binoculars, and other items. The rifle had been purchased in Birmingham by a Harvey Lowmeyer, later determined to be one of several aliases used by Ray.
Pursuit of the white Mustang was thwarted by CB radio transmissions which described a high-speed chase between the occupants of a blue Pontiac and the white Mustang, and even describing gunplay between the vehicles. These broadcasts appear to have been a hoax or diversion. The broadcaster of these CB radio transmissions has never been identified.
Ray's Apprehension, Confession, and Conviction
Authorities at first had little to go on. "Harvey Lowmeyer," the purchaser of the rifle found in the bundle, was described as a "white male, 36 years old, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 150 to 160 pounds, black or dark brown hair," a description fitting many people. The FBI's investigation soon focused on an Eric S. Galt, a name used on a registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. On April 19, fingerprints on the rifle and other items were matched to James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary. More than a month passed without Ray being located. Finally, on June 1 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found a possible photographic match between Ray and a George Raymon Sneyd's Canadian passport. A week later, on June 8, Ray was arrested in Heathrow Airport in London, apparently on his way to Rhodesia.
Ray was extradited to the US to face trial. He replaced his first attorney, Arthur Hanes, with Percy Foreman. Foreman, who had represented more than 400 murder-case defendants, convinced Ray to plead guilty as the only way of avoiding the death penalty. On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A "mini-trial" on that day settled few of the questions which had arisen during the preceding year. And Ray himself hinted at a conspiracy, interrupting the proceedings to saying that while he "agreed to all these stipulations," he did not "exactly accept the theories of Mr. Clark" (the Attorney General)..."I mean on the conspiracy thing." Three days later, Ray recanted his plea and requested a new trial in two letters to Judge Battle. The judge did not act upon these letters, and was found dead at his desk of a heart attack three weeks later, literally with Ray's appeal under his body.
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Additional Links
Dr. King's Atlanta Speech
The King Center
Martin Luther King Jr. Wiki Entry
Montgomery Bus Boycott: It Wasn't the First
Nobel Prize Biography
Understanding Riots
Mod Notes
*There will be a string of more in-depth Civil Rights posts in February for Black History Month.
**Image Credits: Google
Official Threads
Additional Links
International Links
Thanks for reading! Please discuss!
Info posts may contain triggering elements, so please be mindful of the topic and read at your own discretion. Specific triggers and warnings are listed below, but if any additional warnings are needed please don't be shy about making the suggestion. Thanks!
SPECIFIC TRIGGER WARNINGS: Racism, racial violence, hate speech, police brutality, etc.
IMAGE WARNINGS: See trigger warnings.
NOTES: A black Civil Rights history post is scheduled for February
DISCLAIMER: It's not pretty.
These posts are a "safe space" to ask questions you might otherwise be too shy to. Please do not reply to people with "Plz Google" or "educate yourself". Everyone should enter these posts with a learn and teach mindset (in that order). WITH THAT SAID, HOWEVER, please remain mindful of your questions and phrasing, be open-minded, learn, and know when to be quiet. If you are flippant with your ignorance, I will not stop angered members from telling you about yourself.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King Jr.'s maternal grandfather. King Jr. was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.
King's public-speaking abilities - which would become renowned as his stature grew in the Civil Rights Movement - developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches.
Throughout his education, King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in shaping King's theological development.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC's president, King became the organization's dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization's fund raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.
King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that would bolster his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King's closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North.
In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Satyagraha, Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become co-pastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated anti-segregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of downtown Birmingham, angering Sheriff Bull Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents of water from 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 the city. His "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," which argued that individuals had the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time and added 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 some forms of segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
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, King delivered the keynote 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 Movement in 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 truths to 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 of their 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 prohibited segregation 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 Rights Movement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.
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 petitioned for and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3000 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 rally of 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 the act 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 the job 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 growing number 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) also angered 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 they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar movement.
By the mid-1960s King's role as the unchallenged leader of the Civil Rights Movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee argued that King's nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers. In addition, many organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put in the hard 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 captured the nation's attention and suggested that King's influence among blacks was waning. Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselves against 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 of blacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC's tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King's efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counter-demonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, 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 redistribution of 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 address the issue of economic justice.
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 Memphis by 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 100 United 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 99 years in prison. Although over the years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified.
After King's death, historians researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) often tapped King's phone line and reported on his private life to the president and other government officials. The FBI's reason for invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other "radicals."
After his death, King came to represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the ability of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring rhetoric calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as familiar to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of Independence.
King's historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Justice, a research institute in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta is the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, which includes his birthplace, the Ebenezer Church, and the King Center, where his tomb is located. Perhaps the most important memorial is the National Holiday in King's honor, designated by the Congress of the United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King's birthday of January 15.
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The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, from blacks predominately living in urban ghettos.
Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800-1866 Black Codes, which also restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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OP Note: Fuck it, Jim Crow is actually best explained and easiest understood with pictures. It's hard to understand to magnitude of what Dr. King and other civil rights leaders have done without first understanding what the racial climate in the United States was like at the time....
You know, I'll bet this kid is still alive. I wonder how he feels about being a historically archived racist.
This is a wedding photo, btw.
"Work Songs", the original "blame it on hip-hop".
Ahem, this is a huge reason why there are entire generations of black people that can't swim fyi, before we start going on diatribes about how we're too poor or made of lead and don't float something.
A lot of people seem to think that Jim Crow and Civil Rights were just about black people...
Personal Influences
"In an age when whites viewed black neighborhoods as hellholes of vice and social disorganization, Daddy King's church stood like an anchor in a stable and respectable community. And in a dominant culture that stereotyped blacks as childish, sycophantic clowns, King's father prided himself on being the equal of any white person."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Sr., quite often referred to simply as "Daddy King," served as the first role model for young Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of the principal influences in molding his personality. King's father was constantly concerned with social and political issues. He assisted in the organization of voter registration drives, participated in the NAACP, and sat on the board of Morehouse College. As pastor of the local church, he embedded strong religious ideals in his son and linked him to the church. The lectures from both King's parents on the subject of racial harmony stuck with Martin Luther and armed him against all forms of prejudice.
King soon left to begin his formal education at Morehouse College, where he became acquainted with the remarkable president of the school, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who influenced generations of black students. This propensity to shape the minds of black students was not lost on young King. In Mays's strength of purpose and religious commitment, young men like Martin found a role model. Later on, he publicly recognized Dr. Mays as an enormous influence on him in his formative years. He confirmed the religious convictions that the young man had already developed through his father's influences. King is said to have believed that without God, nonviolence lacked substance and potency.
It was with a strong Christian faith in hand that Martin Luther King embarked upon his formal education. He said that Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience," was his "first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolence and resistance." It was primarily Thoreau's concept of refusing to cooperate with an evil system which so intrigued Dr. King.
As Martin moved on to the seminary, he began to pass countless hours studying social philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. Next came Hegel and his contention that "truth is the whole." This fascinated King and convinced him that growth comes through struggle, an idea that would later prove very important in his life. While King deplored the substituting of materialism for religious values, he applauded Marx for exposing the injustices of capitalism, promoting class consciousness among the workers, and challenging the complacency of the Christian churches. It was in part due to his reading of Marx that King became convinced that capitalism had failed the needs of the masses and that it had outlived its usefulness. When it comes to identifying his greatest influence, however, I think King might place Walter Rauschenbush ahead of all of these philosophers, for his bookChristianity and the Social Crisis. It was this work which made King realize that a person's day-to-day socioeconomic environment was important to Christianity.
In King's later career, he came to be associated to certain thinkers by the content of his speeches and writings. For example, he used the concept "agape" (Christian brotherly love) in ways that showed the unmistakable influence of Paul Ramsey. Ramsey has coined the phrase "enemy-neighbor" (the neighbor includes the enemy) and referred to regarding him with love as the ultimate in agape, for in such cases nothing can be expected in return. King's own words closely echo this statement when he professes that, "the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution."
As well, in later years, King talks of nonviolence as a way of catching or drawing one's opponent off balance and, as a result, potentially changing his or her mind. When nonviolent resistance is practiced effectively, it can disarm one's opponent by weakening his moral defences and disturbing his conscience. In this description of nonviolent resistance, King draws on Richard Gregg's doctrine of "moral jiu-jitsu," as Gene Sharp and others will also do later.
In his final year at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania (where he obtained a bachelor's degree in divinity), King studied Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian who impressed him profoundly. Niebuhr played a vital part in stimulating the renaissance of theology in the United States. King was intrigued by the key ideas in Niebuhr's theological book, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941). He later recalled having been excited by Niebuhr's concept of man representing both a child of nature and a spirit who stood outside it. He felt that Niebuhr led him to a fuller understanding of group behavior, human motives, and the connection between power and morality. In King's own words: "Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glowing reality of collective evil."
In what is perhaps Niebuhr's most relevant statement on the subject of non-violent direct action, he professes, "Even in a just and free society, there must be forms of pressure short of violence, but more potent than the vote, to establish justice in collective relations." This is obviously a thought that King both liked and followed. It is interesting to note that Niebuhr was critical of using anything except force to combat imperialism, territorial aggression, and class exploitation. Even Gandhian nonviolence was viewed by Niebuhr as a form of coercion. At this phase of his intellectual development, King had accepted Niebuhr's argument that coercion is absolutely required to restrain evil and combat oppression, but he remained unpersuaded of the relevance of Gandhian nonviolence. Even though King recognized how greatly Black Americans were outnumbered and that it was, in effect, hopeless to attempt violence as a solution, he was skeptical of pacifism at this point. His warming toward nonviolence began on a Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, where in 1948, he attended a lecture by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, who discussed the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
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Howard Thurman
“Don’t ask what the world needs;
ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is
more people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman
Thurman was born and raised in Daytona, Fl. He was raised by his grandmother, who had been enslaved. In 1925, he became and ordained Baptist minister. His first pastorate, at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio, was followed by a joint appointment as professor of religion and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman colleges in Atlanta, Georgia. Thurman spent the spring semester of 1929 studying at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, a Quaker mystic and leader of the pacifist, interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation. Here he began his journey towards a philosophy that stressed an activism rooted in faith, guided by spirit, and maintained in peace.
Three years later, he began to articulate these views. In an essay entitled "Peace Tactics and a Racial Minority," Thurman depicted white America as characterized by the "will to dominate and control the Negro minority," a situation which engendered among blacks a spiritually crippling hatred of their would-be dominators. He suggested that a "technique of relaxation," might break this cycle.
In 1936, Thurman led a "Negro Delegation of Friendship" to South Asia. There he met the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. His conversations with Gandhi broadened his theological and international vision. In his autobiography, Thurman said that in his meeting with Ghandi, the Mahatma expressed his wish that the message of non-violence be sent to the world by African-Americans.
In his seminal 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman provided an interpretation of the New Testament gospels that laid the foundation for a nonviolent civil rights movement. Thurman presented the basic goal of Jesus' life as helping the disinherited of the world change from within so they would be empowered to survive in the face of oppression. A love rooted in the "deep river of faith," wrote Thurman, would help oppressed peoples overcome persecution. "It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea."
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Gandhi
"As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Indian nationalist leader. Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on October 2, 1869 in Porbandar, Kathiawar, West India. He studied law in London, but in 1893 went to South Africa, where he spent 20 years opposing discriminatory legislation against Indians. As a pioneer of Satyagraha, or resistance through mass non-violent civil disobedience, he became one of the major political and spiritual leaders of his time. Satyagraha remains one of the most potent philosophies in freedom struggles throughout the world today.
In 1914, Gandhi returned to India, where he supported the Home Rule movement, and became leader of the Indian National Congress, advocating a policy of non-violent non-co-operation to achieve independence. His goal was to help poor farmers and laborers protest oppressive taxation and discrimination. He struggled to alleviate poverty, liberate women and put an end to caste discrimination, with the ultimate objective being self-rule for India.
Following his civil disobedience campaign (1919-22), he was jailed for conspiracy (1922-4). In 1930, he led a landmark 320 km/200 mi march to the sea to collect salt in symbolic defiance of the government monopoly. On his release from prison (1931), he attended the London Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform. In 1946, he negotiated with the Cabinet Mission which recommended the new constitutional structure. After independence (1947), he tried to stop the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Bengal, a policy which led to his assassination in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic.
Even after his death, Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and his belief in simple living--making his own clothes, eating a vegetarian diet, and using fasts for self-purification as well as a means of protest--have been a beacon of hope for oppressed and marginalized people throughout the world.
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Bayard Rustin
A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Five years in the making and the winner of numerous awards, BROTHER OUTSIDER presents a feature-length documentary portrait, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.
Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and 60s.
Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbian and gay Americans, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in America. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans. In a nation still torn by racial hatred and violence, bigotry against homosexuals, and extraordinary divides between rich and poor, his eloquent voice is needed today.
In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest.
Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin the man was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as an art collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New York City trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement.
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The Montgomery Bus Movement
This is a segregated bus.
The Supreme Court had struck down the "separate but equal" precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson with their decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, making segregation illegal. But were states actually following orders?
Many people know the story of Rosa Parks. On Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, after a long day at work as a seamstress, Mrs. Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery to go home. She sat in the fifth row with three other blacks, the farthest row forward blacks could legally occupy. As the bus filled up along the route, however, more whites entered the bus. Eventually, one white was left standing. According to Alabama law during the '50s, blacks and whites couldn't occupy the same row. When told by the bus driver to give up the row to the white man, three of the blacks left for the back of the bus, but Mrs. Parks simply refused. She was quickly arrested and sent to jail.
Rosa Parks remains one of the most iconic figures of the civil rights movement, and the steps she took changed American life. But her story isn't as improvised as it sounds. In fact, Mrs. Parks' arrest, which led to the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, was planned from the beginning. Parks was an NAACP member with interest in the segregation situation, and she had completed a workshop on civil disobedience before she was arrested. After hearing of the Supreme Court's decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Jo Ann Robinson, a black woman and professor at the all-black Alabama State College, had decided the time was right to test the law.
After the arrest, Robinson and other prominent ministers and civil rights activists, including E.D. Nixon and the young minister Martin Luther King Jr., gathered to discuss a boycott. Handouts were made urging blacks to stay off of buses the following Monday.
The first day of the boycott was a huge success, with empty buses rolling through the streets of Montgomery. The group met again that night and quickly formed an organization, calling themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and electing King as president. After some discussion, the MIA agreed to continue the boycott, which would last for a little more than a year.
This is not a march, these women are walking to work.
More boycotters making the long treks to work on foot.
GIT IT GURL!
A waiting area for carpoolers.
Dr. King assisting the carpool to get boycotters to work as they all say "FUCK YOU" to that empty bus parked across the street.
Whites tried every way possible to break up the boycott. First they tried nonviolent means. When black cab services began undercharging other blacks with a 10-cent fare, the city announced that any cab charging less than 45 cents would be stopped. Companies began canceling insurance policies on cars used for carpooling. Mrs. Parks was arrested for not paying her fine, and King was arrested several times, usually for minor traffic offenses. When these tactics didn't work, whites then turned to violence. Bombs went off in black homes, King's house was shot at and the Ku Klux Klan marched around to protest.
The city was beginning to suffer financially from the boycott, and news of the case made its way to the Supreme Court, which had recently declared segregation illegal in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court ordered full integration in November 1956, and by Dec. 21 of that year, blacks ended the boycott and started riding the buses again.
The boycott marked the first important involvement of the public in the civil rights movement and the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. After success in Montgomery and gaining national attention, King soon became a major leader of the movement, moving to Atlanta and starting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
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Sit Ins and Freedom Rides
By the beginning of the '60s, schools and universities across the country were integrated, and the success in Montgomery had sprouted civil rights organizations in cities everywhere. Not every business or school complied with the changes, though, and black students started to demonstrate the fact that inequalities still existed, staging what were called sit-ins.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr., sat down at the counter of a Woolworth's and asked to be served. They knew they wouldn't be, because the lunch counter at which they sat was for whites only. Still, they continued to sit and refused to get up until they were forced out when the store closed for the night. The next day, a much larger group of students showed up either to participate or witness the sit-in, and after newspapers and civil rights groups heard about the activity, sit-ins were held in several cities across the country.
These sit-ins were very simple in nature. A group of students would sit down at a lunch counter and ask to be served. If they were given food or coffee, they'd move on down to the next counter. Once they were refused service, they would remain seated until served. The key during the sit-ins was nonviolence -- if participants were hit, they couldn't hit back. If they were taunted, they remained silent. Students also dressed in their Sunday best to set themselves apart from the heckling white students. They were met with the usual share of beatings and imprisonments, and by August 1961, more than 3,000 students across the country were arrested.
Black protesters being gassed with insecticide during a sit-in.
The stools were removed to prevent black people from sitting at them.
They had to close to fountain because dirty colored folks were trying to use it.
Too big to post, but a photo of a group of young housekeepers reading a front page spread about 218 student arrests.
Another group that set out to test the judgment of the Supreme Court was the Freedom Riders. On May 4, 1961, a racially mixed group of people left Washington, D.C., on a bus and headed for New Orleans, La. Along the way, groups mixed up their seating -- whites moved to the blacks-only section and vice versa. They knew what they were doing was perfectly legal according to recent Supreme Court cases, but they also knew they'd meet heavy opposition from the public. They simply wanted to make sure the government would respond in a moment of crisis. With rising tensions and the possibility of violence, the Freedom Riders were even prepared for death.
Almost everywhere the riders stopped along their trip, they were met with angry protesters and violence. Black and white Freedom Riders were beaten, buses were stoned and tires were slashed. More than 300 riders were arrested during the trip, which never finished its trip to New Orleans. The Freedom Riders raised civil rights awareness, however, and especially caught the attention of the young Kennedy Administration.
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Birmingham and Martin Luther King
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. chose Birmingham, Ala., as a new place of focus for his campaign. The city was notorious for its violence against blacks -- 18 unsolved bombings had occurred over six years, and several Freedom Riders were hurt thanks to then-governor Bull Connor's failure to station guards at the bus stations. King felt it was time for a change in Birmingham.
After a series of sit-ins and arrests, however, King didn't know what else to do; the arrests weren't getting anything done except to fill up the already overcrowded jails. So King decided to get himself arrested on Good Friday, April 12. When placed in solitary confinement, he read an advertisement taken out by white ministers that derided his efforts in Birmingham, calling his actions "unwise and untimely." Using the margins of the newspaper and toilet paper and a pencil, King wrote the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," one of the most famous documents from the civil rights era. In it, he wrote:
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. […] For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piecing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'"
After officials released King on April 20, he and the SCLC worked out a new tactic: the use of children in protests. The reason for this, according to James Bevel, was that "most adults have bills to pay -- house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills -- but the young people … are not hooked with all those responsibilities." On May 2, black children between the ages of 6 and 18 left in waves from Kelly Ingram Park and marched downtown singing "We Shall Overcome." The children were arrested and carted over to the jails in vans and buses. Within three hours, the jails were overcrowded with 959 young blacks. The next day, more children showed up to march downtown, and Bull Connor ordered firefighters to turn high-pressure hoses on the young, nonviolent protesters. Blasts from the hoses hit the children so hard they were sent tumbling down the street. Television cameras were capturing it all, of course, and the nation watched in shock.
The attention led President Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill, and to demonstrate the bill's support, the March on Washington was set up. 250,000 people of all races gathered in Washington, D.C. -- it was here Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Although Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, making sure blacks were included in all public facilities. A year later Johnson also signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting illegal legislation such as literacy tests and poll taxes.
Despite gains made from the new legislation, violence and frustration were just around the corner.
These children are being taken to jail, fyi.
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
The remains of a church following a bombing by people who were, of course, not classified as terrorists.
Yes, that is a little boy.
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Watts Riots, Black Power and MLK's Legacy
Martin Luther King Jr.'s main strategy during the civil rights campaign was one of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest, and it worked for most of the movement. Gathering inspiration from the writings of Henry Thoreau and the nonviolent of Mahatma Gandhi, King spent much of the '50s and early ‘60s successfully campaigning for peaceful change
But in 1965, when actions taken by civil rights leaders and organizers were still heavily protested by racists, often in the form of beatings or worse, some people had just had enough. Malcolm X, assassinated early in the year in February, was leading the Black Power movement, which grew out of the civil rights movement and encouraged blacks to assert their rights more forcefully, sometimes with violence. Marquette Frye and the citizens of Watts, a racially segregated neighborhood near Los Angeles, Calif., were the first to display this kind of frustration to the nation on a larger scale during the violent Watts Riots.
Malcolm X
On Aug. 11, 1965, 21-year-old Frye and his older brother, 22-year-old Ronald, were driving near the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts around 7 p.m. when they were pulled over by California highway patrolman Lee W. Minikus. A black motorist had allegedly informed Minikus that Frye was driving recklessly, so he gave chase, pulled the car over and administered a sobriety test. Frye failed and was placed under arrest for drunk driving.
Because it was a hot night during an unusually hot summer, many people were sitting outside their homes and witnessed the event. A small crowd of about 30 people eventually grew to more than 250. On top of this, Frye's mother, Rena Price, had to come to the scene to claim the car once Frye was under arrest. Once Mrs. Price began scolding her son for drinking, a previously compliant Frye became belligerent, moving toward the crowd and shouting at the officers. When officers pursued him, Frye attempted to run off. The officers gave chase and caught him again, and the crowd became more and more aggressive.
News of police brutality spread throughout Watts, and the event, combined with the uncomfortably hot weather, cramped conditions and rampant poverty, sparked several riots in the neighborhood over five days. Thirty-four people were killed, and there were 1,032 reported injuries. Of those injuries, 118 were from gunshots. Rioters also caused an estimated $40 million in damage to buildings, mostly from fires and looting. During the five-day stretch, 3,438 people were arrested. Most of the riots were televised, and a nation watched as Watts was reduced to ruins.
The event quickly changed the tone of the movement. When Martin Luther King Jr. visited Watts, people heckled him instead of welcoming him, rejecting his message of nonviolence. When King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, riots sprang up in several cities around the U.S.
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King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, owned by businessman Walter Bailey (and named after his wife). King's close friend and colleague Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, who was King's roommate in the motel room the day of the assassination, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often that it was known as the "King-Abernathy Suite."
According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's last words were to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was going to attend: "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."
At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, while he was standing on the motel's second floor balcony, King was struck by a single .30 bullet fired from a Remington 760 Gamemaster. The bullet entered through his right cheek, breaking his jaw, neck and several vertebrae as it travelled down, severing the jugular vein and major arteries in the process before lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor unconscious.
The unconscious King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where doctors opened his chest and performed manual heart massage. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. According to Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though he was only 39 years old, he had the heart of a 60 year old man.
Shortly after the assassination, witnesses saw James Earl Ray fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel where he was renting a room. A package was dumped close to the site that included a rifle and binoculars with Ray's fingerprints on them. The rifle had been purchased by Ray under an alias six days before. A worldwide manhunt was triggered that culminated in the arrest of Ray at London Heathrow Airport two months later.
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James Earl Ray
In the early evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a single shot which struck his face and neck. He was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a peaceful march in support of striking sanitation workers. About an hour later, he was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM at St. Joseph Hospital.
Shortly after the murder, a bundle was dropped near the door of Canipe's Amusement Co. near the assassination scene, and a white Mustang sped away. Memphis police officers found the bundle to contain a .30-06 rifle, ammunition, a pair of binoculars, and other items. The rifle had been purchased in Birmingham by a Harvey Lowmeyer, later determined to be one of several aliases used by Ray.
Pursuit of the white Mustang was thwarted by CB radio transmissions which described a high-speed chase between the occupants of a blue Pontiac and the white Mustang, and even describing gunplay between the vehicles. These broadcasts appear to have been a hoax or diversion. The broadcaster of these CB radio transmissions has never been identified.
Authorities at first had little to go on. "Harvey Lowmeyer," the purchaser of the rifle found in the bundle, was described as a "white male, 36 years old, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 150 to 160 pounds, black or dark brown hair," a description fitting many people. The FBI's investigation soon focused on an Eric S. Galt, a name used on a registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. On April 19, fingerprints on the rifle and other items were matched to James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary. More than a month passed without Ray being located. Finally, on June 1 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found a possible photographic match between Ray and a George Raymon Sneyd's Canadian passport. A week later, on June 8, Ray was arrested in Heathrow Airport in London, apparently on his way to Rhodesia.
Ray was extradited to the US to face trial. He replaced his first attorney, Arthur Hanes, with Percy Foreman. Foreman, who had represented more than 400 murder-case defendants, convinced Ray to plead guilty as the only way of avoiding the death penalty. On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A "mini-trial" on that day settled few of the questions which had arisen during the preceding year. And Ray himself hinted at a conspiracy, interrupting the proceedings to saying that while he "agreed to all these stipulations," he did not "exactly accept the theories of Mr. Clark" (the Attorney General)..."I mean on the conspiracy thing." Three days later, Ray recanted his plea and requested a new trial in two letters to Judge Battle. The judge did not act upon these letters, and was found dead at his desk of a heart attack three weeks later, literally with Ray's appeal under his body.
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And in case you're interested, some conspiracy stuff...
Home/MLK Assassination
The Martin Luther King Assassination
Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Mall.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the opening acts which plunged 1968 into a year of turmoil. Coming on the heels of the Tet Offensive which showed the war in Vietnam to be in disarray, and President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, King's assassination was itself soon followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy, violence at the Democratic National Convention, and a general unraveling of the country into a period of violence and despair.
Like the other assassinations of the 1960s, the King murder had its "lone nut," in this case James Earl Ray, an escaped convict who purchased the rifle found near the assassination scene and was caught in flight two months later. But, also like the other assassinations, evidence of conspiracy was easily found, despite being ignored by government investigators.
The Assassination
Aides on Lorraine Motel balcony with the stricken Dr. King.
In the early evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a single shot which struck his face and neck. He was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a peaceful march in support of striking sanitation workers. About an hour later, he was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM at St. Joseph Hospital.
Shortly after the murder, a bundle was dropped near the door of Canipe's Amusement Co. near the assassination scene, and a white Mustang sped away. Memphis police officers found the bundle to contain a .30-06 rifle, ammunition, a pair of binoculars, and other items. The rifle had been purchased in Birmingham by a Harvey Lowmeyer, later determined to be one of several aliases used by Ray.
Pursuit of the white Mustang was thwarted by CB radio transmissions which described a high-speed chase between the occupants of a blue Pontiac and the white Mustang, and even describing gunplay between the vehicles. These broadcasts appear to have been a hoax or diversion. The broadcaster of these CB radio transmissions has never been identified.
Ray's Apprehension, Confession, and Conviction
Authorities at first had little to go on. "Harvey Lowmeyer," the purchaser of the rifle found in the bundle, was described as a "white male, 36 years old, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 150 to 160 pounds, black or dark brown hair," a description fitting many people. The FBI's investigation soon focused on an Eric S. Galt, a name used on a registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. On April 19, fingerprints on the rifle and other items were matched to James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary. More than a month passed without Ray being located. Finally, on June 1 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found a possible photographic match between Ray and a George Raymon Sneyd's Canadian passport. A week later, on June 8, Ray was arrested in Heathrow Airport in London, apparently on his way to Rhodesia.
Ray was extradited to the US to face trial. He replaced his first attorney, Arthur Hanes, with Percy Foreman. Foreman, who had represented more than 400 murder-case defendants, convinced Ray to plead guilty as the only way of avoiding the death penalty. On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A "mini-trial" on that day settled few of the questions which had arisen during the preceding year. And Ray himself hinted at a conspiracy, interrupting the proceedings to saying that while he "agreed to all these stipulations," he did not "exactly accept the theories of Mr. Clark" (the Attorney General)..."I mean on the conspiracy thing." Three days later, Ray recanted his plea and requested a new trial in two letters to Judge Battle. The judge did not act upon these letters, and was found dead at his desk of a heart attack three weeks later, literally with Ray's appeal under his body.
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Click to viewAdditional Links
Dr. King's Atlanta Speech
The King Center
Martin Luther King Jr. Wiki Entry
Montgomery Bus Boycott: It Wasn't the First
Nobel Prize Biography
Understanding Riots
Mod Notes
*There will be a string of more in-depth Civil Rights posts in February for Black History Month.
**Image Credits: Google
Official Threads
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International Links
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