Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights Movement Essay - 1,407 words

... saying that segregation was wrong, (later loss of this support devastated the movement). In the minds of the protestors this would be the answer to their oppression, not realizing the depth of their trouble. After the huge victory in Birmingham, the SCLC wanted to next focus their efforts on a voter rights bill. The SCLC was getting deeper and deeper into the southern white mans beliefs set forth on them by the Civil War and slavery. They werent asking to ride next to the white man, nor eat next to the white man, but to have equal power with the white man.


This should already have been the truth, but sadly it wasnt. Blacks were discouraged from voting. For instance they would be deterred by slow service, odd courthouse hours, excessively difficult literacy tests, and, of course, the threat of violence. Selma would be the place to set their drive toward the right to vote. It provided everything that made a media event, which was needed to get national support. It had a segregationist mayor, a Klan affiliated police chief, and a very low percentage of blacks registered to vote.


Of 30, 000 people, slightly more than half were black, but only 350 blacks were registered. The SCLC started this campaign off of the high of Dr. King winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which was a victory for all of the Civil Rights Movement. The campaign was extremely brutal, starting on the evening of the 18 th of February when a protest march headed for the jail in the town of Marion, when it was attacked by a mob of whites. The streetlights mysteriously shut off and violence commenced in the dark. A young black man, Jimmy Lee Jackson was beaten and shot and killed by state troopers as he tried to protect his grandfather and mother from a trooper attack on civil rights marches.


The violence was slowly getting worse, showing a greater desperate attempt for the white mans oligarchy to stay intact. It was ridiculous for the chauvinists to believe that violence would overcome the black fight, not knowing it was feeding the SCLC tactics of nonviolence. This tactic was when protestors used their passive physical presence to provoke violence from authorities and thus the sympathy of a national audience. This tactic was the key to almost every victory of the Civil Rights Movement. The brutality continued when a march from Selma to Montgomery met up with 60 state troopers along with some civilians. The troopers asked them to stop, once, then attacked with teargas, clubs, whips and electric cattle prods.


These violent images inspired protests in Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, Newark, and other cities, and caught the attention of the White House. This proved the tactic of nonviolence was extremely successful in obtaining a national audience. Selma led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Johnson signed into law in August. The legislation prohibited the kind of tactics that had been used in Selma to hinder black voter registration, also giving the federal government more power to police local instances of abuse. Selma unfortunately marked the final stage of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a major gain obtained by nonviolent direct action.


After Selma, the SCLC changed their focus. Encouraged by Watts, a huge riot in L. A. , over police brutality and poor living conditions, the SCLC turned their attention toward the northern cities. The cities were suffering from something far different then the SCLC had been fighting for earlier.


This problem of poverty was brought on by a lack of decent jobs for blacks, due to racism, but not a particularly visible sign of racism. It was like a quagmire of poverty, extremely difficult for a person to work their way out of the ghetto. The SCLC lost national support, including the Johnson Administration, which would go no further with federal legislation. What they were now asking for was a redistribution of the nations wealth. To do this without giving up a lot of what the main populace personally had worked for is difficult to do without turning this into a socialist, or even communist government; which was obviously very unpop ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: civil rights movement, kings death, martin luther king jr, vietnam war, jesse jackson

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