“Martin Luther King Jr. Remembered”

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“Martin Luther King Jr. Remembered” video clip

Death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee while lending support to a sanitation workers' strike. He was shot by James Earl Ray at approximately 7:05 P.M. Ray's bullet struck King as he was standing on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel; King died approximately one hour later. Although no television cameras were in the vicinity at the time of the assassination, television coverage of the event quickly followed.

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The Black Panthers

Frustrated activists in Oakland, California, responded to Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” theories and formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panthers, armed and clad in black, operated basic social services in the urban ghettos, patrolled the streets, and called for an armed revolution. Although the Black Panthers did provide valuable support to the community, their embrace of violence prompted a massive government crackdown on the group, leading to its dissolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Additional Information on Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

Interview Video with Malcom X

Black Power

Despite Malcolm X’s untimely death, his original message of race separation (instead of integration) lived on and inspired many students in the SNCC, who also expressed dissatisfaction with the gains made through peaceful protests. Although the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were landmark laws for the civil rights movement, young activists such as Stokely Carmichael felt they had not done enough to correct centuries of inequality. In 1967, Carmichael argued in his book Black Power that blacks should take pride in their heritage and culture and should not have anything to do with whites in the United States or anywhere else. In fact, Carmichael even promoted one plan to split the United States into separate black and white countries.

Summary of Black Power

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

Violent opposition to the Freedom Summer campaign convinced Martin Luther King Jr. that more attention needed to be drawn to the fact that few southern blacks were actually able to exercise their right to vote. Springing into action, King traveled to the small town of Selma, Alabama, in 1965, to support a local protest against racial restrictions at the polls. There, he joined thousands of blacks peacefully trying to register to vote. Police, however, attacked the protesters on “Bloody Sunday,” killing several activists in the most violent crackdown yet. The same year, an outraged Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress responded by passing the Voting Rights Act to safeguard blacks’ right to vote. The act outlawed literacy tests and sent thousands of federal voting officials into the South to supervise black voter registration.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

Summary of Act

March on Washington

Kennedy and the March on Washington

The violence during the Birmingham protest shocked northerners even more than the violence of the Freedom Rides and convinced President John F. Kennedy to risk his own political future and fully endorse the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, in 1963, King and the SCLC joined forces with CORE, the NAACP, and the SNCC in organizing the March on Washington in August. More than 200,000 blacks and whites participated in the march, one of the largest political rallies in American history. The highlight of the rally was King’s sermonic “I have a dream” speech.

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Text of "I have a dream" Link

The Birmingham Protest

The overwhelming public support from the North for Freedom Riders prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to launch more peaceful protests, hoping to anger die-hard segregationists. In 1963, King focused all of his energy on organizing a massive protest in the heavily segregated city of Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands of blacks participated in the rally, including several hundred local high school students who marched in their own “children’s crusade.” Birmingham’s commissioner, “Bull” Connor, cracked down on the protesters using clubs, vicious police dogs, and water cannons. King was arrested along with hundreds of others and used his time in jail to write his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to explain the civil rights movement to critics.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

The Student Movement

Although the SCLC failed to initiate mass protest, a new student group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) accomplished much. The SNCC was launched in 1960 after the highly successful student-led Greensboro sit-in in North Carolina and went on to coordinate peaceful student protests against segregation throughout the South. The students also helped the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organize Freedom Rides throughout the Deep South. In 1961, groups of both black and white Freedom Riders boarded interstate buses, hoping to provoke violence, get the attention of the federal government, and win the sympathy of more moderate whites. The plan worked: angry white mobs attacked Freedom Riders in Alabama so many times that several riders nearly died. Still, many of the students believed that the media attention they had received had been worth the price.

Summary of Freedom Riders

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Martin Luther King Jr. and Montgomery Bus Boycott

Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1955, the modern civil rights movement was effectively launched with the arrest of young seamstress Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama. Police arrested Parks because she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. After the arrest, blacks throughout the city joined together in a massive rally outside one of the city’s Baptist churches to hear the young preacher Martin Luther King Jr. speak out against segregation, Parks’s arrest, and the Jim Crow law she had violated. Blacks also organized the Montgomery bus boycott, boycotting city transportation for nearly a year before the Supreme Court finally struck down the city’s segregated bus seating as unconstitutional.

In 1957, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to rally support from southern churches for the civil rights movement. Inspired by Indian political activist Mohandas Gandhi, King hoped the SCLC would lead a large-scale protest movement based on “love and nonviolence.”

Summary of Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Little Rock Crisis

In 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus chose to ignore a federal court order to desegregate the state’s public schools and used the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. Although President Dwight D. Eisenhower personally opposed the Brown decision, he sent federal troops to integrate the high school by force and uphold federal supremacy over the state.

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Little Rock Nine
What Happened

Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, after decades of legal work, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel, finally managed to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine (established in Plessy v. Ferguson) in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas . Sympathetic Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren convinced his fellow justices to declare unanimously that segregated public schools were inherently unequal. The Brown decision outraged conservative southern politicians in Congress, who protested it by drafting the Southern Manifesto.

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The Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance

Between World War I and World War II, more than a million blacks traveled from the South to the North in search of jobs, in what became known as the Great Migration. The Harlem neighborhood of New York City quickly became the nation’s black cultural capital and housed one of the country’s largest African-American communities, of approximately 200,000 people. Even though most of Harlem’s residents were poor, during the 1920s, a small middle class emerged, consisting of poets, writers, and musicians. Artists and writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston championed the “New Negro,” the African American who took pride in his or her cultural heritage. The flowering of black artistic and intellectual culture during this period became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

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Digital History
Harlem Renaissance
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The Early Movement

In 1896, in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the conservative Supreme Court upheld the racist policy of segregation by legalizing “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. In doing so, the court condemned blacks to more than a half century more of social inequality. Black leaders nonetheless continued to press for equal rights. For example, Booker T. Washington, president of the all-black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, encouraged African Americans first to become self-sufficient economically before challenging whites on social issues. W. E. B. Du Bois, a Harvard-educated black historian and sociologist, however, ridiculed Washington’s beliefs and argued that blacks should fight for social and economic equality all at once. Du Bois also hoped that blacks would eventually develop a “black consciousness” and cherish their distinctive history and cultural attributes. In 1910, he also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to challenge the Plessy decision in the courtroom.

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Court Case

Life of Martin Luther King Jr.

•Martin Luther King was a minister who believed that everyone should be treated the same, regardless of what they looked like. He believed that we should accept everyone for the people they are, and not judge them by how they look.
•Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to make changes in the laws of our country and knew that as a citizen of the United States he had certain rights that were being denied him and many other people like him.
•Can you think of some things he wanted to change?
•Instead of just sitting around and complaining, he did something about it. He fought for his rights, but he did it peacefully. He believed that the best way to make a change was through peaceful protests like boycotts, sit ins, and marches.

Brother Martin by Christine King Farris

As you go through the book:

o What things did MLK do as a child that was similar to what you do?

o Pg. 15 “white only” signs: Write in your journal how that makes you feel

o Pg 22 look at the look on the children’s faces. How do they look? Why?

o Last page – how do these children look? Why?

For a summary of the book click on the Link

Martin Luther King Biography

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.

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Objective

Students will learn about Martin Luther King and how he believed that people should be judged for who they are, not what they look like. They will be able to learn how to be good citizens of the united states by learning about the life of Martin Luther King

Students will also learn important events during the civil rights movement.