The Struggle for Civil Rights PDF

The Struggle for Civil Rights Kennedy had campaigned with a strong appeal to black voters, but he proceeded gingerly to redeem his promises on civil rights. Political concerns stayed his hand. Elected by a wafer-thin margin, Kennedy needed the support of southern legislators to pass his eco...

The Struggle for Civil Rights Kennedy had campaigned with a strong appeal to black voters, but he proceeded gingerly to redeem his promises on civil rights. Political concerns stayed his hand. Elected by a wafer-thin margin, Kennedy needed the support of southern legislators to pass his economic and social legislation, especially his medical and educational bills. He believed that those measures would eventually benefit black Americans at least as much as specific legislation on civil rights. Bold moves for racial justice would have to wait. But events soon scrambled these careful calculations. After the wave of sit-ins that surged across the South in 1960, groups of Freedom Riders (Definition = Organized mixed-race groups who rode interstate buses deep into the South to draw attention to and protest racial segregation, beginning in 1961. This effort to challenge racism, which involved the participation of many northern young people as well as southern activists, proved a political and public relations success for the civil rights movement.) fanned out to end segregation in facilities serving interstate bus passengers. A white mob torched a Freedom Ride bus near Anniston, Alabama, in May 1961, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s personal representative was beaten unconscious in another anti–Freedom Ride riot in Montgomery. When southern officials proved unwilling or unable to stem the violence, Washington dispatched federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders. Reluctantly but fatefully, the Kennedy administration had now joined hands with the civil rights movement. Because of that partnership, the Kennedys proved ultrawary about the political associates of Martin Luther King, Jr. Fearful of embarrassing revelations that some of King’s advisers had communist affiliations, Robert Kennedy ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap King’s phone in late 1963. But for the most part, the relationship between King and the Kennedys was a fruitful one. Encouraged by Robert Kennedy, and with financial backing from Kennedy-prodded private foundations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights groups inaugurated the Voter Education Project (Definition = Effort by SNCC and other civil rights groups to register the South’s historically disenfranchised black population. The project typified a common strategy of the civil rights movement, which sought to counter racial discrimination by empowering people at grassroots levels to exercise their civic rights through voting.) to register the South’s historically disfranchised blacks. Integrating southern universities was as challenging as registering African Americans to vote. Some desegregated painlessly, but the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) became a volcano. A twenty-nine-year-old air force veteran, James Meredith, encountered violent opposition when he attempted to register in October 1962. In the end President Kennedy was forced to send in four hundred federal marshals and three thousand troops to enroll Meredith in his first class—in colonial American history. In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a campaign against discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated big city in America. Previous attempts to crack the city’s rigid racial barriers had produced more than fifty cross burnings and eighteen bomb attacks since 1957. “Some of the people sitting here will not come back alive from this campaign,” King advised his organizers. Events soon confirmed this grim prediction of violence. Watching developments on television screens, a horrified world saw peaceful civil rights marchers repeatedly repelled by police with attack dogs and electric cattle prods. High-pressure hoses shot water at the demonstrators with enough force to knock bricks loose from buildings or strip bark from trees. Little children were bowled down the street like tumbleweeds. Jolted by these vicious confrontations, President Kennedy delivered a memorable televised speech to the nation on June 11, 1963. In contrast to Eisenhower’s cool aloofness from the racial question, Kennedy called the situation a “moral issue” and committed his personal and presidential prestige to finding a solution. Drawing on the same spiritual traditions as Martin Luther King, Jr., Kennedy declared that the principle at stake “is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He called for new civil rights legislation to protect black citizens. In August King led more than 200,000 black and white demonstrators on a peaceful March on Washington (Definition = Massive civil rights demonstration in August 1963 in support of Kennedy-backed legislation to secure legal protections for American blacks. One of the most visually impressive manifestations of the civil rights movement, the march was the occasion of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.) in support of the proposed legislation. In an electrifying speech from the Lincoln Memorial, King declared, “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.” Still the violence continued. On the very night of Kennedy’s stirring television address, a white gunman shot down Medgar Evers, a black Mississippi civil rights worker. In September 1963 an explosion blasted a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls who had just finished their lesson called “The Love That Forgives.” Kennedy’s civil rights bill made little headway in Congress in the months after his address. The Killing of Kennedy Violence haunted America in the mid-1960s, and it stalked onto center stage on November 22, 1963. While riding in an open limousine in downtown Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was shot in the brain by a concealed rifleman and died within seconds. Vice President Johnson was promptly sworn in as president on a waiting airplane and flown back to Washington with Kennedy’s body. As a stunned nation grieved, the tragedy grew still more unbelievable. The alleged assassin, a furtive figure named Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot to death in front of television cameras by a self-appointed avenger, Jack Ruby. So bizarre were the events surrounding the two murders that even an elaborate official investigation conducted by Chief Justice Warren could not quiet all doubts and theories about what had really happened. For several days the nation was steeped in sorrow. Not until then did many Americans realize how fully their young, vibrant president and his captivating wife had cast a spell over them. Chopped down in his prime after only slightly more than a thousand days in the White House, Kennedy was acclaimed more for the ideals he had enunciated and the spirit he had kindled than for the concrete goals he had achieved. In later years revelations about Kennedy’s womanizing and allegations about his involvement with organized crime figures tarnished his reputation. But despite those accusations, his apparent vigor, charisma, and idealism made him an inspirational figure for a rising “baby boom” generation. Few could foresee that the decade following his death would explode into extraordinary ferment at home and abroad.