The Civil Rights Movement

• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1956)

• Sit-in Movement (1960)• Civil Rights Act of 1964• Voting Rights Act of 1965

• Watts Riot (1965)• Malcolm X• Huey Newton• Fair Housing Bill (1967-8)

I. Martin Luther King, Jr.II. The Great SocietyIII. Black Power

I. Martin Luther King, Jr.

December 1, 1955

Civil Disobedience“We must use the weapon of love. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate.”

To White Southerners:“We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.”

“The separate but equal doctrine can no longer be safely followed as a correct statement of the law.”

Sit-In-Movement • Began in Greensboro, NC on February 1, 1960, when four black college students demanded service at a “whites-only” lunch counter.

• Within a week the movement spread to six towns. Within two months it spread to 54 cities in 9 states.

Richmond News Leader

“Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them reading Goethe, and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen.”

Black Church Goers Pray in a Non-Violent Demonstration in Birmingham, Al.

“I want them to see the dogs work.”

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” • “One who breaks an unjust

law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

• Through nonviolent protests he sought to “create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

March on Washington, August 28, 1963

“I Have a Dream”“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the movement I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream . . . 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 one day. . . the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”

II. The Great Society

“By political background, by temperament, by personal preference,” Johnson was “the riverboat man. He was brawny and rough and skilled beyond measure in the full use of tricky tides and currents, in his knowledge of the hidden shoals. He was a swashbuckling master of the political.”

- A Journalist’s description of LBJ

The Johnson Treatment“He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made the Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

The essence of Lyndon B. Johnson’s power is brilliantly captured in this series of images called "The Johnson Treatment." Johnson, left, then Senate majority leader, works over Theodore F. Green, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, in 1957

Civil Rights Act of 1964

• Outlawed discrimination in hotels, restaurants, and other public accommodations.

• Outlawed discrimination by employers.

• Gave the attorney general the ability to sue for school desegregation.

Voting Rights Act of 1965• Authorized the attorney general to send

federal examiners to register voters. • Suspended literacy tests and voting

restrictions in states where fewer than half the adults had voted in 1964.

• By the end of the year 250,000 Blacks were registered.

III. Black Power

National Guard Soldiers Patrol LA During the Watts Riot of 1965

Damage during the Watts Riot

• $35 million in property damage

• 4,000 rioters jailed

• 34 deaths

Scene from Detroit Riot in 1966

Huey P. Newton, a Founder of the Black Panther Party

“In Defense of Self Defense”

“There has always existed in the Black colony of Afro-America a fundamental difference over . . . tactics . . . . One side of this difference contends that Black people. . . must employ no tactic that will anger oppressor whites. This view holds that Black people constitute a hopeless minority and that salvation for Black people lies in developing brotherly relations. . . .

On the other side of the difference, we find that the point of departure is the principle that the oppressor has no rights that the oppressed is bound to respect. Kill the slave master, destroy him utterly, move against him with implacable fortitude. Break his oppressive power by any means necessary. . . . The choice offered by the heirs of Malcolm is to repudiate the oppressor. . . or face a merciless, speedy and most timely execution for treason.”

MLK’s Response

In 1967 he wrote “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community.”

“Probably the most destructive feature of Black Power is its unconscious and often conscious call for retaliatory violence. . . . The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensify the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their own prejudices toward Negroes. In the guilt and confusion confronting our society, violence only adds to chaos. It deepens the brutality of the oppressor and increases the bitterness of the oppressed. Violence is the antithesis of creativity and wholeness. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. . . .

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love an do that.”

LBJ, June, 1865“You do not take a a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him and then say. ‘You are free to compete with the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

“It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates of opportunity. . . . We must seek. . . not equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Fair Housing Act• Banned

discrimination in federally owned housing and in multi-unit housing with mortgages insured by the federal government.

• By 1970 the act was extended to all houses sold through real estate brokers.