New Issues
"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless
he has his freedom."
Malcolm X,
he has his freedom."
Malcolm X,
- July 12, 1965 Dessie Mae Williams, 23 yr. old African American woman, stood on the corner near the firehouse at 400 West Wilcox St. when a firetruck sped out of the firehouse and the driver lost control. The truck smashed into a stop sign near Williams and the sign struck and killed her. Hearing of Williams death, 200 neighborhood people streamed into the street surrounding the firehouse for 2 nights, throwing bricks and bottles at the firehouse. An 18 year old man who had been there admitted that he lost his head, "We're sorry about the bricks and bottles. But when you get pushed, you shove back. Man, you don't like to stand on a corner and be told to get off it when you got nowhere else to go."
- In 1965, nearly 70% of African Americans lived in large cities. Many had moved from the South to the big cities of the North and West during the Great Migration of the 1920's and 1940's. Many whites refused to live with African Americans and would often move out of the neighborhoods when they moved in.
- In 1965 only 15% of African Americans held professional managerial, or clerical jobs, compared to 44% of whites. Almost half of all African American families lived in poverty.
- Many African Americans living in urban poverty knew the civil rights movement had made enormous gains, but when they looked at their own circumstances, nothing seemed to be changing. The movement had raised their hopes, but their everyday problems were economic and social. As a result, their anger and frustration began to rise-until it finally erupted.
- Just 5 days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a race riot broke out in Watts, an African American neighborhood in Los Angeles. Allegations of police brutality had served as the catalyst of this uprising, which lasted for 6 days and required over 14,000 members of the National Guard and 1,500 law officers to restore order. Rioters burned and looted entire neighborhoods and destroyed about $45 million in property. They killed 34 people and 900 suffered injuries.
- Race Riots broke out in dozens of American cities between 1965 and 1968. The worst riot took place in Detroit, 1967. Burning, looting and skirmishes with police and National Guard members resulted in 43 deaths and over 1,000 wounds. The governor of Michigan remarked that Detroit looked like "a city that had been bombed."
- In 1967 President Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on civil disorders to study the causes of of the urban riots and to make recommendations to prevent them from happening again in the future. The commission blamed white society and white racism for the majority of the problems in the inner city. "Our nation is moving toward 2 societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," it concluded.
- By the mid-1960s, a number of African American leaders were becoming increasingly critical of Martin Luther King's nonviolent strategy. They felt it had failed to improve the economic position of African Americans. What good was the right to dine at restaurants or stay at hotels if most African Americans could not afford these services anyway? Dr. King became sensitive to this criticism, and in 1965 he began to focus on economic issues.
- Many young African Americans called for black power, a term that had many different meanings. A few interpreted black power to mean that physical self-defense and even violence were acceptable in defense of one's freedom-a clear rejection of Dr. King's philosophy. To most, including Stokely Carmichael, the leader of SNCC in 1966, the term meant that African Americans should control the social, political and economic direction of their struggle.
- By the early 1960s, a man named Malcom X had become a symbol of the black power movement that was sweeping the nation. Born Malcom Little in Omaha, Nebraska, he experienced a difficult childhood and adolescence. He drifted into a life of crime, and in 1946, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for burglary.
- Prison transformed Malcom. He began to educate himself, and he played an active role in the prison debate society. Eventually he joined the Nation of Islam, commonly known as the Black Muslims, who were led by Elijah Muhammad. Despite their name, the Black Muslims don't hold the same beliefs as mainstream Muslims. The Nation of Islam preached black nationalism. Like Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, Black Muslims believed that African Americans should separate themselves from whites and form their own self-governing communities.
- Shortly after joining the Nation of Islam, Malcom Little changed his name to Malcom X. The "X" stood as a symbol for the family name if his African ancestors who had been enslaved. Malcom argued that his true family name had been stolen from him by slavery and he did not intend to use the name white society had given him.
- Black Islams ran their own businesses, organized their own schools, established their own weekly newspaper and encouraged their members to respect each other and to strengthen their families. Black Muslims didn't advocate violence but did advocate self-defense. Malcom X was a powerful and charasmatic speaker and his criticisms of white society and the mainstream civil rights movement gained national attention for the Nation of Islam.
- By 1964 Malcom X had broken with the Black Muslims. Discouraged by scandals involving the Nation of Islam's leader, he went to the Muslim holy city of Makkah in Saudi Arabia. After seeing Muslims from many different races worshipping together, he concluded that an integrated society was possible. In a revealing letter describing his pilgrimage to Makkah, he stated that many whites that he met during the pilgrimage displayed a spirit of brotherhood that gave him a new, positive insight into race relations.
- After Malcom X broke with the Nation of Islam, he continued to criticize the organization and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Because of this, 3 organization members shot and killed him in February 1965 while he was giving a speech in New York. In Malcom's view, African Americans may have been victims in the past but they didn't have to allow racism to victimize them in the present. His ideas influenced African American to take pride in their own culture and to believe in their ability to make their way in the world.
- Malcom X's ideas influenced a new generation of militant African American leaders who also preached black power, black nationalism and economic self-sufficiency. In 1966 in Oakland, California, Huey Newton, Bobby Seal and Eldridge Cleaver organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, or the Black Panthers, as they were known. They considered themselves the heirs of Malcom X and they recruited most of their members from poor urban communities across the nation.
- The Black Panthers believed that a revolution was necessary in the United States and they urged African Americans to arm themselves and confront white society in order to force whites to grant them equal rights. Black Panther leaders adopted a "Ten Point Program" which called for black empowerment, an end to racial oppression, and control of major institutions and services in the African American community, such as schools, law enforcement, housing and medical facilities.
- Dr. King went to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike of African American sanitation workers in March 1968. At the time, SCLC had been planning a national "Poor Peoples Campaign" to promote economic advancement for all impoverished Americans, The purpose of this campaign, the most ambitious one that Dr. King would ever lead, was to lobby the federal government to commit billions of dollars to end poverty.
- On the evening of April 4, 1968, as he stood on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated by a sniper. Ironically he had told a gathering at a local African American church just the previous night, "I've been to the mountaintop...I've looked over and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as people will get to the Promised Land."
- Dr. King's death marked the end of an era in American history. Although the civil rights movement continued, it lacked the unity of purpose and vision that Dr. King had given it. Under his leadership, and with the help of tens of thousands of dedicated African Americans, many of whom were students, the civil rights movement transformed American society. Although many problems remain to be resolved, the acheivements of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, dramatically improved life for African Americans, creating new opportunities where none had existed before.
Preview Of Events
1965 - Watts riots break out in Los Angeles; Malcom X assassinated 1966 - Chicago Movement fails. 1967 - Kerner Commission studies problems of inner cities. 1968 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated |
Main Ideas
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