Marching to Washington |
Martin Luther King Jr. |
The civil rights bill that President Kennedy sent Congress guaranteed equal access to all public accommodations and gave the U.S. attorney general the power to file school desegregation suits. To persuade Congress to pass the bill, two veteran organizer--labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin of the SCLC--summoned Americans to march on Washington D.C. On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by a number of civil rights and religious groups, the event was designed to shed light on the political and social challenges African Americans continued to face across the country. The march, which became a key moment in the growing struggle for civil rights in the United States, culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for racial justice and equality.
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King, both a Baptist minister and civil-rights activist, had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, beginning in the mid-1950s. Among many efforts, King headed the SCLC. Through his activism, he played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation of African-American citizens in the South and other areas of the nation, as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honors. King was assassinated in April 1968, and continues to be remembered as one of the most lauded African-American leaders in history, often referenced by his 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream."
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Black Panthers |
Thurgood Marshall |
Think about it. During Black History or learning about the Civil Rights era which faces do we see the most? MLK, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. It is already bad enough that when Black history is taught in school it is watered down and over simplified, but the little that is taught mainly focuses on Black men. I am not denying that these Black male leaders have contributed to the betterment of our Black people as a whole, but it also important to understand that although we should be united as a people, Black men and women have different experiences based on their gender.
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Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenaged Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class. After graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. There, he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana; Langston Hughes, the great poet; and Cab Calloway, the famous jazz singer.
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MLK Death |
Malcolm X |
The plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of King's plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered.
Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and established a camp they called "Resurrection City". They stayed for six weeks. Dr. King seemed to sense that death was near. The night King died, Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Fearful that King's death would spark riots, Kennedy's advisers told him to cancel his appearance in an African American neighborhood in Indianapolis . |
To pass the time during his incarceration, Malcolm X read constantly, devouring books from the prison library in an attempt make up for the years of education he had missed by dropping out of high school. Also while in prison, he was visited by several siblings who had joined to the Nation of Islam, a small sect of black Muslims who embraced the ideology of black nationalism—the idea that in order to secure freedom, justice and equality, black Americans needed to establish their own state entirely separate from white Americans. Malcolm X converted to the Nation of Islam while in prison, and upon his release in 1952 he abandoned his surname "Little," which he considered a relic of slavery, in favor of the surname "X"—a tribute to the unknown name of his African ancestors. Now a free man, Malcolm X traveled to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, to expand the movement's following among black Americans nationwide. Malcolm X became the minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem and Temple No. 11 in Boston, while also founding new temples in Harford and Philadelphia. In 1960, he established a national newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, in order to further promote the message of the Nation of Islam.
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Selma |
Rosa Park |
At the start of 1965, the SCLC conducted a major voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had been working for two years to register voters. By the end of 1965, more than 2,000 African Americans had been arrested in SCLC demonstrations. After a demonstrator named Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot and killed, King responded by announcing a 50-mile protest march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. On March 7, 1965, about 600 protesters set out for Montgomery.
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Rosa Parks was an African American Civil
Rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of
civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Her
birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both
become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in both California and Ohio. On December 1,
1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's
order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after
the white section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus
segregation. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became
important symbols of the modern Civil Right Movement. She became an
international icon of resistance to racial segregation.
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