Dr Martin Luther King and marches

• Dr Martin Luther King Jr's ideology

  Dr Martin Luther King Jr promoted the idea that peaceful non-violent protests would gain public attention and sympathy, which would persuade courts, presidents and law-makers to end discrimination.
• Who Dr Martin Luther King Jr

  • Dr Martin Luther King Jr was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in a middle-class home
  • His father was a Baptist Christian preacher , and he wanted to be one too
  • He had only been preaching for a short time in Montgomery, Alabama, when the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed to organise the bus boycott
  • He is most well known for his Christian values, his support for non-violent methods of protest and his inspirational speeches
• The SCLC

  • Dr King also helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to encourage non-violent campaigns for civil rights
  • The SCLC particularly aimed to increase the number of black Americans who were registered to vote
  • His contribution as an important civil rights leader was recognised when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964
• Civil Rights in Birmingham

  • By the spring of 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, had become the focus of civil rights protests
  • This was because the authorities had done nothing to desegregate public facilities and nearly half the population were black Americans.
• Civil Rights leaders in Birmingham trying to get publicity

  • The civil rights leaders in Birmingham realised that there were two factors that could help them to get publicity for their protests: 
  • The local commissioner for public safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, held racist views
  • Many members of the Ku Klux Klan lived in Birmingham 
  • If these people reacted violently to the protestors, then this would generate a lot of media coverage that was sympathetic to the civil rights cause
• 1st civil rights march in Birmingham

  • The first civil rights march, in April 1963, ended with Dr King and other leaders of the march being arrested and put in prison
  • While in prison, King wrote ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, which clearly explained the case for continuing to protest and for an end to discrimination. 
• 2nd set of civil rights marches in Birmingham

  • At the beginning of May, a second set of marches began
  • Many of the marchers were young people, mostly teenagers, but some were as young as six
  • The marches were referred to as the ‘children’s crusade’
  • The police arrested so many protesters that the prisons were full, so they used police dogs and water cannons to force the protesters off the streets
  • This was shown on television and in photographs around the world. It created a lot of sympathy for the protesters
• End of the Birmingham protests

  • President John F Kennedy sent a representative to negotiate for an end to the protests. 
  • George Wallace (the governor of Alabama) and the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop this from happening but the white Americans who owned businesses wanted the protests to end
  • Birmingham began to desegregate and the protests ended
  • President Kennedy was now convinced that the United States needed a Civil Rights Act to make sure these protests did not happen again 
• What led to the Washington March

  • In August 1963, Congress was debating President Kennedy’s civil rights bill
  • Many of the civil rights organisations - including the NAACP, CORE, the SNCC and the SCLC - organised a joint march in Washington, DC, to show their support for the bill
  • Some worried that this would lead to violent clashes with protesters. Kennedy asked for the march to be called off in case it damaged the chances of the bill being passed
• Events of the Washington March

  • The Lincoln Memorial commemorates the life of Abraham Lincoln, the president who introduced the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation
  • In front of it, around 250,000 people gathered to hear speeches and music about the need to improve civil rights
  • It is estimated that between 20% and 25% of the people marching were white
  • The final speech of the day was by King. In this complex speech, known as ‘I Have a Dream’, he explained how he hoped that black and white Americans could live together as equals, linking his beliefs to the American dream and the US Constitution.
• The role of women in the Washington March

  • Despite the profile of women in the civil rights movement, like Rosa Parks and Ella Baker, women were given limited roles
  • For example, they sang or introduced male speakers at the event. Prominent women were instructed to walk in a group behind the male leaders, meaning King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, couldn’t walk beside her husband
  • The limited role of women at this event highlighted the inequalities in both race and gender in the USA 
• The Impact from the Washington March

  • The March on Washington further raised the profile of the civil rights movement and increased awareness if the effectiveness of peaceful protest
  • However, there was still a lot of resistance to equality in Congress, and violence against black Americans continued
  • President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B Johnson, managed to get Kennedy’s civil rights law passed in 1964.
• What led to the Selma March

  • President Johnson had to take voting rights out of the Civil Rights Act to get it passed through Congress in 1964
  • If he had not, there would have been too much opposition to the act from southern politicians. In order to get a new law guaranteeing voting rights, civil rights campaigners focused on Selma in Alabama
  • Martin Luther King organised another non-violent march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery to present a petition to the governor asking for equal voting rights. 
• Events of the Selma March

  • Not long after the march from Selma began, on 7 March 1965, the police attacked the marchers by the Edmund Pettus Bridge with dogs, whips and tear gas
  • This became known as Bloody Sunday and was shown all around the world in newspapers and on television
  • Martin Luther King initially called off another march to avoid further violence. However, the second march did eventually go ahead and led to President Johnson getting a Voting Rights Act through Congress in August 1965. 
• Martin Luther King's assasination

  • After the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King became involved in a number of other campaigns against poverty and against the Vietnam War
  • In April 1968, he was visiting Memphis to support black American workers who wanted equal treatment when he was assassinated at his hotel by James Earl Ray, a white American
  • There was rioting in over a hundred American cities in response to King’s assassination