Miss you Dr King/ Zakou Ismael): The spring and summer of 1963 proved to be one of the most important times of the Civil Rights movement. On June 12, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated; white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith would not be found guilty of his murder for nearly thirty years. In April, 1963, protest against discrimination in the downtown department stores of Birmingham, Alabama, culminated in protests on April 4. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s arrest during these demonstrations and the media coverage of police violence against the demonstrators catapulted both the movement and King, the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), into the national spotlight to an even greater degree than before. The boycotts and mass marches eventually provided sufficient pressure that white leaders promised to desegregate the stores’ facilities, hire African Americans to work in the stores, and establish a biracial committee for ongoing talks concerning racial problems. These gains were achieved at a price, however: King was jailed briefly; police brutality occurred against protesters; and arrested protesters filled Birmingham’s jails. Nevertheless, the filled jails negatively affected the capacity of police to arrest and hold demonstrators, which was exactly what King and other civil rights leaders had hoped; news coverage of police brutality outraged many citizens; and, while jailed, King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a document that delineated the need for and goals of the direct action campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. The acclaim that met this document foreshadowed the reaction to his speech at the March on Washington two months later. Zakou Ismael: Although he did not know it at the time, King had delivered the greatest speech of his life. His words conveyed, to a television audience of millions, the moral power of the great crusade for civil rights in the 1960’s. No longer could the country ignore the injustices of poverty, segregation, and violence against African Americans in the United States. King’s eloquent plea for justice and freedom was one of the decade’s shining moments; however, it also served as a powerful reminder that much still needed to be done.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:30:48 +0000
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