Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights Movement by Kevin Patrick Mahoney
Whenever
one thinks of Civil Rights in America, one thinks of Martin Luther King. He
towers above all his contemporaries. His rhetoric lives on: his speech of April
3rd 1968 (the "promised land") has been incorporated into many pop songs,
and songs have been written about him. He has become one of the cultural icons
of the twentieth century. It is very easy to believe that if he had not lived,
then the world would be very different today. That is because he was seen to
have made a very great difference. However, it is dangerous to see history as
composed by great men; on the other hand, it is just as dangerous to ignore the
inspiration great men have aroused in others. There were many other
prominent black leaders at that time, of which Ella Baker was a prime example.
Nathan Irvin Huggins has written about this very issue: "Yet it is foolish
to imagine that the individual actors were interchangeable parts and that,
without the particular personality of Martin Luther King, someone else would
have served as well" (1).
Adam Fairclough recounts how King took up his position as the head of the
Montgomery Improvement Association that December in 1955. As he writes,
"King was an accidental leader; he neither precipitated the Montgomery bus
boycott, organized it, nor sought its leadership" (2). Indeed, King was
very much surprised when he was nominated for the leadership. Some historians
believe that his nomination was a reflection of the timidity on the part of the
local black clergy. King, after all, was a newcomer and a young, inexperienced
preacher. Yet the man who nominated him, Rufus A.Lewis, knew that he could do a
better job than the previous incumbent. Even Lewis little realised that King
would become such a great figurehead; he was only looking
(1) Huggins, Charisma
and Leadership p.478.
(2) Fairclough, The Preachers and the People p.427.
2
for
a competent organiser and spokesman.
Martin Luther King made his earliest Civil Rights speech on the evening
after the first successful day of the boycott; a boycott arranged by other
prominent black leaders. There was E.D.Nixon, head of the local NAACP branch,
Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Council, and, of course, Rosa Parks,
the woman who was arrested for sitting on a white person's seat, and therefore
violated segregation. A member of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, her name has justifiably gone down in history. Parks'
action, by her account, was influenced by the two weeks she had spent at the
Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. As Fairclough writes, it was
funded by Southern White philanthropists, and "flouted the local
segregation laws and gave black and white southerners a virtually unique
opportunity to meet and mingle on equal terms" (3). Highlander went
against the traditional image of the Southern institution quite consciously.
The fight against segregation did not simply mean a conflict between white and
black; some whites were also moving against the old-fashioned Jim Crow laws.
Parks was not motivated by anything Martin Luther King did or said, even if she
had heard of him before she sat in that seat.
Fairclough also makes the point that King was in the right profession.
Previously, the leaders of the black communities had been education officials,
principals in colleges such as Dr. Bledsoe in Ellison's novel Invisible Man.
Yet teachers were in a vulnerable position, for their employment depended on
the state. If they spoke out for issues of social equality, then they would
only lose their jobs. So, their tendency was to uphold the status quo. Indeed,
for many years, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was unable to
carry out many effective protests, for their supporters were fearful of losing
their jobs if they were ever arrested. Black preachers were appointed or
discharged by their
(3)
Fairclough p. 408.
3
congregations.
Therefore, King was in a secure profession and he was not the only black
preacher to speak out; many of the others, such as the Reverend C.K.Steele,
took this role upon themselves, unlike King. Congregations controlled how
radical their preachers were, and Steele's stance was not always popular:
"It's been all I could do to stay here" (4). King may not have been
in danger of losing his job, but his life was another matter.
King often recounted the tale of how he decided to keep on with the
boycott: "I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking
about the fact that she could be taken from me any minute" (5). Not only
was his own life in danger - his whole family was at risk. King had been
arrested on a false charge of speeding when taking part in Montgomery's car
pool. He had feared lynching at that point. He came home on the 27th of January
1956, and had been scared by one of the many threatening phone calls his family
received at that time. As David Garrow relates it (and as King often did), King
had a kind of spiritual awakening in his kitchen that night. An "inner
voice" told him to stand up for what he believed in. Historians often have
difficulty with this, for King's enlightenment was far from rational. Yet
people often do make irrational decisions. King was on the point of giving up,
and it would have been understandable had he done so. After all, nobody had
expected the boycott to have lasted so long. In his own mind, the 27th of
January was to have a resounding effect, for on that same date a year later,
dynamite was found on the Kings' porch. Martin's response to this first
assassination attempt was to stand up against the bigots of Montgomery.
It was due to these bigots, and their actions, that King became famous
in the first place. When the boycott leaders were arrested, the media focused
to a great extent on Martin. This media coverage was to be very important, for
it
(4) Fairclough
p.439.
(5) Garrow, King and the Spirit of Leadership p.442.
4
brought
Martin to the attention of several influential Northerners involved in Civil
Rights, as Fairclough relates. The most important was Bayard Rustin, and a
comparison could be made between him and King. For instance, although Rustin
had a great track record in Civil Rights, his name does not have quite the same
resonance. He, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison set about creating a movement
around King (the SCLC) based upon the Montgomery success. They, and
experiences, were what made Martin. Rustin was a controversial figure at this
time, the McCarthy era. He was suspect because of his involvement with the
Young Communist League. So much of a distraction was he, that he was forced to
leave Montgomery and advise King from the North.
Various factors facilitated Civil Rights at this time. Preachers
in the thirties would never have protested against segregation, for it was just
too much part of Southern culture. Yet black Americans who fought against
fascism in the Second World War came back with an increased sense of worth,
having witnessed a freer life. New election laws in the 1950s allowed more
blacks to vote. Part of the success of the Baton Rouge bus boycott in 1953 was
due to white politicians listening to their black constituents. The U.S.
Supreme Court, under Earl Warren, began to reverse its position on the
"separate but equal" clause in Brown V. Topeka and the 1956 case of
Gayle et al V. BOWDER et al. Ironically, this probably contributed to the
virulence with which Montgomery whites opposed the bus boycott.
From what Martin Luther King said himself, we know that he did not set
out to make the movement. Rather, the movement set out to make him, and to make
an asset out of the reputation he had acquired from the violence of White
opposition. Baker has been seen as a hostile witness by Oates, but, as
Fairclough writes, such witnesses can be greatly revealing. Baker had been a
Civil Rights campaigner for many years, and she, more than anyone, had worked
to
5
create
an effective movement in the SCLC. Yet she suspected that King treated her with
disdain, partly because of her sex, and partly because she was not afraid to
criticise him. Fairclough calls the SCLC an autocratic organisation, run, as it
was, by mainly Baptist preachers who rubber stamped everything King said. Yet
his contemporaries did criticise him when he became a social critic in the late
Sixties. King felt a need to move independently, to speak out against the war
in Vietnam and poverty. Despite having won the Nobel Peace Prize, he came to be
regarded with indifference by more and more people. His reputation for
non-violence was nearly destroyed by the riots of March 28th 1968. As Carson
writes, if King were alive today "he would probably be the unpopular
social critic he was on the eve of the Poor People's Campaign rather than the
object of national homage he became after his death" (6). The movement did
indeed create this icon, but Martin Luther King paid for it with his life.
(6) Carson, Charismatic
Leadership in a Mass Struggle p.454.
6
Bibliography
King's
Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity, and Transformation by David J. Garrow,
J.A.H. June 1991.
The
Preachers and the People: The Origins and Early Years of the Southern
Leadership Conference, 1955-1959 by Adam Fairclough, Journal of Southern
History Vol. LII. No.3, August 1986.
Martin
Luther King, Jr., and the Spirit of Leadership by David J. Garrow, J.A.H. Vol.
74. No.2. September 1987.
Martin
Luther King, Jr.: Charismatic Leadership in a Mass Struggle by Clayborne
Carson, J.A.H. Vol 74. No.2. September 1987.
Martin
Luther King, Jr.: Charisma and Leadership by Nathan Irvin Huggins, J.A.H. Vol 74.
No.2. September 1987.
Freedom
Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement by Steven F.
Lawson.
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