Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in its contemporary form started in 1955 with an act of mild disobedience by a black woman on a bus in the Deep South. Black leaders developed several strategies over the next few years, strategies that would be successful in changing laws and in getting some of the long-standing discriminatory institutions of the South changed. Between 1954 and 1965, the Civil Rights Movement developed into a major movement for social justice, societal change, and self-determination for millions of black Americans. The tactics undertaken by the movement have ranged from violent to nonviolent, with nonviolent predominating under the direction of Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The movement started first around the busing issue in Montgomery, Alabama, but it was also the culmination of decades of frustration nearly a century after the slave era and after a long history of continuing discrimination and ill-treatment. Black leaders did not care to wait for white hearts to change, so they set out to change them with a program of peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, and similar actions. King developed from a local preacher addressing a local issue into a major civil rights leader known throughout the world. His message of non-violence was important as a basis for the Civil Rights Movement and represented one branch of the development of a black consciousness in America in the 1960s. This period in King's life, from the bus boycott to his assassination in 19

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public speaker, notably for his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in 1963. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is presented as a coming together of two very different men, King on the one hand, and assassin James Earl Ray on the other. Haskins gives the assassination more space in his book than is warranted by the time period covered, and in doing so he shows how important this event was for the Civil Rights Movement after that murder, leading to some speculation about what King might have accomplished had he not been killed when he was: There would have been other moments for martin Luther King, had he lived . . . That he did not is the fault not just of the man, or men, who killed him . . . in the broad sense, all of us, in a society that has not rid itself of bigotry, are responsible for the life, and the death, of Martin Luther King. Adam Fairclough is a professor of modern American history at the University of Leeds and has written extensively on the Civil Rights Movement. His book notes that the public career of King covered only twelve years but that in this short time King helped transform the South and the nation as a whole. Fairclough devotes a chapter to King's early life and the beginning of his

Category: History - O