erns of segregated social experience on a range of issue fronts.
In the cities of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama; Atlanta and Albany, Georgia; and finally in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr., was especially instrumental in bringing about federal enforcement of racial integration of public accommodations (1964), voting rights for blacks (1965), and equality of employment opportunity (1966).
Less well known, but no less important, than the stirring successes of Dr. King and the movement in the South were their failures in the North in the peak years of the movement. In Chicago, the most King could accomplish was to dramatize and expose the fact of prejudice in the North. King led a campaign for open housing and was to lead a demonstration through the streets of the all-white suburb of Cicero, where in 1951 there had been a large race riot (Lewis 343), to dramatize the need for free and open housing. Reflecting on what he took to be the lesson of Chicago--that racial discrimination and segregation in education, housing, and employment were deeply entrenched in North and South alike--King articulated an increasingly radical vision of social transformation of the US: "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values" (Lewis 354).
Vexing the high-profile controversy in Chicago was the kind of subtlety that had not existed in Alabama and Georgia, with their Jim Crow laws. Odious as de jure segregation in the South might have been to civil rights advocates, it possessed the virtue of clarity. But in the North, the force of social custom and practice, as well as housing patterns, was such that public accommodations and public schools (populated according to neighborhood proximity) were in fact--de facto--no less segregated. Thi...