Dr. King Weeps From His Grave
The New York Times
By CORNEL WEST
August 25, 2011


Selected passages

...[T]he age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable...

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle. Read the full post here

Chinese sculpter Lei Yixin working on the MLK Memorial

MLK Jr. Memorial Statue Completed Using Unpaid Chinese Laborers
Think Progress
By Alex Seitz-Wald
August 26, 2011

The opening ceremony for the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial has been postponed as Hurricane Irene closes in on the East Coast, but when it does open, the monument will do so under a different cloud as some point out that the way it was constructed violates some of the core principles for which King fought and died. While often overshadowed by his civil rights legacy, King was an outspoken defender of labor rights and was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he was assassinated. But his memorial was built, in part, using free labor imported from China.

The foundation behind the memorial, which deserves tremendous praise for successfully pulling off the monumental project, controversially selected Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin — known for his bust of Mao Zedong — to be the lead sculptor on the project. Couldn’t the foundation have "chosen a black American, let alone an American," critics ask? Read more here

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Wikipedia

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010
By FRANK RICH
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
July 2, 2010

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago. Read more here

Florida Commission on Human Relations

The Commission is the state agency charged with enforcing the state’s civil rights laws and serves as a resource on human relations for the people of Florida. It is against Florida law to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status or familial status. The Commission investigates complaints of discrimination in the areas of areas of employment, housing, public accommodations and state employee whistle-blower retaliation.

The Commission is responsible for promoting fair treatment, equal opportunity and mutual respect among members of all economic, social, racial, religious and ethnic groups and works to eliminate discrimination against groups and their members. Read more here

Florida Civil Rights Act ("FCRA")
Sections 760.01 - 760.11, Florida Statutes

760.01 Purposes; construction; title.—

(1) Sections 760.01-760.11 and 509.092 shall be cited as the "Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992."

(2) The general purposes of the Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992 are to secure for all individuals within the state freedom from discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicap, or marital status and thereby to protect their interest in personal dignity, to make available to the state their full productive capacities, to secure the state against domestic strife and unrest, to preserve the public safety, health, and general welfare, and to promote the interests, rights, and privileges of individuals within the state.

(3) The Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992 shall be construed according to the fair import of its terms and shall be liberally construed to further the general purposes stated in this section and the special purposes of the particular provision involved.

Was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Dream? 

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

The White House

Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

New York Times

By SHAILA DEWAN

June 1, 2010

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case. The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed "arrogant" and "pretty vocal." In another woman, he said he "detected hostility." Read more here

National Black Farmers Association

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized Republicans for blocking a measure that would compensate black farmers engaged in a decades-old discrimination suit against the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Selections from Interesting Facts About Martin Luther King, Jr.

King’s father was born "Michael King", and Martin Luther King, Jr., was originally named "Michael King, Jr.," until the family traveled to Europe in 1934 and visited Germany. His father soon changed both of their names to Martin Luther in honor of the German Protestant leader Martin Luther.

Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. A precocious student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grade and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school.

King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama when he was twenty-five years old in 1954. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955 with the arrest of Rosa Parks. As a result, King helped organize the boycott from his basement office in the church, and began a 13 year struggle for civil rights that ended with his assassination in 1968.

Inspired by Gandhi’s success with non-violent activism, King visited Gandhi’s birthplace in India in 1959. The trip to India affected King in a profound way, deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America’s struggle for civil rights.

King was also said to be influenced by Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Mays, Hosea Williams, Bayard Rustin, Henry David Thoreau, Howard Thurman and Leo Tolstoy.

King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964.

MLK and Pres. Johnson

Martin Luther King, Jr.
From Wikipedia

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King is often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism.

A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, serving as its first president. King's efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he expanded American values to include the vision of a color blind society, and established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.

In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and stopping the Vietnam War. Read more here

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, sought to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. and stop the Civil Rights Movement

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director

Final Report of The Select Committee
To Study Governmental Operations
And Intelligence Activities

United States Senate
April 23, 1976

From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI's "war" against Dr. King:

"No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business."

The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them. Read more here

Sen. Frank Church

Church Committee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.

By the early years of the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the unfolding Watergate scandal brought the era of minimal oversight to an abrupt halt. The US Congress was determined to rein in the Nixon administration and to ascertain the extent to which the nation's intelligence agencies had been involved in questionable, if not outright illegal, activities. Read more here

FBI COINTELPRO

From Wikipedia

COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.

COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological warfare, planting false reports in the media, smearing through forged letters, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, extralegal violence and assassination. Covert operations under COINTELPRO took place between 1956 and 1971; however, the FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception. The FBI's stated motivation at the time was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order. Read more here

Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil rights movement
The Commercial Appeal
by Marc Perrusquia
September 12, 2010

At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn't just a murder. This was history.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle. Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.

Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel - King's room - and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He'd marched with King, and sat in on some of the movement's sensitive strategy meetings.

A veteran freelancer for America's black press, Withers was known as "the original civil rights photographer," an insider who'd covered it all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the movement in 1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole Miss and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis and his death. Read more here

Clockwise from top left W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr.

African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) refers to the movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring voting rights to them. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1955 and 1968, particularly in the South. The emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from oppression by white Americans.

The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations that highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.

Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the Civil Rights Movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to action. Read more here

Marcus Garvey

African-American Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

The American Civil Rights movement has been made up of many movements. The term usually refers to the political struggles and reform movements between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African Americans and other disadvantaged groups and to end legal racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South.

This article focuses on an earlier phase of the struggle. Two United States Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which overturned Plessy — serve as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's painstaking legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years but made steady progress on voter rights and gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Read more here

Peter, a man who was enslaved in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863, whose scars were the result of violent abuse from a plantation overseer

Slavery in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Slavery in the United States was a form of slave labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mostly in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 following the American Civil War. The first English colony in North America, Virginia, acquired its first Africans in 1619, after a ship arrived that carried a cargo of about 20 Africans. The practice established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s was expanded into English North America.

Most slaves were of African descent and were held by whites; in the English colonies, their status as foreigners and, generally, non-Christians contributed to hardening the legal boundaries of slavery. Over decades, many slaves in the Upper South were born of mixed race with white fathers; because of generations of white fathers, by the early nineteenth century, some mixed-race slaves would qualify as legally white under state laws. Some Native Americans and free blacks also held African-descended slaves. In 1662 the colony of Virginia passed a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which children of a slave mother inherited her status. This was in contrast to English common law, in which children of subjects inherited the status of the father. Many mixed-race children were born into slavery because white men took advantage of slave women. Europeans also held some Native Americans as slaves, including some of African descent. Slave labor was in demand in the areas where there was good-quality soil and climate for large plantations of high-value cash crops with labor-intensive cultivation, such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, and coffee. By the early decades of the 19th century, the overwhelming majority of slaveholders and slaves were in the southern United States. By the Civil War, most slaves were held in the Deep South, where they were engaged in a work-gang system of agriculture on large plantations; two-thirds worked on cotton. They were directed by a supervisory class called overseers, usually white men. Read more here

John Brown
National Park Service

On October 16, 17, and 18, 1859, John Brown and his "Provisional Army of the United States" took possession of the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown had come to arm an uprising of slaves. Instead, the raid drew militia companies and federal troops from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. On the morning of October 18, a storming party of 12 Marines broke down the door of the Armory's fire enginehouse, taking Brown and the remaining raiders captive.

Brown, charged for "conspiring with slaves to commit treason and murder," was tried, convicted, and hanged in Charles Town on December 2, 1859. Before the sentence was carried out, however, Brown issued a prophetic warning:

I wish to say furthermore, that you had better – all you people at the South – prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled – this negro question I mean – the end of that is not yet. Read more here

The Last Moments of John Brown, by Thomas Hovenden

On the day of his death he wrote "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."


Emancipation Proclamation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Left: Henry Louis Stephens, untitled watercolor (c. 1863) of a man reading a newspaper with headline "Presidential Proclamation / Slavery"

The Emancipation Proclamation consists of two executive orders issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The first one, issued September 22, 1862, declared the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The second order, issued January 1, 1863, named ten specific states where it would apply. Lincoln issued the Executive Order by his authority as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.

The proclamation did not name the slave-holding border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware, which had never declared a secession, and so it did not free any slaves there. The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, so it also was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties that were in the process of forming West Virginia, as well as seven other named counties and two cities. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and thirteen named parishes of Louisiana, all of which were also already mostly under Federal control at the time of the Proclamation.

The Emancipation Proclamation was criticized at the time for freeing only the slaves over which the Union had no power. Although most slaves were not freed immediately, the Proclamation did free thousands of slaves the day it went into effect in parts of nine of the ten states to which it applied (Texas being the exception). In every Confederate state (except Tennessee and Texas), the Proclamation went into immediate effect in Union-occupied areas and at least 20,000 slaves were freed at once on January 1, 1863.

Read more here

Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.

He successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. Read more here

Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On December 18, Secretary of State William H. Seward, in a proclamation, declared it to have been adopted. It was the first of the Reconstruction Amendments.

President Lincoln was concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation, which outlawed slavery in the ten Confederate states still in rebellion in 1863, would be seen as a temporary war measure, since it was based on his war powers and did not abolish slavery in the border states or any other areas where slavery was still technically legal. Read more here

Slavery by Another Name, PBS Film

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II. Read more here

George Meadows, Lynching victim, Jefferson County, Alabama January 15, 1889

Lynching in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently in the South from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892.

It is associated with re-imposition of White supremacy in the South after the Civil War. The granting of civil rights to freedmen in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) aroused anxieties among white citizens, who came to blame African Americans for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and forfeiture of social privilege. Black Americans, and Whites active in the pursuit of equal rights, were frequently lynched in the South during Reconstruction. Lynchings reached a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Southern states changed their constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, and, having regained political power, enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to reestablish White supremacy. Notable lynchings of civil rights workers during the 1960s in Mississippi contributed to galvanizing public support for the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights legislation.

The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Southern states created new constitutions between 1890 and 1910, with provisions that effectively disfranchised most blacks, as well as many poor whites. People who did not vote were excluded from serving on juries, and most blacks were shut out of the official political system. Read more here

1920 Duluth lynchings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 1920 Duluth Lynchings occurred on June 15, 1920, when three black circus workers were attacked and lynched by a mob in Duluth, Minnesota. Rumors had circulated among the mob that six African Americans had raped a teenage girl. A physician's examination subsequently found no evidence of rape or assault.

The killings shocked the country, particularly for their having occurred in the northern United States, although four earlier lynchings had occurred in Minnesota. In 2003, the city of Duluth erected a memorial to the murdered workers. Read more here

Michael Fedo 'The Lynchings In Duluth' part 1

Michael Fedo 'The Lynchings In Duluth' part 2

Michael Fedo 'The Lynchings In Duluth' Part 3

Michael Fedo 'The Lynchings of Duluth' part 4

Michael Fedo 'The Lynchings In Duluth' Part 5

Jesse Washington lynching, Waco, TX

Lynching of Jesse Washington
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Jesse Washington lynching, or Waco Horror, was the disfigurement, torture, and lynching of a 17-year old African American farmhand from Waco, Texas, United States, on May 15, 1916. Washington's killing occurred after he was found guilty in a one-hour long trial for the rape and murder of a wealthy 53-year-old woman. Sources conflict as to whether Washington's guilt was ascertained at the trial; although he signed a confession, which was published widely in several local newspapers, Washington was by all accounts illiterate. Some sources indicate that Washington was mentally handicapped.

The incident's modern infamy is in large part due to the numerous extant photographs of the youth's mutilated body, including postcards which were marketed for commercial purposes.

"Topic of the Times", New York Times, May 17, 1916. Retrieved 2008-12-26. "[I]n no other land even pretending to be civilized could a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the savage exultation of its inhabitants." See PDF below. Read more here

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

James Allen, Author

These images make the past present. They refute the notion that photographs of charged historical subjects lose their power, softening and becoming increasingly aesthetic with time. These images are not going softly into any artistic realm. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. And what it still means. -- New York Times. Read more here

Laura Nelson

Lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laura and Lawrence Nelson were African Americans who were lynched in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911.

Laura, her husband, their 15-year-old son Lawrence, and (by some accounts) their baby, were taken into custody after Lawrence shot and killed George Loney, Okemah's deputy sheriff. Loney and a posse had arrived at the Nelsons' home to investigate the theft of a cow. Laura's husband pleaded guilty to the theft and was sent to the state prison. In an effort to save her son, Laura said she had fired the fatal shot. Both she and Lawrence were arrested; the son was taken to the local jail and Laura to a cell in the county courthouse.

Three weeks later a mob of 40 armed men arrived to kidnap the mother and son. They tied up the guard and dragged off the mother and son. Laura was raped, according to some reports, and both were hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River.  Hundreds of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards. The killers were never identified. The folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose father as a young man attended the lynching and later belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, wrote about the event in three songs.

The Nelsons were among at least 4,743 people lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 of them black, 154 of them women, 73 percent of them in the South. Read more here

James Cameron: Lynching Survivor, Activist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Cameron (February 23, 1914 – June 11, 2006), not to be confused with the film director of the same name, was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties for eight years during early integration. After moving to Wisconsin, in 1988 he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.

At his death, he was the only known survivor of a lynching attempt. Read more here

Ku Klux Klan rally, Gainesville, FL

Ku Klux Klan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as The Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism. Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist. The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is classified as a hate group.

The first Klan flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities. The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings. The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the civil rights movement and progress among minorities. Read more here

Jim Crow laws
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages.

Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800–1866 Black Codes, which also restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Read more here

Elizabeth Eckford, Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957

Brown v. Board of Education
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

Read more here

Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site

Elizabeth Eckford, Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas 1957

The Problem We All Live With
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Problem We All Live With is a 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell. An iconic image of the civil rights movement in the United States, it depicts Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl, on her way in to an all-white public school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 during the process of racial desegregation. Because of threats and violence against her, she is escorted by four U.S. Deputy Marshals; the painting is framed such that the marshals' heads are cropped at the shoulders.[1][2] On the wall behind her is written the racial slur "nigger" and the letters "KKK"; a smashed tomato thrown at Bridges is also visible. The white crowd is not visible, as the viewer is looking at the scene from their point of view. The painting is oil on canvas and measures 36 inches high by 58 inches wide.

Read more here

Chief Justice Rehnquist

Did Then-Law Clerk Rehnquist Support Separate-But-Equal Ruling? Article Cites Summary of Lost Letter
ABA Journal Law News Now
By Debra Cassens Weiss
March 22, 2012

A new law review article considers whether William H. Rehnquist was citing his own views in 1952 when he wrote a memo as a Supreme Court law clerk supporting the 1896 decision upholding the separate-but-equal doctrine.

"I realize it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues," Rehnquist wrote to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson, "but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed."

During his confirmation hearing, Rehnquist said he had prepared the memo as a statement of Jackson’s tentative views, and they were not his own opinion, the New York Times reports. Now a new law review article (PDF) seeks to debunk Rehnquist’s pre-confirmation claim.

Jackson was part of the unanimous opinion striking down the separate-but-equal doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education, and Rehnquist appeared angry with his boss in the aftermath, according to the authors of the article, Brad Snyder and John Q. Barrett. The cite Rehnquist’s apparent criticisms of his boss in a 1955 letter written to Justice Felix Frankfurter after Jackson’s death. Read more here

Rosa Parks, booking photo

Montgomery Bus Boycott
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. Many important figures in the civil rights movement were involved in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others, as listed below.

Rosa Parks, fingerprinted

The boycott caused crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city's black population who were the principal boycotters were also the bulk of the system's paying customers. The campaign lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person, to December 20, 1956, when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Read more here

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Alabama deputy discovers civil rights era artifacts

MSNBC/Associated Press
July 23, 2004

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - A sheriff’s deputy who was cleaning a basement storage room stumbled upon a box containing a trove of artifacts from the civil rights era, including black-and-white mug shots of Rosa Parks and a young Martin Luther King Jr.

Historians called the discovery a significant find that provides a one-of-a-kind time capsule into the early days of the civil rights struggle. The 1956 mug shot of King after being arrested in the historic Montgomery bus boycott could be a record of his very first arrest, said Horace Huntley, director of the Oral History Project at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

"I think that is a tremendous find," Huntley said. "It gives us a window to the past that we absolutely would not see otherwise." Read more here

Crisis in Levittown (1957)
Producer: Lee Bobker/Lester Becker
Production Company: Dynamic Films
Sponsor: Katy Brocksmith
Audio/Visual: sound, b&w

The Black upper middle-class Myers family moves into all-white Levittown, PA in August, 1957, and are snubbed and mistreated, in this powerful landmark documentary showcasing racism in the United States.

The mission of The Academic Film Archive of North America (AFA) is to acquire, preserve, document, and promote academic film by providing an archive, resource, and forum for continuing scholarly advancement and public exhibition. Read more here

From Wikipedia: Levitt & Sons would not sell homes to African Americans. Though Levitt did not consider himself to be a racist, he was bowing to the prevailing attitudes of many European Americans during the 1950s, considering housing and racial relations entirely separate matters. However, this did not prevent a European-American family from reselling a home to an African-American family, and Levittown's first black couple, William and Daisy Myers, bought a home in the Dogwood Hollow section in 1957. Their move to Levittown was marked with racist harassment and mob violence, which required intervention by state authorities. This led to an injunction and criminal charges against the harassers while Myers and their supporters refused to surrender and received national acclaim for their efforts. For instance, Daisy Myers has been hailed as "The Rosa Parks of the North", who helped expose the northern states' problems with racial inequality of that time. Daisy Myers later wrote a book about her family's experiences. She died Dec. 5, 2011, in York, Pa. Read more here

William Levitt (left) and brother Alfred, who designed Levittown houses.

1951: American dream houses, all in a row
The Trentonian
By JON BLACKWELL

William Levitt had already established himself as America's biggest housebuilder in 1951 when he looked upon a green expanse of woods and spinach farms in bucolic Bucks County, Pa., and dreamed of instant suburbia….

The early Levittowns also had an ugly secret: no black families allowed. "As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice," Levitt insisted in 1954. "But, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours."

 One black couple, Bill and Daisy Meyers, was daring enough to buy a Levittown, Pa. house in 1957. They were met by rock-throwers, bomb threats and mobs screaming racist taunts at them. It seemed like the bland facade of middle-class conformity was peeling away — to reveal hatred and fear underneath.

 The Levittown "whites-only" policy eventually yielded to political pressure and lawsuits. Levittown, Pa. now has a mere fraction of blacks — just 1.5 percent — but Willingboro is split almost evenly between black and white. In a twist on ‘50s policy, real-estate agents now tout Willingboro's peaceful diversity as an attractive reason to move. Read more here

Jew vs. Jew in Levittown
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Joanne Jacobson
April 13, 2009

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb
By David Kushner
Walker & Company, 256 pages, $25.

Virtually since its founding on New York’s Long Island in 1948, "Levittown" has been a byword for conformity: houses, people, aspirations; a kind of origin narrative of suburban homogeneity. But David Kushner, in "Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb," tells a darker story that shadows that narrative — a story of difference, coming to an explosive climax of racial violence over the summer and fall of 1957 in the second of William Levitt’s meticulously planned communities. Levitt’s career-long commitment to a whites-only policy is both an ugly story and a revealing one, for it dramatically wounded the post-World War II suburban promise of a fresh start and of safety and community, and it highlighted, early on, the fragility of that promise and the complexity of Jews’ relationship to it.

In July 1957, Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx, challenged Levitt’s restrictive covenant by arranging for the private sale of the house next door to them in the Pennsylvania Levittown to an African-American family. As soon as Bill and Daisy Myers and their two children moved in, they were confronted by threatening phone calls and hostile, rock-throwing neighbors. Over the next few months, local vigilantes mobbed neighborhood streets and stoned a local police sergeant who was assigned to protect the Myers family; Confederate flags, purchased at the area’s Shop-O-Rama, began to fly in neighbors’ cars and windows, crosses were burned on lawns.

The state attorney general’s office had to step in to end the violence and bring its perpetrators to trial. Prominent Jewish organizations joined both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing Levitt’s racist policies, and the Federal Housing Administration threatened to cut off mortgages on his next Levittown. "Astonishingly," Kushner writes, "Levitt still refused to back down" — stubbornly making plans for yet another whites-only Levittown, in Willingboro Township, N.J., and fighting legal challenges through the New Jersey court system until, finally, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Read more here

Whites Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA
University of Richmond
History Engine

Upon driving up to their new home at 43 Deepgreen Lane, Daisy Myers was filled with doubt, recalling that she repeatedly asked herself, "what would be the extent of our ostracism? Would we be able to sleep comfortably?" as she studied the four law officers standing on the lawn of her address in the Dogwood Hollow Section of Levittown. These questions regarding the neighborhood reaction to the arrival of a black family in what had been an intentionally all-white enclave, were unfortunately answered over the next two weeks. At dusk each evening, crowds of people gathered outside the Myer’s home, angrily shouting and jeering, singing the national Anthem, and throwing stones toward the Myer’s home, as apparently these "spacious skies," they sang of were not meant to be enjoyed in an integrated setting. Levittown police failed to enforce the court ordered protection for the Myers, prohibiting more than three people from assembling near the residence at once. Mobs consequently gathered in this fashion each night, only finally subsiding due to interference from the state police. After an agonizing fourteen days, the riots ended, but the Myers continued to suffer the anxiety of the consequences triggered by the introduction of integration to Levittown. Harassment of the family persisted for almost three months, as Daisy Myers received threatening phone calls of those who "told [her] they threatened to shoot William down on sight," the family’s deliveries of oil, bread, and milk stopped arriving, and the more than occasional unfriendly white stroller-by forced the Myers to have constant protection, or at the very least, sympathizing company. Anti-segregationist even obtained property immediately neighboring the Myers’ home, using the location to intimidate the family further, evident by their conspicuous display of the confederate flag. Read more here

(Left) William and Daisy Myers, the first African American residents of Levittown, Pa., socializing with their neighbors (Library of Congress)

"State Police Action at Levittown". Letters to Governor George Leader, August 1957, for and against integration of Levittown

The Other Civil Rights Movement: Integrating Levittown
One Nation, Many Americans Project (ONMAP), Greater Egg Harbor Regional School District

The desegregation of Levittown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania well illustrates this story. Following the policy of its developer Bill Levitt, Levittown, PA was built in 1952 as an exclusively white suburb (population size: 60,000). This was not unusual at the time. Between 1935 and 1960, dozens of postwar suburbs kept out African Americans. Although the Supreme Court ruled racial covenants to be unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), federal housing policies subsidizing housing construction and new mortgages, private neighborhood agreements, and real estate agents kept de facto racial exclusions in place at a time when suburbs were rapidly expanding. Such racially based divisions had -- and continue to have -- profound consequences, since where people live affects their educational options, work opportunities, and quality of life. Read more here

Daisy Myers

Levittown pioneer Myers dies
Bucks County Courier Times
By Chris English
December 7, 2011

Daisy Myers, who helped write a chapter in U.S. race relations by being part of the first black family in Levittown, died Monday afternoon at her home in York. She was 86.

Daughter Linda Myers said her mom had been suffering from congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She had gone through weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation before coming home.

Myers, her husband, Bill, and their three small children moved into a house on Deepgreen Lane in the Dogwood Hollow section of Levittown in Bristol Township on Aug. 13, 1957. They bought the house from the homeowner.

All of the original Levittown homeowners were white because the development’s builder, Bill Levitt, wouldn’t sell to black people. He said he wasn’t racist, but selling to black people would have hurt sales too much. Read more here

FREEDOM RIDERS is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism. Read more here

Freedom Riders

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freedom Riders were Civil Rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (of 1960). The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans May 17.

Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South. Read more here

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders

Eric Etheridge, author

On the cover:

Freedom Rider Helen Singleton

Born November 27, 1932, Philadelphia

Arrested July 30, 1961, Train station, Jackson; Student, Santa Monica City College

The Australian Freedom Rides
U.S. Freedom Rides

Baseball bats and bicycle chains

The second bus headed for Birmingham where they were beated with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains. James Peck required more than fifty stitches in his head. The local police let the beatings continue, but when they were over they arrested the Freedom Riders.

The photograph shows members of the KKK beating a black bystander George Webb in the Birmingham Trailways bus station, May 14, 1961. The man with his back to the camera (center right) is FBI undercover agent Gary Thomas Rowe.

Public safey commissioner Bull Conner claimed that he posted no officers at the bus depot because of the holiday. It later emerged that the FBI knew of the planned attack and that the local police stayed away on purpose.

Alabama governor John Patterson offered no apologies, explaining, "When you go somewhere looking for trouble, you usually find it . . . . You just can't guarantee the safety of a fool and that's what these folks are, just fools."

The bus company, however, did not want to risk losing another bus to a bombing, and its drivers, who were all white, did not want to risk their lives. Read more here

Public Broadcasting Service
PBS - American Experience
The Freedom Rides


James Peck, seated on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Alabama, following attack on a Freedom Riders bus.



Letter from Birmingham Jail
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, also known as The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader.

King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham's city government and downtown retailers. He gave bits and pieces of the letter to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters, where the Reverend Wyatt Walker began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle.

King's letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12, 1963, titled "A Call for Unity". The clergymen agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not in the streets. They criticized Martin Luther King, calling him an "outsider" who causes trouble in the streets of Birmingham. To this, King referred to his belief that all communities and states were interrelated. He wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider…" King expressed his remorse that the demonstrations were taking place in Birmingham but felt that the white power structure left the black community with no other choice. Read more here

The Martin Luther King, Jr.
Research and Education Institute
Stanford University

In 2005, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute was created to provide an institutional home for a broad range of activities illuminating the Nobel Peace laureate’s life and the movements he inspired. The Institute’s endowment supports programs that serve as an enduring link between Stanford’s research resources and King’s dream of global peace with social justice. Read more here

Letter from Birmingham Jail
Encyclopedia of Alabama

Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is the most important written document of the civil rights era. The letter served as a tangible, reproducible account of the long road to freedom in a movement that was largely centered around actions and spoken words. Despite its pragmatic and hurried origins, the document is now considered a classic work of protest literature. Read more here

Time Magazine

LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL
Friday, Jan. 03, 1964


While Martin Luther King Jr. was in Birmingham's city jail last April, a group of white clergymen wrote a public statement criticizing him for "unwise and untimely" demonstrations. King wrote a reply—on pieces of toilet paper, the margins of newspapers, and anything else he could get his hands on—and smuggled it out to an aide in bits and pieces. Although in the tumble of events then and since, it never got the notice it deserved, it may yet live as a classic expression of the Negro revolution of 1963. Excerpts from the letter, which was addressed to "My Dear Fellow Clergymen":

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait."

Read more here

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (August 28, 1963)
Black Past.org

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C., was a landmark event for the early civil rights movement and is partly credited with winning the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Over 250,000 demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C., in what was to that point the largest public protest in the history of the nation.

Throughout 1962, civil rights activists had been discussing the need for a large national demonstration to push for federal legislation to combat discrimination. After the widely publicized protests in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, President John F. Kennedy went on record for the first time condemning racial injustice, and it seemed to be the perfect climate for a mass march. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a mass march on Washington, D.C., modeled after his 1941 March on Washington Movement. Read more here

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (or "The Great March on Washington," as styled in a sound recording released after the event) was the second largest political rally for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech advocating racial harmony at the Lincoln Memorial during the march.

The march was organized by a group of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, under the theme "jobs, and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 (police) to over 300,000 (leaders of the march). Observers estimated that 75–80% of the marchers were black and the rest were white and other minorities.

The march is widely credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). Read more here

Guidebook that aided black travelers during segregation reveals vastly different D.C.
Washington Post
By J. Freedom du Lac
September 12, 2010

The old Holleywood tavern at Ninth and U streets NW, one of just eight bars in Washington listed as open to blacks in 1949, is now the indie-rock bar, DC9. Where the Brass Rail restaurant once served blacks who were excluded from most downtown eateries, there is now a day-care center for toddlers and infants. Green's, a beauty parlor on 18th, south of U, is now a Peruvian restaurant.

Half a century after the edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book with those D.C. listings was published, playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey stumbled upon the book, which was once a kind of Fodor's Black America - a travel guide for African Americans road-tripping in an era of racial segregation…

With a quotation from Mark Twain - "Travel is fatal to prejudice" - on its cover, the guidebook was published annually from 1936 until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rendered it obsolete. The book, inspired by guides that told Jewish travelers which hotels and restaurants were restricted, covered places from Mexico to Montreal, identifying restaurants, service stations, hotels, "tourist homes," taverns, liquor stores, beauty parlors, nightclubs, drugstores and tailors that catered to blacks who'd grown weary of wandering into "whites-only" establishments.

During segregation, it wasn't uncommon for African American travelers to pack meals, blankets and even containers of gasoline in their cars for long trips. "We didn't want to stop anywhere and get into a situation where we didn't know how it was going to turn out," says Ramsey, who is 60. Read more here

Mississippi civil rights workers murders
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mississippi civil rights workers murders involved the lynching of three anti-racism and social justice activists near Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21, 1964, during the American Civil Rights Movement.

The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from nearby Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, demonstrated the dangers faced by civil rights workers in the South, especially during what became known as "Freedom Summer", dedicated to voter education and registration. Blacks in Mississippi, as throughout the former Confederacy, lived under racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, and had been essentially disfranchised in Mississippi since the passage of the state constitution of 1890. Read more here

Civil Rights Act of 1964
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public ("public accommodations").

Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who would later sign the landmark Voting Rights Act into law. Read more here

The Dirksen Congressional Center, Reference Sources on the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 –

Why It Matters

Today’s Drum, Civil Rights Law

UNC University Library

Alabama state troopers attack civil-rights demonstrators outside Selma, AL, Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

Selma to Montgomery marches
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by local African-Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). In 1963, the DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began voter-registration work. When white resistance to Black voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.

The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march, the following Tuesday, resulted in 2,500 protesters turning around after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The third march started March 16. The marchers averaged 10 miles (16 km) a day along U.S. Route 80, known in Alabama as the "Jefferson Davis Highway". Protected by 2,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals, they arrived in Montgomery on March 24, and at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25.

The route is memorialized as the Selma To Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a U.S. National Historic Trail. Read more here

Voting Rights Act of 1965
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. §§ 1973–1973aa-6) is a landmark piece of national legislation in the United States that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S.

Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibits states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise. The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The Act established extensive federal oversight of elections administration, providing that states with a history of discriminatory voting practices (so-called "covered jurisdictions") could not implement any change affecting voting without first obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice, a process known as preclearance. These enforcement provisions applied to states and political subdivisions (mostly in the South) that had used a "device" to limit voting and in which less than 50 percent of the population was registered to vote in 1964. The Act has been renewed and amended by Congress four times, the most recent being a 25-year extension signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006.

The Act is widely considered a landmark in civil-rights legislation, though some of its provisions have sparked political controversy. During the debate over the 2006 extension, some Republican members of Congress objected to renewing the preclearance requirement (the Act's primary enforcement provision), arguing that it represents an overreach of federal power and places unwarranted bureaucratic demands on Southern states that have long since abandoned the discriminatory practices the Act was meant to eradicate. Conservative legislators also opposed requiring states with large Spanish-speaking populations to provide bilingual ballots. Congress nonetheless voted to extend the Act for twenty-five years with its original enforcement provisions left intact. Read more here

Loving v. Virginia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Read more here

HBO Documentary Films: The Loving Story

On June 2, 1958, a white man named Richard Loving and his part-black, part-Cherokee fiancée Mildred Jeter travelled from Caroline County, VA to Washington, D.C. to be married. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in 21 states, including Virginia. Back home two weeks later, the newlyweds were arrested, tried and convicted of the felony crime of "miscegenation." To avoid a one-year jail sentence, the Lovings agreed to leave the state; they could return to Virginia, but only separately. Living in exile in D.C. with their children, the Lovings missed their families and dearly wanted to return to their rural home. At the advice of her cousin, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who wrote her back suggesting she get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union. Read more here

The Loving Story: TIME LightBox - Photographs of Grey Villet

The Loving Story Facebook

I've Been to the Mountaintop
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"I've Been to the Mountaintop" is the popular name of the last speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr.

King spoke on April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee. The next day, King was assassinated.

The speech primarily concerns the Memphis Sanitation Strike. King calls for unity, economic actions, boycotts, and nonviolent protest, and challenges the United States to live up to its ideals. At the end of the speech, he discusses the possibility of an untimely death. Read more here

Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martin Luther King, Jr., a prominent American leader of the African-American civil rights movement and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. On June 10, 1968, James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested in London at Heathrow Airport, extradited to the United States, and charged with the crime. On March 10, 1969, Ray entered a plea of guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee state penitentiary. Ray later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful; he died in prison on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70. Read more here

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Briefcase, Room 306, the Lorraine Motel
King's neatly packed, monogrammed briefcase in his room at the Lorraine. "That is Dr. King's briefcase, just as it was. His brush. His pajamas. That's a can of shaving cream there on top. And you can see his book, Strength to Love, peeping from the pocket."


Aeschylus

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

- RFK quoting the poet Aeschylus

Can you image....that we once lived in a time where a man like this could have been president?

Forget the appeal across races. Forget the charisma, the dedication to the poor, the ability to say things others were too afraid to say.

The fact that he could speak like this, extemporaneously, to a crowd that just heard their hero had been shot and killed, is astonishing. - author unknown

The Martin Luther King Assassination
Mary Ferrell Foundation

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the opening acts which plunged 1968 into a year of turmoil. Coming on the heels of the Tet Offensive which showed the war in Vietnam to be in disarray, and President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, King's assassination was itself soon followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy, violence at the Democratic National Convention, and a general unraveling of the country into a period of violence and despair.

Like the other assassinations of the 1960s, the King murder had its "lone nut," in this case James Earl Ray, an escaped convict who purchased the rifle found near the assassination scene and was caught in flight two months later. But, also like the other assassinations, evidence of conspiracy was easily found, despite being ignored by government investigators. Read more here

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr. Conspiracy Part 2

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr. Conspiracy Part 3

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr. Conspiracy Part 4

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr. Conspiracy Part 5

Conspiracy, History Channel DVD

James Earl Ray

The King family does not believe the real killer was ever brought to justice, and brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Loyd Jowers. On December 8, 1999 a Memphis jury found Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators assassinated King by a conspiracy that included agencies of the U.S.  government, and that James Earl Ray was used a scapegoat. Read more here

Dr. King's Slaying Finally Draws A Jury Verdict, but to Little Effect
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK with EMILY YELLIN
December 10, 1999

When 12 jurors returned their decision in a wrongful death trial in Memphis on Wednesday afternoon, they became the first jury to hold someone responsible for playing a role in the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968.

But with key players dead, with confessions recanted and altered, and with a vast conspiracy alleged but not proved, Wednesday's verdict in the civil trial of Loyd Jowers seems unlikely, ultimately, to untangle the knot of fact and theory surrounding one of the century's most traumatic events.

The jury in Memphis declared Mr. Jowers liable in Dr. King's death for having purportedly hired a now-dead Memphis police officer, as part of a vast conspiracy, to kill Dr. King. It also found that unnamed others, including government agencies, had been involved, in effect accepting the plaintiffs' contention that James Earl Ray was innocent, despite his guilty plea. Read more here

Dexter King

Selected excepts

"At a news conference here today, seated at a table with a view of Dr. King's crypt, the civil rights leader's widow and children made it clear that they now consider the case closed. The ''most incredible coverup of the century'' has now been exposed, said Dexter Scott King, one of Dr. King's four children."

''We know what happened,'' Mr. King said. ''This is the period at the end of the sentence. So please, after today, we don't want questions like 'Do you believe James Earl Ray killed your father?' I've been hearing that all my life. No, I don't, and this is the end of it.''

"In Washington, where Justice Department investigators have been reviewing aspects of the assassination at the request of the King family, officials said today that the Memphis verdict was unlikely to alter their review. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Justice Department's report was nearly complete and that criminal charges were not likely to be brought." (Eric Holder, now U.S. Attorney General) Read more here

Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir

Dexter Scott King, Author

Dexter Scott King was just seven years old when he learned, while watching television one April evening, that his father -- the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr -- had just been shot and killed. In this book he reveals for the first time what it was like to carry a great name but also to carry a heavy burden. Read more here

The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis

Probe Magazine

by Jim Douglass
Spring 2000

"According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government." Read more here

An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King

William F. Pepper, Author

"On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a workers' strike. By nightfall, army snipers were in position, military officers were on a nearby roof with cameras, and Lloyd Jowers had been paid to remove the gun after the fatal shot was fired. When the dust had settled, King had been hit and a clean-up operation was set in motion-James Earl Ray was framed, the crime scene was destroyed, and witnesses were killed. William Pepper, attorney and friend of King, has conducted a thirty-year investigation into his assassination. In 1999, Loyd Jowers and other co-conspirators were brought to trial in a civil action suit on behalf of the King family. Seventy witnesses set out the details of a conspiracy that involved J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Richard Helms and the CIA, the military, Memphis police, and organized crime. The jury took an hour to find for the King family. In An Act of State, you finally have the truth before you-how the US government shut down a movement for social change by stopping its leader dead in his tracks." Read more here

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?: Second Edition

James Earl Ray, Author

James Earl Ray never had a trial. A few days after he was coerced into pleading guilty, he withdrew his guilty plea. Tennessee law provides Ray with the right to a trial, but his eight requests for a trial have been denied. Now Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King, has joined Ray in seeking a trial to set the record straight. Her son, Dexter King, told a Tennessee court on February 20, 1997: "It is right, for the sake of truth and justice that there be a trial to get at the truth. Nothing but the truth will set us free." The rifle that Ray admits he brought to Memphis in April, 1968 was never test-fired; its bullets were never compared to the bullet that killed Martin Luther King, Jr. Although the FBI stated that the bullet was too damaged to test, ballistics experts agree that newly developed technology, a scanning electron microscope, can determine whether the rifle with Ray's fingerprints was the weapon. The rifle with Ray's fingerprints on it was carefully left on Main Street in Memphis in a box, along with Ray's prison radio. The radio had Ray's identification number etched into it. Would an assassin take time to leave incriminating evidence before fleeing the scene? In 1994 a former federal judge and a jury from Memphis heard attorneys present a televised mock trial of James Earl Ray. A former prosecutor presented the case and Ray was defended by an attorney of his choice. The jury found Ray "not guilty." The real killer has never been apprehended. After reading this book you too will ask "Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?" Read more here

Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gerald Posner, Author

In the three decades since April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis, scores of books and articles have questioned whether James Earl Ray, King's killer, acted alone or was part of a larger conspiracy. Now, based on explosive new interviews, confidential files, and previously undisclosed evidence, bestselling author Gerald Posner finally resolves the simple truth of the last great political murder mystery of the 1960s, definitively proving that Ray acted alone. Beginning with a straightforward narrative of the events before, during, and after the shooting, Posner untangles the case's leading puzzles: Was there a mysterious person named Raoul who directed Ray in the year leading up to the murder? Were the FBI, the CIA, or an arm of the Mafia involved? Did the military have a covert team of snipers in Memphis on the day King died? Was James Earl Ray a patsy, as the King family has publicly declared? At the heart of this book is an in-depth profile of Ray himself, a fascinating profile of a career criminal from one of the most forsaken parts of poor white America. Posner re-creates the memorable dramas of the case: Dr. King's rousing "mountaintop" speech the night before his death; the chilling moments of the assassination; Ray's frantic flight across four countries as he tried to escape justice; and the shock of the King family's embrace of Ray just before his own death in jail. A riveting search for justice, Killing the Dream finally thwarts James Earl Ray's efforts to take his secrets to the grave, and proves the identity of King's killer beyond a shadow of a doubt. Read more here

EMI Strikes Deal With Martin Luther King Jr. Estate
The New York Times
by Dave Itzkoff
March 17, 2009

EMI Music Publishing said that it had signed a deal with the estate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to represent the intellectual property of the civil rights leader. In a news release, EMI, which handles publishing rights for musical artists like Beyoncé and Kanye West as well as songs like "Over The Rainbow" and "I Heard It Through The Grapevine," said that it would represent the use of Dr. King’s words in recordings and music as well as his words and image in online and digital media. EMI said it would also work with Intellectual Properties Management, an Atlanta-based company that licenses Dr. King’s image, likeness and recorded voice for nonmusical works. In recent years, samples of Dr. King’s speeches have turned up in songs like "Long Way to Go" by Gwen Stefani and "Madagascar" by Guns N’Roses. Read more here

EMI
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a British multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It was the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and was one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major publishing arm, EMI Music Publishing — also based in London with offices globally. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but since February 2011 it was wholly owned by Citigroup (which took the then financially troubled company over because of more than $4 billion in debt it held). EMI is a member of the RIAA & IFPI. Read more here

Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. (194 F.3d 1211 (11th Cir. 1999)) is a United States court case that involved a longstanding dispute about the public domain copyright status of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous speech, known by the key phrase I have a dream, originally delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. The court ruled that the speech was actually a performance and is, like other performances such as plays and CBS's own television shows, covered by copyright, and is not in the public domain. The case was never finally decided as the two sides ultimately settled the matter out of court. Read more here

Malcolm X

malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com

The most complete collection of Malcolm X speeches and interviews ever assembled, The Complete Malcolm X contains more than 12 hours of video, 28 hours of audio, 250 pages of speech transcriptions, over 4,000 pages of FBI files and more: over 40 hours of material in total on one DVD. Read more here

By any means necessary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

By any means necessary is a translation of a phrase coined by the French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre in his play Dirty Hands. It entered the popular culture through a speech given by Malcolm X in the last year of his life. It is generally considered to leave open all available tactics for the desired ends, including violence; however, the "necessary" qualifier adds a caveat—if violence is not necessary, then presumably, it should not be used. Read more here

MLK and Malcolm X

Malcolm X
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. His detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, antisemitism, and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history, and in 1998, TIME named The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Read more here 

Peeling Away Multiple Masks
The New York Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 7, 2011

He was a master of reinvention who had as many names as he did identities: Malcolm Little, Homeboy, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Big Red, Satan, Malachi Shabazz, Malik Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and, most famously, Malcolm X. A country bumpkin who became a zoot-suited entertainer who became a petty criminal who became a self-taught intellectual who became a white-hating black nationalist who became a follower of orthodox Islam who became an international figure championing "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people."

In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," Manning Marable — a professor at Columbia University and the director of its Center for Contemporary Black History, who died just last week — vividly chronicles these many incarnations of his subject, describing the "multiple masks" he donned over the years, while charting the complex and contradiction-filled evolution of his political and religious beliefs. The book draws from diaries, letters, F.B.I. files, Web resources and interviews with members of Malcolm X’s inner circle. Read more here

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced doo-BOYZ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in western Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a tolerant community and experienced little racism as a child. After graduating from Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.

Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included colored persons everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in their struggles against colonialism and imperialism. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa, and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread bigotry in the United States military. Read more here

Booker T. Washington
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915. Representative of the last generation of black American leaders born in slavery, he spoke on behalf of the large majority of blacks who lived in the South but had lost their ability to vote through disfranchisement by southern legislatures. While his opponents called his powerful network of supporters the "Tuskegee Machine," Washington maintained power because of his ability to gain support of numerous groups: influential whites; the black business, educational and religious communities nationwide; financial donations from philanthropists, and his accommodation to the political realities of the age of Jim Crow segregation.

Washington was born into slavery to Jane, an enslaved woman, and a white father, a nearby planter, in a rural area of the southwestern Virginia Piedmont. After emancipation, his mother moved the family to rejoin her husband in West Virginia; there Washington worked in a variety of manual labor jobs before making his way to Hampton Roads seeking an education. He worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) and attended college at Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University). In 1876, Washington returned to live in Malden, West Virginia, teaching Sunday School at African Zion Baptist Church; he married his first wife, Fannie Smith, at the church in 1881. After returning to Hampton as a teacher, in 1881 he was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Read more here

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination". Its name, retained in accordance with tradition, uses the once common term colored people.

The NAACP bestows the annual Image Awards for achievement in the arts and entertainment, and the annual Spingarn Medals for outstanding positive achievement of any kind, on deserving African Americans. It has its headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland.

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PBS Independent Lens Facebook

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
PBS Independent Lens

For three decades, the film canisters sat undisturbed in a cellar beneath the Swedish National Broadcasting Company. Inside was roll after roll of startlingly fresh and candid 16mm footage shot in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, all of it focused on the anti-war and Black Power movements. When filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson discovered the footage, he decided he had a responsibility to shepherd this glimpse of history into the world.

With contemporary audio interviews from leading African American artists, activists, musicians and scholars, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 looks at the people, society, culture, and style that fuelled an era of convulsive change. Utilizing an innovative format that riffs on the popular 1970s mixtape format, Mixtape is a cinematic and musical journey into the black communities of America.

At the end of the '60s and into the early '70s, Swedish interest in the U.S. civil rights movement and the U.S. anti-war movement peaked. With a combination of commitment and naiveté, Swedish filmmakers traveled across the Atlantic to explore the Black Power movement, which was being alternately ignored or portrayed in the U.S. media as a violent, nascent terrorist movement.

Despite the obstacles they encountered, both from the conservative white American power establishment and from radicalized movement members themselves, the Swedish filmmakers stayed committed to their investigation, and ultimately formed bonds with key figures in the movement.

This newly discovered footage offers a penetrating examination — through the lens of Swedish filmmakers — of the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975, and its worldwide resonance. The result is like an anthropological treatise on an exotic civilization from the point of view of outsiders who approached their subject with no assumptions or biases. Read more here

Abraham, Martin and John
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 


"Abraham, Martin and John" is a 1968 song written by Dick Holler and first recorded by Dion. It is a tribute to the memories of icons of social change, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. It was written as a response to the assassinations of King and the younger Kennedy in April and June 1968.

Each of the first three verses features one of the men named in the song's title, for example:

    Has anybody here, seen my old friend Abraham -
    Can you tell me where he's gone?
    He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young
    But I just looked around and he's gone.

After a bridge, the fourth and final verse mentions Robert "Bobby" Kennedy, and ends with a description of him walking over a hill with the other three men. Read more here

National Civil Rights Museum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, is a privately owned complex of museums and historic buildings built around the former Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Major components of the complex on 4.14 acres include a museum which traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1600s to the present, the Lorraine Motel and hotel buildings as well as the Young and Morrow Building at 422 Main Street on the west side of Mulberry up a small hill across the street from the motel which was the site where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and later recanted) to shooting King from a second story bathroom window as well as the Canipe’s Amusement Store at 418 Main Street next door to the rooming house where the alleged murder weapon with Ray's fingerprints was found. Included on the grounds is the brushy lot that stood between the rooming house and the motel where a differing theory says the fatal shot came from a different weapon at ground level in a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers who operated Jim's Grill which opened onto the lot.

The complex is owned by the nonprofit Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation. It is located on the south edge of Downtown Memphis, Tennessee in what is now called the South Main Arts District and is about six blocks east of the Mississippi River. Read more here

America's Black Holocaust Museum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

America's Black Holocaust Museum located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the only memorial dedicated specifically to the victims of the enslavement of Africans in the United States. It was founded by James Cameron, America's last living survivor of a lynching. Cameron died in 2006; in 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of financial problems. It has not re-opened since. Read more here

The Missing Quote from the King Memorial
Black Agenda Report
by Don DeBar
January 17, 2012

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government...I cannot be silent." – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"President Barack Obama invoked the words of Dr. King – some of them – without even mentioning war."

While the insiders in Washington parse the meaning of the paraphrased words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. regarding his own epitaph, his true legacy – the one that many believe led to his murder – has been whitewashed from the King Memorial entirely. Read more here

Memorials and Spectacles: The Anti-Dr. King Monument
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by editor and columnist Jared Ball
October 18, 2011

"All we are left with is a memorial that will permanently impose itself, as spectacle, preventing actual discussion of the man or his ideas."

This week’s dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C. was a quintessential display of what Guy Debord called "spectacle." In his words, what we prefer to refer to as "media" is really the communication of "orders" whereby "those who give them are also those who tell us what [to] think of them." These orders, Debord says, "permeate all reality," and form a "crushing presence" so as to assure that "no place [is] left where people can discuss the realities which concern them…" And by so doing we are left with only the "unanswerable lies [which] have succeeded in eliminating public opinion." In fact, Debord says, the "spectacle" is "the end of history [which] gives power a welcome break." Such displays as we witnessed this weekend operate under the orders of ending critical thought and radical reflection and gave us a parade of characters who, as Debord also says, are the "experts [who] serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status." Read more here