The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1957

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jerome Glennon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

scholarly journals Martin Luther King, Jr.

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN A. KIRK
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Martin Luther King

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

1968: End of The Civil Rights Movement?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
New Phase

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.

The Heart of the Movement

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-88
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
White People ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
The Face ◽  
Taxi Service ◽  
Martin Luther King

The chapter reveals the violence associated with the Civil Rights Movement, the courage of African American activists (Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers) and the small minority of southern white ministers who joined them. In Montgomery, Alabama, Robert Graetz provided taxi service for demonstrators. Andrew Turnipseed paid the salary of James Love, who signed the Mobile bus petition, when his parishioners would not. No southern white minister would participate in freedom rides, but John Morris organized a Freedom Ride after the violence subsided. The group was arrested. Joseph Ellwanger was harassed in Birmingham. Hundreds of black protestors were arrested and tortured. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Edwin King was arrested and tortured. The Klan and other white supremacist groups flourished. Black activists and some whites were murdered in Mississippi. As Edwin King commented, “Good white people could do nothing in the face of madness.”

Aftermath

2020 ◽  
pp. 269-302
Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
African American Participant ◽  
American Participant ◽  
Bloody Sunday ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter highlights the national outpouring of grief and anger over the death of Heather Heyer. It discloses how Heyer's ashes were buried in a secret location in order to protect the grave from desecration by neo-Nazis. It also mentions the placement of Heather Heyer's name on a memorial wall at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama that honors martyrs of the civil rights movement. The chapter recalls Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights organization that staged demonstrations in Alabama and Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African American participant in the protest demonstrations, who was fatally shot by a white Alabama state trooper. It reviews the infamous “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965 that was stimulated by Jackson's shooting.

scholarly journals “He Was Shot because America Will Not Give Up on Racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Civil Rights Movement in British Schools

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MEGAN HUNT ◽  
BENJAMIN HOUSTON ◽  
BRIAN WARD ◽  
NICK MEGORAN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
British History ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black British ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Martin Luther King

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

A Discussion of Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation By Jonathan Rieder

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 716-717
Author(s):  
Erica Chenoweth
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. civil rights movement was perhaps the most politically and symbolically important American social movement of the 20th century. And Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was a central text of the movement, and arguably one of the most important political texts of the century. Jonathan Rieder’s Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation offers a rich and sustained account of the role of King’s letter as a contribution to thinking about race and politics, religion and politics, civil disobedience, political ethics, and the struggle for social justice. This symposium brings together a range of political scientists to comment on Rieder’s book and on the importance of King’s “Letter” more generally, as a contribution both to U.S. political discourse and to political theory.

A Philadelphia (Mississippi) Story

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Claire Whitlinger
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
African American Community ◽  
United Methodist Church ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Insight Into

Previous research on Philadelphia, Mississippi and Neshoba County focuses overwhelmingly on the 1964 murders and subsequent legal trials (in 1967 and 2005), providing relatively little insight into the area’s commemorative practices. Furthermore, such research often depicts the twenty-five years following the murders as “the long silence,” a description that is not entirely accurate. It overlooks the annual commemoration services hosted by Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, the African American church that the three civil rights movement workers visited just before their deaths. This chapter recognizes and reconstructs the commemorative activities of Philadelphia’s African American community, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Neshoba County in 1966 and other resistance to the local Ku Klux Klan. Doing so uncovers two distinct communities of memory: one characterized by Philadelphia’s dominant white public sphere, the official, government-sanctioned memory; the other representing a powerful and persistent countermemory embedded in Philadelphia’s African American community. In doing so, this chapter positions the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations within historical context, uncovering the mnemonic landscape that preceded the emergence of these two community-wide commemoration services.

“The Right Achieved and the Wrong Way Conquered”: J. H. Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Conflict over Civil Rights

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wallace Best
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
Martin Luther King

AbstractThe infamous conflict between Joseph Harrison Jackson, longtime president of the National Baptist Convention, Inc. (NBC), and Martin Luther King, Jr., has attracted considerable scholarly attention. For nearly a decade, the two Baptist clerics fought for control of the largest African American religious organization in the country as King sought to use it as the “institutional basis for the Civil Rights Movement.” Treated as a simple confrontation between the “radicalism” of King and the”conservatism” of Jackson, however, the conflict has been misinterpreted and, therefore, undervalued by scholars. It was not a struggle between conservative and progressive forces within the NBC, and Jackson and King were not ideological polar opposites. Their conflict was essentially religious in nature and was predicated on questions regarding what constituted church work among black Baptists. In retaining control of the NBC, Jackson wanted to make sure that the answers to those questions would reflect what he perceived to be the “vital center” of American culture. He was convinced that his commitment to “correct” the social ills of society through national and religious unity would achieve that which was right while conquering that which was wrong. Faced also with the challenges of an increasingly global context within which black religious leaders were compelled to operate, Jackson envisioned the NBC as an organization involved with efforts to bring peace and economic parity around the world. In Jackson's view, King's aim to use the NBC as the “institutional basis for the Civil Rights Movement” was both “anti-American” and limited in scope. Jackson's “gradual” stance on civil rights and his confidence in the democratic process to bring about social change reveal one of the many options employed in post -WWII African American religious and political culture.

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