HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/martin-luther-king Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:42:29 GMT en hourly 1 Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation https://www.historyextra.com/membership/suing-for-equality-how-sarah-mae-flemming-began-the-legal-fight-against-segregation/ Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:22 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/suing-for-equality-how-sarah-mae-flemming-began-the-legal-fight-against-segregation/ The year before the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, another black American woman started a legal fight against segregation on public transport. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies highlight her role in the civil rights battle On 2 November 2005, thousands of mourners crowded into the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit to attend the funeral of black American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Former US president Bill Clinton led the tributes before a congregation that held hands and sang the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’.
The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama is familiar yet sometimes misunderstood. Her arrest for refusing to surrender a bus seat in December 1955 followed not the spontaneous action of an apolitical seamstress but a calculated decision by a lifelong activist who, along with other members of the black community, had put increasing pressure on white city leaders to end the daily indignities of segregated bus journeys. Her detention may have been the catalyst for the desegregation of public transport in the South, but other black women before her had also braved similar hurt, humiliation and intimidation.
Among them was a woman called Sarah Mae Flemming. In June 1954, Flemming was involved in an incident that is far less celebrated than the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet it was an incident that truly laid the foundation for the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws as applied to public transport.
Flemming was a child of the Great Depression, one of seven children raised by a farming couple whose own parents had been enslaved. Born on 28 June 1933, she grew up alongside her siblings in a busy household near Eastover, South Carolina, a small community some 20 miles south-east of the state capital, Columbia.
After graduating from high school, Flemming worked briefly for a relative in Ohio before returning to South Carolina to help support her family, taking a position as a maid for white residents in one of Columbia’s affluent suburbs.
The day that changed her life, 22 June 1954, started much as any other: she boarded a bus to work. At first there was standing room only, until a seat was vacated by a departing white passenger. When Flemming took the seat, however, the driver shouted at her to move. According to contentious evidence he gave later in court, she had breached the ‘colour line’ – the long-standing system of racial segregation enforced by so-called Jim Crow laws – by sitting in front of two white women.
Embarrassed, Flemming decided that she would walk the remaining 2 miles to work, and pulled the cord for the next stop. At that time, black Americans were required to enter and leave buses by the rear door – but the aisle was too crowded, so she tried to follow white passengers through the front exit. The driver stood in her way, then struck her in the stomach. Flemming was forced to shuffle through the rear door, and from there to a hospital. Worse than the pain from the punch was the wound to her dignity.
From insult, opportunity
The hurt and humiliation of one young woman did, though, present an opportunity to the broader black community. Just a month earlier, the United States Supreme Court had reached a landmark decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, outlawing school segregation. To Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the secretary of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP – the national organisation founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights for people of colour – Flemming’s mistreatment presented a chance to test whether that ruling also applied to public transport. Flemming agreed to help, resolving to challenge Jim Crow laws despite the risks to which she would be exposed.
Simkins hired white lawyer Philip Wittenberg, who filed a suit accusing the bus company of having violated Flemming’s right to the full protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. He sought $25,000 in damages.
The legal process in Flemming v South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (who operated the bus) was convoluted and slow. District Court Judge George Bell Timmerman, a staunch segregationist, dismissed the case on the grounds that the Brown decision applied only to schools and not to public transport. The NAACP assisted with an appeal to the US Fourth Circuit Court, which deemed that the Brown decision applied to all aspects of public life – and that the Flemming case must proceed to trial.
Civil rights activists sensed that they were on the verge of a breakthrough – a perception sharpened when, in April 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bus company. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins saw the decision as the end of bus segregation, telling reporters: “Now that the Supreme Court has spoken with clarity, we are hopeful that the majority of communities throughout the South will fall in line.”
There seemed good reason for such optimism. Within a day, transit companies in 13 cities across the region had announced the desegregation of their buses. That included Montgomery City Lines, which instructed its drivers not to enforce segregated seating, an action blocked when city officials secured a court injunction.
Yet the Flemming case did not win the fight against the colour line in Montgomery – where the boycott was ongoing, and would continue for over a year – or elsewhere. Both sides in the civil rights struggle soon realised that the Supreme Court had not actually determined whether segregated busing was unconstitutional, only that it would not consider an appeal until the lower court had actually heard the case.
Battle lines in Montgomery remained drawn: white city leaders secured an injunction that stopped the bus company desegregating, while black activists persevered with their boycott. “Jim Crow Dies Hard,” affirmed a headline in the Washington Post. Proving the point, when the Flemming case returned to the district court in June 1956, Judge Timmerman dismissed it a second time. Not until June 1957, following a successful appeal by Flemming’s lawyers, did the case finally convene. It was not worth the wait. An entirely white male jury took only 30 minutes to decide against the plaintiff.
Serving a greater good
Flemming had lost the will to fight. Rather than remain involved in the escalating civil rights struggle, she retreated into the privacy of family life, raising three children with her husband, whom she married while the case was ongoing. “As for myself,” she informed the press, “I never rode a city bus since they put me off and I never will again.” Her own battle had ended in defeat, but Flemming had contributed to the broader triumph of civil rights activists.
In February 1956, lawyers filed suit on behalf of four black female plaintiffs who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. Four months later, a district court ruled in their favour, striking down bus segregation. In November, the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision in the case of Browder v Gayle. A year after it had begun, the organisers of the Montgomery bus boycott had won a decisive victory.
It is not known whether Flemming was even aware of the fact, but the judges who ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional cited as precedent the appeal court ruling in her case that ‘separate but equal’ no longer had any basis in law. Flemming did not receive justice, but her fight through the courts had served an even greater good.
Sarah Mae Flemming lived the rest of her life, away from the spotlight, in Eastover with her husband and their three children until her untimely death on 16 June 1993, aged just 59. By then, Rosa Parks had long overshadowed her – a situation compounded by the fact that Flemming never spoke publicly about her contribution to the civil rights cause.
Barely a footnote in histories of the movement written during her lifetime, her story has belatedly been rediscovered. Today, locals and visitors to downtown Columbia can stroll along Sarah Mae Flemming Way to see the impressive mural that honours her memory. It is a reminder that, though charismatic civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X became the focus of most attention, the fight for racial equality was as much – if not more – about ordinary people such as Flemming performing extraordinary acts of courage.
Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies are, respectively, professor and associate professor of American history at the University of Sussex
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> "These women transformed his understanding of the world": making Malcolm X https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-women-transformed-his-understanding-of-the-world-making-malcolm-x/ Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-women-transformed-his-understanding-of-the-world-making-malcolm-x/ Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders in the US civil rights movement – thanks largely, explains Ashley D Farmer, to the women who shaped his life and ideas On a balmy spring evening in Omaha, Nebraska, Louise Little answered a knock at the door. She must have been terrified when she opened it and saw several knights of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback, demanding that she produce her husband at once. Louise knew she was in trouble. She was all alone save her three children – Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert – and pregnant with her fourth child, Malcolm. But as the Klansmen brandished their guns, Louise stood her ground. She refused to let them see fear in her eyes or tell them her husband’s whereabouts.
In the end, the men left with a threat on their lips as they rode off into the night. Such moments were par for the course for Louise Little, the first of many black women who taught, mentored and shaped the man now known as Malcolm X.
Malcolm was born 100 years ago – on 19 May 1925, in Omaha. He was Grenadian-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl Little’s fourth child together. It is easy to see why Earl was smitten with Malcolm’s mother: Louise had travelled extensively, she spoke multiple languages and she was politically engaged.
Malcolm’s parents met in Montreal, Canada at a gathering of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A black nationalist from Jamaica, Garvey captured the black masses with his calls for race pride, and the right for black people all over the world to control their communities and determine their futures. The pair married in 1919, relocated briefly to Philadelphia and then moved to Omaha. By the time Malcolm was born, the Littles were well-known nationalist organisers in the area. Earl was the president of the local chapter of the UNIA, while Louise served as its secretary, managing memberships and writing for the UNIA’s newspaper, The Negro World.
Childhood tragedies
The couple worked hard to survive during Jim Crow – the state-sponsored racial caste system that deployed disenfranchisement, racial violence and segregation laws to make black people second-class citizens in almost every walk of life. Louise and Earl raised their children as Garveyites, eventually moving to Lansing, Michigan in search of a better life and a bigger black nationalist community.
Life came to a screeching halt for six-year-old Malcolm when his father, Earl, announced he was going into town on 29 September 1931. It wasn’t uncommon for Earl to go out like this, but this time Louise had a gnawing feeling that white supremacists were gunning for her husband more than usual. She begged him not to go. But Earl wouldn’t listen. Later that night, Lansing police confirmed her fears. Earl was dead. The officers claimed that Earl had slipped and fallen on the tracks and a streetcar had run him over. But Malcolm claimed the KKK was at fault. They had long wanted his nationalist father dead.
Whatever the cause of Earl’s death, Louise was now left to raise their seven children alone. She got by, at first, by following Garvey’s ideals. Grieving as she was, Malcolm’s mother read to him from The Negro World, modelled black economic independence by shopping at black-owned businesses, and fostered his interest in the global black diaspora. Louise Little was Malcolm’s earliest teacher and laid the foundation for him to become one of the greatest black nationalist leaders of the 20th century.
But Louise’s life lessons were cut short. Years into the Great Depression, and with too many children to feed, Malcolm’s mother started to fall apart. In December 1939, doctors declared Louise insane and sent her to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo. The state placed the Little children in foster care and sent Malcolm to a juvenile home in the mostly white town of Mason, Michigan. By his own account, Malcolm thrived there, earning good grades and integrating into his school community. But a chance encounter with his half-sister, Ella Collins, changed the trajectory of his life.
Inspirational sister
Ella, who was one of Earl’s children from his first marriage, visited Malcolm and her other half-siblings when he was a young teen. Malcolm was impressed. “[Ella was] the first really proud black woman I had ever seen,” he recalled in his autobiography. “Ella wasn’t just black, but like our father she was jet black. The way she sat, moved, talked, did everything, bespoke of somebody who did and got exactly what she wanted.”
Ella and her husband, Kenneth Collins, adopted Malcolm when he was 15 years old, and welcomed him into their home in Roxbury, the black part of Boston. “No physical move in my life,” Malcolm noted of his relocation in 1941, was “more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did.” For better or worse, the move opened up a whole new world for Malcolm. Ella did her best to keep Malcolm on the straight and narrow, but the city life was too much of a draw. It didn’t take long for him to join up with the wrong crowd. Malcolm, or ‘Detroit Red’ as he was known on Roxbury’s streets, became part of a five-person larceny ring that plundered its way through jewellery stores and pawn shops across the city. After several close calls, the police finally nabbed the quartet.
His sisters were Malcolm’s steadying force while he was behind bars. Ella was one of Malcolm’s first and only visitors at the Charlestown State Prison in 1946, where the 20-year-old started his 10-year sentence for burglary. But it was his older sister, Hilda, who prompted the despondent Malcolm to change course. Frustrated, if not embarrassed, by his turn toward crime, Hilda suggested that Malcolm clean up his act while behind bars. He could start by improving his grammar and reading comprehension, she suggested, since letter writing was his only real connection with the outside world.
“I did begin a correspondence course in English,” Malcolm recalled after Hilda admonished him. This became the gateway to the world of books. Soon Malcolm started devouring any publication he could get his hands on behind bars, everything from Shakespeare to Asian history. Because of his sister’s prompting, Malcolm Little was on his way to becoming one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century.
Perusing books on all sorts of subjects helped open Malcolm’s mind to the Nation of Islam (NOI). While Malcolm was in prison, Ella, along with his older brothers, Wilfred and Philbert, joined the religious organisation that Wallace Fard Muhammad had started in 1930 in Detroit. By the time they joined the Nation, it had a new leader: Elijah Muhammad. Nevertheless, its goals were the same: to “teach the downtrodden and defenceless black people a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves”, worship Allah, and support black nationalist principles such as black political and economic independence. The NOI made sense to Malcolm – who recognised the echoes of Garveyism in the group’s message. By the time he got out of prison in August 1952, he had joined the NOI and changed his name to Malcolm X.
Marriage and family
Four years later, Malcolm found a life companion in another Nation follower. Betty Dean Sanders grew up in Detroit and attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before relocating to New York to study nursing at Brooklyn State College. At the urging of other nursing students, Betty began attending NOI meetings. She was hesitant at first. Betty had grown up in a loving household that valued women’s independence and the Christian faith. How could she convert to Islam and live by its mandates – everything from its strict dietary restrictions to its conservative gender roles? Yet Nation leaders’ analysis of race relations resonated with the 22-year-old girl who had been to the Deep South and witnessed Jim Crow first-hand. Betty converted in 1956 and married Malcolm X on 14 January 1958, the same day that she received her nursing licence.
Betty X, as she was now known, had more formal education than most in her NOI circles. She wanted to work, but Malcolm, who at the time mostly thought of women as helpmates to men, forbade it. So Betty asserted her know-how in other ways. To be sure, she worked hard to raise their six daughters, but she also helped to facilitate Malcolm’s career. When she wasn’t answering phones and managing his schedule, Betty hosted movement luminaries at the couple’s home and offered her opinion on everything from US race relations to world events. After their guests left and Malcolm laid his head down at night, he discussed the movement and his role in it with her. She offered insights and softly steered him as he navigated the turbulent waters of the early 1960s.
With Betty by his side, Malcolm became one of the most influential people in the country. He kept up a gruelling schedule, speaking on college campuses and at mosques across the country, sparring with white leaders and journalists, and mobilising Nation members whenever police or politicians attacked one of their own. No matter their political affiliation, activists across the black freedom movement had to concede that Malcolm was one of their biggest and brightest stars. But many wanted to see him stretch politically, to move beyond the Nation of Islam.
Movement leaders such as Audley Moore said as much. Moore met Malcolm at an open-air meeting in Harlem in the 1950s. He immediately captivated her with his ability to rouse crowds to black nationalist action, something she hadn’t seen since she had come face-to-face with Garvey in the 1920s. Captivated by Garvey’s message, a 25-year-old Moore had joined the UNIA then and there, and spent the next seven decades building the black nationalist movement in America. So influential was she in shaping modern black nationalism that Moore became known as the “Queen Mother” of the movement and activists came to her house to learn at her feet.
Malcolm was one of them. In the early 1960s, Moore’s West Philadelphia home served as a nationalist training ground of sorts – a place where young and old organisers alike came to seek her counsel. Malcolm stopped in when he was in town and Moore jumped at the chance to shape his thinking. She wanted him to embrace the movement for reparations for black Americans that she began in the 1950s and to adopt a more global approach to black liberation – one that included the struggles that African countries were waging against their colonial oppressors.
It didn’t take long for Moore to see her influence in his public remarks. “If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing,” Malcolm told an audience at Michigan State University in 1963. “But collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams.” Magnify that by the millions of black people whose wealth and wages had been stolen for centuries, and “You’ll see how this country got so rich so fast,” he continued, laying the groundwork for his audience to understand the argument for reparations.
Still, Malcolm tried to remain a dutiful follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation. But he couldn’t ignore the rumours. Word on the street was that the NOI leader had fathered several children out of wedlock – a sin in the eyes of the Nation. Malcolm felt betrayed by his mentor. If this were not enough, after Malcolm brazenly remarked that John F Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”, Muhammad silenced him. By early 1964, it was time for Malcolm to part ways both with his beloved leader and the organisation that shaped him.
Black women stepped in to fill the void. In April 1964, Malcolm left for a five-week trip that his sister Ella funded, during which he visited Africa and the Middle East, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It transformed Malcolm’s life. He gained a new understanding of Islam outside of the Nation and a new sense of self. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz.
Globetrotting exchanges
While abroad, Malcolm stopped in Ghana. The west African country had gained its independence from Britain in 1957 and its president, Kwame Nkrumah, welcomed black Americans to the country. Several black women – including writer Maya Angelou, long-time labour organiser Vicki Garvin, and WEB Du Bois’ wife, Shirley Graham – who were temporarily residing there formed the ‘Malcolm X Committee’ to welcome the activist. Committee members planned dinners to discuss foreign policy, introduced Malcolm to Nkrumah, and facilitated conversations between Malcolm and diplomats from around the world. These women transformed his understanding of the world and their place in it. When he proclaimed that “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman” that same year, he based these claims not only on his time with Betty but also on his conversations with these women.
These black female activists also helped Malcolm conclude that the “single worst mistake of the American black organisations and their leaders” was that they “failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication” with independent black nations. Malcolm vowed to right this wrong when he returned to the US by creating the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
Malcolm, as most still knew him, modelled the OAAU after the Organisation of African Unity, a conglomeration of African nations founded in 1963 to develop a unified voice and agenda for the continent. His version would align the millions of black Americans with African nations to foster global black liberation. However, he had trouble getting the OAAU off the ground.
Days before he was set to debut the organisation, Malcolm wrote to Sara Mitchell, a young woman he had met amid his Harlem organising. He asked her to come to the meeting and offer her “objective analysis of [her] impressions of what we are trying to do, including [her] suggestions as to how we can do better”. Mitchell obliged, offering such trenchant analysis that Malcolm invited her to help write the aims and objectives of the organisation and develop its inner workings.
Mitchell shaped the scope and substance of the group, calling on Malcolm to abandon the tagline “By any means necessary” and instead to adopt a broader one, “Independence, Justice, and Prosperity”, in order to bring more people into the group. Other capable women, such as longtime organiser Lynne Shifflett, served as the OAAU’s executive secretary. Jazz singer Abbey Lincoln joined as the provisional director of the organisation.
Public assassination
After some organisational retooling, Malcolm planned to address these women and other members of the OAAU on 21 February 1965 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Yet no sooner had he stepped onto the stage than NOI members gunned him down in front of a pregnant Betty and three of his four daughters. Betty and Ella tried to carry on the organisation in the aftermath, with an office filled with women running its daily operations. But it floundered without its leader.
Though short-lived, the OAAU exemplified Malcolm’s political values on all fronts. His undying pursuit of black freedom; his ability to evolve in his thinking about how to achieve this; and his understanding that black women were vital to the cause.
Yet this is not the Malcolm most remember. Most conjure up soundbites of him throwing the second punch as it were: his labelling of the white man as “the devil” and his support of “violence in self-defence”. Further juxtaposed to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, these and other quips helped the press and popular culture frame Malcolm as a radical and hateful man. Malcolm also said: “Dr King wants the same thing I want. Freedom.” Despite this, even today, many see him as King’s and the civil rights movement’s ‘evil twin’.
Lost in this legacy is the fact that white supremacists threw the first punch. Throughout his short life, Malcolm witnessed the black folks around him endure extreme vigilante violence, irrepressible racism and seemingly endless sexism. His goal was to try to offer them another viable path to freedom beyond integration. On the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, it is just as important to remember that this is the true legacy of Malcolm X – as well as the many female teachers, mentors, lovers and friends who helped make it possible.
Timeline: Becoming X
10 key milestones in the life of the influential US black nationalist
19 May 1925 Malcolm Little is born in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth child of Grenada-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl 29 September 1931 Malcolm‘s father, Earl, dies after being hit by a streetcar in Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm comes to believe that white supremacists were responsible December 1939 After years of hardship raising seven children alone, Malcolm‘s mother, Louise, is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The children are placed in foster care 1941 Malcolm is adopted by his half-sister Ella Collins, and moves to Roxbury, a black neighbourhood in Boston, to live with her family 1946 Malcolm begins a 10-year sentence for burglary at Charlestown State Prison in Boston. There, he resumes his education and devours a range of books, opening his mind to ideas of black nationalism August 1952 Malcolm is released from prison. Having joined the Nation of Islam, the 27-year-old changes his name to Malcolm X 14 January 1958 Malcolm marries 22-year-old nurse Betty Dean Sanders. Alongside raising their six daughters, she nurtures and shapes her husband‘s career: speaking, writing and advocating for black nationalism April 1964 After becoming disillusioned with the Nation of Islam‘s leader, Malcolm travels to Africa and the Middle East, completing his Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and taking the name El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz 28 June 1964 Having met Ghana‘s first postcolonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm founds the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He aims to attract more members, including women, by adopting a broader approach 21 February 1965 Preparing to address OAAU members at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City, Malcolm X is shot dead by an assassin angry at his criticism of the Nation of Islam and its leader
Ashley D Farmer is an associate professor in the Departments of History & African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
]]> What was the March on Washington? https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/march-washington-what/ Mon, 28 Aug 2023 06:02:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/march-washington-what/ The 1963 March on Washington made history as one of the largest protest marches ever staged, and the setting for Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Rhiannon Davies shares an explainer on the events of the day… When was the March on Washington?
On 28 August 1963, a multi-racial crowd of more than 250,000 protesters flocked to the United States of America's capital, Washington DC, to take part in one of the biggest protest marches ever staged. They were campaigning in the name of jobs and freedom, trying to pressure the president at the time, John F Kennedy, to pass the civil rights legislation that he had long been promising. On the day, protesters gathered at the Washington Monument, before marching about a mile down the National Mall to gather in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Despite the authorities’ fears that violence might break out, the atmosphere of the day was peaceful. In fact, it has even been described by some as “like a picnic”.
What happened at the March on Washington?
The day's programme was packed with a full roster of entertainers and inspiring activists. Marchers sung along to musicians like Bob Dylan, prayed with pastors, and at the end of the night listened in awe to the final speaker: Martin Luther King Jr. King was an icon by this time, having first risen to fame during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks' decision not to give up her bus seat. He was one of the boycott's leaders, and his inspiring speeches had captivated the press and roused the nation. But it was during the March on Washington that he delivered his most iconic speech: the “I have a dream” speech.
The first half of his speech was as he'd practised. In it, he powerfully explained how he felt black Americans were still not free, a century on from emancipation, and had “come to our nation's capital to cash a check”.
He told the eager crowd: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” But then, after delivering his prepared remarks, he went off script. He decided to share with the crowd in front of him his dream for the future of America, he said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
This speech is now remembered as one of the most iconic of the 20th century and a defining moment of the US civil rights movement. It captivated the world and made waves in the White House. After that march, civil rights leaders, including King, went to speak with the president. The following year, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law as Martin Luther King Jr looked on.
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]]> "I Have A Dream": the speech that America couldn’t ignore https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/i-have-a-dream-the-speech-that-america-couldnt-ignore/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/i-have-a-dream-the-speech-that-america-couldnt-ignore/ On 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King issued his 'I Have a Dream' oration to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters in Washington DC. Robert Cook assesses the impact of this iconic moment on the struggle for racial equality Why did Martin Luther King feel moved to deliver his legendary 'I have a dream' speech in 1963?
Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech towards the close of the March on Washington on 28 August 1963. This event was backed by a fractious coalition of African-American civil rights groups including King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the moderate National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although the SCLC’s non-violent spring campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, had finally prompted the Kennedy administration to draft a comprehensive civil rights bill intended to demolish racial segregation in the south, local white resistance to the integration of public facilities remained intense.
A march on Washington DC, originally the brainchild of veteran black labour leader A Philip Randolph in 1941, was conceived as a means of inducing the federal government not only to pass the civil rights bill but also to secure economic justice for impoverished African-Americans. The administration’s fears of unrest in the capital proved groundless. Randolph’s deputy, Bayard Rustin, organised the march superbly. Around 250,000 people, roughly a quarter of them white, gathered peaceably in sweltering heat to hear a range of speakers and musicians perform at the Lincoln Memorial. The mood was buoyant; the day unforgettable.
Was King the leader of the civil rights movement at this time?
King’s charismatic personality, stirring rhetoric and photogenic appeal made him the most recognisable black figure in the United States by 1963. He first shot to fame in 1956 as the public face of the Montgomery bus boycott and gained further recognition during the successful Birmingham campaign. Most white Americans, including FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, who was convinced King was a communist stooge, regarded him as the leader of the insurgent civil rights movement.
However, he was not seen in this light by many African-Americans. Outside the movement he was regarded by black radicals, the outspoken Malcolm X among them, as a dupe of the liberal establishment. Inside the movement, he was increasingly resented by hard-pressed SNCC activists who were committed to fostering leadership at the local level. By the summer of 1963 King was under constant pressure to prove that non-violence could deliver real gains to African-Americans.
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How important was the physical setting for King’s speech?
King’s oration drew force from the fact that he spoke in what he called “the symbolic shadow” of President Abraham Lincoln who had issued the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years previously. The Lincoln Memorial had been a sacred space for African-Americans since 1939 when it was used for a racially integrated concert given by the black contralto Marian Anderson. Sanctioned by the federal authorities, the event was an early sign of US government support for African-American civil rights in the 20th century.
King had been critical of President Kennedy’s lacklustre approach to segregation, but he knew that embracing the memory of the Great Emancipator before Daniel Chester French’s imposing marble statue of Lincoln would charge his call for urgent national action with historical legitimacy. King began with the words “Five score years ago,” instantly merging his own voice with that of the great president who had delivered the Gettysburg address in 1863.
What did King actually say?
At Gettysburg, Lincoln exhorted his compatriots to rededicate themselves to the founding fathers’ commitment to a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. King spent the first portion of his 16-minute speech, completed in the early hours of the morning, developing his metaphor of the founders’ commitment as “a promissory note”, which African-Americans were now ready to cash. Aware that the government must be pressured into action, King asserted that after 100 years of empty promises, black people’s patience had run out. Cash the cheque now, he warned, or “the whirlwinds of revolt” would continue “until the bright day of justice emerges”. King balanced this alert with trenchant advice to his own people. African-Americans, he counselled, should resist the temptation to use physical force against their enemies. They should stay disciplined, acknowledge that many whites were active supporters of the freedom struggle, retain their faith in non-violence, and remember the Christian tenet that “unearned suffering is redemptive”.
Roughly halfway through the oration, perhaps at the urging of the black singer Mahalia Jackson, King abandoned his text and launched into an extemporaneous sermon. Interrupted by shouts of “yeah” and “my Lord” from the crowd in the familiar call-and-response style of a black church service, he articulated his millennial vision of America as an interracial utopia prepared for the Second Coming of Christ – the beloved community in which “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at Last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
What were the main sources of King’s rhetoric?
King had used many of the phrases and ideas in his speech before. Like all evangelical preachers, he often borrowed from his own work and that of others. The phrase ‘let freedom ring,’ repeated several times in the stirring peroration, was lifted directly from an address to the 1952 Republican national convention by Archibald J Carey Jr, a black Methodist clergyman.
King drew on other textual sources to enrich, empower and ennoble his message. A Baptist minister himself, he peppered the oration with lines from the Old Testament. Importantly, because this was a profoundly patriotic speech delivered in the midst of a Cold War in which civil rights activists were routinely labelled subversives, King also drew purposefully on the well-springs of American nationalism. He referenced not only Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the founders’ commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but also the patriotic song ‘America’, sung regularly in the United States to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen”.
What makes ‘I Have a Dream’ one of the most celebrated orations in American history?
King’s adept use of rhetorical techniques such as anaphora, the repetition of key phrases at the start of successive sentences (for example, “Now is the time”), helped make the speech memorable. However, its power was generated primarily by the skilful manner in which he blended the secular and the sacred to articulate his conviction that Americans, white and black, were living at a historic moment of national and scriptural fulfilment. The speech was a dramatic performance. It must be viewed and heard as well as read. It was carried live on US television, and the new Telstar satellite beamed it around the world. King’s inspired use of words and phrases, the imposing physical setting, and the moral grandeur of the civil rights struggle all combined to entrench his interracial ‘dream’ in the national psyche.
Was the speech recognised as great at the time?
No one in 1963 could have foreseen that ‘I Have a Dream’ would have such immense staying power, but it certainly received a rapturous ovation from the crowd and was well received by the liberal press in the United States. “Dr King touched all the themes of the day,” wrote one commentator in the New York Times, “only better than anybody else.” Not everyone was impressed. Many southern papers damned it with faint praise at best. The FBI’s assistant director, William Sullivan, prepared a memorandum stating that King’s “powerful demagogic speech” revealed the civil rights leader to be “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country”.
How did the speech affect the African-American struggle for civil rights?
‘I Have a Dream’ strengthened the mainstream consensus against segregation that had begun to develop after the Birmingham campaign. But it did not usher in any utopia. On 15 September a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls. Kennedy’s civil rights bill was still pending at the time of his assassination the following November. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, played a major role in securing its final passage in the US Senate in July 1964. Johnson’s efforts were assisted by the pressure exerted on conservative mid-western Republicans by white churchgoers attracted by King’s integrationist rhetoric and appalled by the murderous outrages of hard-line segregationists.
What is the legacy of ‘I Have a Dream’?
The speech has left an ambiguous legacy. American conservatives have supported their calls for an end to affirmative action by citing Martin Luther King’s dream that his own children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Barack Obama, criticised by some African-Americans for his political caution, has often invoked King’s legacy to bolster his own career. In 2006 he recalled his night-time jogs to the Lincoln Memorial where he looked out over the reflecting pool “imagining the crowd stilled by Dr King’s mighty cadence”.
Importantly, ‘I Have a Dream’ presents us with only a snapshot of King’s thought. His growing disenchantment with the federal authorities and white liberals in general, as well as mounting pressure from black nationalists, impelled him to seek more radical solutions to the country’s ills. In 1967 he delivered a scathing attack on America’s war in Vietnam and, in the months before his murder in 1968, he spearheaded the Poor People’s Campaign to secure greater federal assistance for the downtrodden of all races.
When most Americans today recall Martin Luther King it is, for the most part, the King of 1963 they are remembering. The radical King of 1967 and 68 is, for many, a less comfortable figure to recall. But who knows? Perhaps this later, more abrasive King has more relevance for our own troubled times than the dreamer we now acknowledge.
Robert Cook is emeritus professor of American history at the University of Sussex
This article was first published in the August 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Black British history: key questions answered https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/black-british-history-guide-facts/ Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:55:29 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/black-british-history-guide-facts/ Historian Hannah Cusworth answers questions about the lives of black people in historical Britain Q: What do we actually mean by ‘black British history’?
A: It’s an important question to start with, because it’s a really broad topic. In its simplest terms, we’re looking at 2,000 (maybe more) years’ worth of history in Britain. But we also need to think about what we mean by the word ‘black’, which is a term that has changed over time. When I use that word, I’m specifically referring to people from Africa and the wider African diaspora, and that is the definition that applies to the use of the word throughout this Essential Guide.
I consider myself part of the African diaspora: my dad’s family are from the Caribbean, but they were originally from somewhere in west Africa. Therefore, when I’m talking about black British history, I’m talking about people whose heritage is in Africa, but whose history is within Britain itself.
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Recently, historians such as Professor David Olusoga have been influential in expanding black British history to include areas of the world that Britain was involved with because of its empire. If we adopt this viewpoint, black British history also encompasses Caribbean history and the islands that Britain colonised, as well as Britain’s involvement in Africa, which goes back centuries, and, of course, includes the slave trade. So it’s important that we also think about black British history in wider terms than just Britain.
Q: When did black people first arrive in Britain?
A: You could argue that there have been black people living in Britain even before the Roman conquest began in earnest in AD 43. ‘Cheddar Man’, a Mesolithic skeleton discovered in 1903 in southwest England, lived around 10,000 years ago and DNA analysis suggests that he had dark-to-black skin with blue eyes. It’s difficult to put a precise date on it, but we know there were black people living in Britain during the Roman occupation.
Q: What was the impact of the slave trade on Britain’s black population?
A: There’s been quite a lot of work done by scholars on the black presence in Tudor England, which pre-dates Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. We know of individuals like John Blanke, who was a trumpeter for Henry VII and Henry VIII, and several other black people in the Tudor court who may have come to England with Catherine of Aragon in 1501. And we know that a Guinean diver named Jacques Francis led an expedition to salvage guns from the Mary Rose in 1545.
There were a variety of black people living and working in Britain before the 18th century, but the nature of that presence changed when Britain became more involved in the slave trade. In the Georgian era, we think there was a black community of more than 10,000 people in London, which was much larger than that seen in the Tudor era or before. The numbers definitely increased as Britain’s involvement in the slave trade grew.
Q: The Netflix series Bridgerton depicts black people living as members of Britain’s Georgian elite, including Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. Is there any historical truth to this?
A: Yes, definitely, although opinion is divided about the exact heritage of Queen Charlotte. The historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom argues that she had black ancestry through the Portuguese line of her family; indeed, if we look at images of her, some of her features do resemble those we might associate with black mixed-race people. Other historians disagree.
But there are many other examples of black Georgians right through the social classes. Dido Elizabeth Belle is one of the most well-known. The daughter of a British naval officer called John Lindsay and an African woman named Maria Belle, Dido was raised by Lord Mansfield and his family at Kenwood House in London. Another example is Nathaniel Wells, the son of a sugar plantation owner and an enslaved woman, who inherited his father’s plantation in Saint Kitts and a significant amount of money.
When mixed-race children were born in the Caribbean to wealthy families, they were often sent to Britain to be educated; there are several examples of such children attending schools in Yorkshire and Scotland. So, although Bridgerton is exaggerated in terms of its elite black presence, it’s not completely in the realms of fantasy.
Q: Are there any differences in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in terms of their black histories?
A: Often when we talk about black British history, what we’re really talking about is black English history, but the different nations all have interesting black histories of their own. For example, there’s some amazing work going on at the moment looking at Scotland’s involvement in the slave trade, particularly plantation slavery. In fact, many of the plantation overseers in the Caribbean – the people running the plantations – were Scottish.
Ireland, too, has a distinct history of colonialism, both through Irish people who were forced out to the colonies as indentured servants, as well as those who were involved in the running of Caribbean plantations. There were also a lot of Anglo-Irish military leaders – one individual I’ve been working on is Edward Despard, a colonial administrator who refused to prioritise white settlers when allocating land and married a mixed-race Jamaican woman.
- Read more | Britain's black trailblazers: 7 pioneers who changed British history
A lot of black Welsh history is centred around Cardiff, notably Butetown – sometimes known as Tiger Bay – which has a very strong Somali community. Many Somali people who settled in the area in the 19th century were sailors who, as part of the empire, were legally allowed to settle in Britain. It’s so important to bring these histories to the fore and not to assume that black people of the past only lived in London.
Q: What do we know about the history of queer black people in Britain?
A: There is a lot of work being undertaken by a new generation of black British historians who are particularly interested in queer black life, primarily in the 20th century, and are using oral histories to bring that history to light.
A favourite historical example of mine is a Jamaica-born bisexual woman called Pearl Alcock, who ran a gay bar in Brixton in the 1970s. I’ve heard descriptions of how people would go downstairs into the basement where there would be queer black men dancing together. To me, this is a particularly powerful example because, sometimes when we think about queer history, we often hold up individuals as being exceptional. But the story of Pearl and the kind of bar that she ran shows that there was actually a gay black scene – albeit a small one – of ordinary Londoners coming together to dance and have fun and meet people. These are the kinds of stories that I’m hoping will come through with this new generation of historians.
Q: Was there the same push for equal rights in 1960s Britain as there was in countries like the United States?
A: When I was growing up, I had the sense that that there was a civil rights struggle in America, but nothing equivalent happened in Britain. And that’s not the case at all. It was different, but black people in Britain still fought against what was then described as a ‘colour bar’.
There wasn’t the same full-blown segregation as there was in the US, but there were many, many instances of black and Asian people wanting to go into a pub to have a pint after work, for example, and being told that they couldn’t enter, or that they had to sit in a separate room away from the white patrons. There was discrimination in housing, employment and socialising, and black people in Britain were constantly fighting against it. In 1963, when the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to employ black or Asian bus crews, a bus boycott was staged, and the company ultimately backed down. The leaders of the boycott referenced what was going on in the US at the time and said that they took some inspiration from it.
- Read more about the Bristol bus boycott
So, I think there was a real awareness of the struggle for civil rights that was going on in the US, in the same way that there was an awareness within the black British community about apartheid South Africa and the struggles there, as well as decolonisation in west Africa. And black civil rights leaders from the US were visiting Britain at this time, including Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Q: Do you think too much attention is given to the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in 1948?
A: The arrival of the Windrush (which brought one of the first large groups of postwar West Indian immigrants to Britain) has become an iconic moment in UK history. But it’s important to remember that several other ships arrived in the 18 months or so prior to Windrush, so it wasn’t the first by any means.
I think, as humans, we like to ascribe a ‘beginning’ to historical events, and it would be wrong to ignore the big wave of postwar migration and not acknowledge that this did effectively change the face of Britain. But it’s important to remember that the black presence in Britain did not begin with Windrush, and actually goes back a lot further.
What I’ve found heartening about the last few years is that there is a growing appetite for black history that’s not just centred around the Windrush and the stories of the people who arrived in the years after 1948. We’re really starting to branch out in terms of the black history that we’re telling our children, and that’s a great thing. It’s time to hear some new stories.
Hannah Cusworth is an historian who specialises in black British histories. Formerly a schoolteacher, she is currently completing a PHD with English Heritage looking at mahogany, race and the 18th-century Atlantic world
This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]> The forgotten mothers of civil rights leaders https://www.historyextra.com/membership/forgotten-mothers-civil-rights-leaders-martin-luther-king-malcolm-x-anna-malaika-tubbs-podcast/ Sat, 13 Feb 2021 12:14:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/forgotten-mothers-civil-rights-leaders-martin-luther-king-malcolm-x-anna-malaika-tubbs-podcast/ Anna Malaika Tubbs shines a light on how Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and James Baldwin were influenced by their mothers Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and James Baldwin are often remembered as change-makers who came into the world with their political ideas fully-formed – but this was far from the case. As Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals in her new book Three Mothers, the mothers of these civil rights leaders shaped their activism and taught their sons to resist racism.
Anna Malaika Tubbs is the author of Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (HarperCollins, 2021)
]]> Mourning Martin Luther King Jr: the life and legacy of the civil rights leader https://www.historyextra.com/membership/martin-luther-king-jr-life-legacy-civil-rights-myths-death-who-shot-him-facts-dream-speech/ Mon, 18 Jan 2021 11:05:25 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/martin-luther-king-jr-life-legacy-civil-rights-myths-death-who-shot-him-facts-dream-speech/ On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, by white supremacist James Earl Ray. Writing for HistoryExtra on the 50th anniversary of Dr King's murder, Benjamin Houston considers the life of the civil rights activist famous for his "I Have A Dream" speech, and debunks some of the myths that still surround his legacy 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder. Gunned down outside his hotel room in Memphis, where he was in town to support a refuse workers’ strike, it was his last effort to broaden his work beyond race and call attention to the deserved dignity of all people, regardless of poverty and social status.
Plucked from a quiet minister’s life in Montgomery and thrust onto the national and global stage as a result of the surging black freedom struggle; awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and gunned down on a hotel balcony in Memphis – in a decade and a half King lived a life of activism that few could match over an entire lifetime. That life, and the symbolic and substantive importance of his role in the civil rights movement, is so rich and varied that most cannot help but oversimplify him – sometimes benignly, sometimes wilfully. Yet either does grave injustice to his legacy. His message needs to be understood in its fullest capacity to honour its meaning.
Rather than rely on a few isolated images, sentences, and moments from King’s career, it is far better to understand the contradictions that Martin Luther King embodied in his life. As is written in a posthumous 2001 autobiography drawn from King’s own writing: “In my own life and in the life of a person who is seeking to be strong, you combine in your character antitheses strongly marked. You are both militant and moderate; you are both idealistic and realistic.”
Contradicting perceptions
Even as most people worshipfully recite a few isolated and decontextualised lines from “I Have a Dream” – King’s most famous speech, delivered to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters in Washington DC in August 1963 – scholars now regard King as having consistent and insistent radical beliefs about class, imperialism, economic injustice and more throughout his career. The fact that so few people know about these consistencies speaks to the differences in the public and private King – the former an image necessarily crafted in support of the civil rights movement.
To take one example: King’s commitment to a life of nonviolence was not instantaneous. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, which electrified the world as African-Americans protested segregated practices and racist treatment on the local bus system, he had armed bodyguards and even applied for a gun permit. Only after he chose to absorb and internalise the advice of mentors with extensive backgrounds in nonviolence did he fully awaken to the possibilities of nonviolent direct action, adapted from Mohandas K Gandhi’s example used to oppose British imperial rule during the 20th century. Over time he would come to refine those insights for the US context into so-called ‘Kingian’ nonviolence. The point suggests not only that nonviolence is a learned philosophy, one subscribed to with only a great deal of forethought, but also that it was hardly the norm among African-Americans at the time. But it also speaks to the evolution of King, thrust into one leadership role, an increasingly public one, subsequently overshadowing the work of many other local leaders and grassroots contributors who had nurtured the boycott into being. It was not necessarily foreordained that he would become a civil rights leader, much less the so-called ‘American Gandhi’.
Other paradoxes linger: King was born in 1929, into the degrading conditions of racial segregation. By law and by custom, interlocking racial practices [often known as Jim Crow] confined and controlled black people in all phases of their existence and encoded white privilege into all facets of life. It governed movement in public spaces by banishing African-Americans to separate toilets and water fountains, and by insisting that they surrender seats to whites on public transport. But it also stifled black aspirations by supporting discrimination in employment, housing, education, voting, and all other spheres of life, even in transgression of rights supposedly protected by the US Constitution. It was a system that constantly deemed King and other black people ‘inferior’ while devising ever-new and ever-cruel ways to reinforce that notion.
And yet the Jim Crow system created the cocooning protection of a separate black world, armed with internal resources personified by churches, schools, universities, mentors and networks. That community nurtured King, educating him on the values and tools to survive and challenge segregation. It taught him that a sense of love and community could give energy to tired souls, sustain a greater good, and move towards a brighter future. He preached the gospel of love because that was what fortified him. Freedom was not just an abstract concept, but something felt and lived, and so the context that created King also shaped his ability to change that context.
Another dichotomy comes from King’s intellectual core. He was fundamentally rooted in the black church: it was the very polestar of his thinking, guiding him through his early life and undergraduate education at historically-black Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. And yet his immersion in other theological traditions at Boston University, which yielded him a PhD in 1955, meant that he could also discuss the work of leading theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch, familiar names to American religious intellectuals, who grappled with issues of sin, social justice, and the human condition. His ability to distil those insights into simple but profound language, and to mingle those insights with traditions from the black church, meant that he could speak to wildly different audiences with power and grace. Merging these influences helped him find his voice and spread the import of his message far and wide.
A global symbol of the civil rights movement
Similarly, his civil rights work was yoked to the local but with a breadth of vision that spanned the globe. He was a southerner, by virtue of birth and by a deeply steeped sensibility tied to that region’s particular racial history (although thanks to his education outside the South, he knew that racism infected the US far beyond Dixie’s borders). But despite those roots in the raw racism of the American Deep South, he peered far beyond that world in diagnosing maladjustments and seeing underlying links in different forms of oppression. Not only had he “come to realise that racism is a world problem” (an idea underlined when white supremacists shouting “Keep Britain White!” heckled him at Westminster City Temple Hall during a 1964 speech), but he also understood the lived connections between the realities of segregation. He knew the effects of humiliation and apathy among people not always conscious of their inner and collective power.
The international span of that understanding led him across the world. He supported African liberation movements throughout his career, voyaged on a pilgrimage to India in the late 1950s, and continually mused on how the plight of developing countries could be conjoined to the black freedom struggle at home. Indeed, when he visited Newcastle upon Tyne in November 1967, for an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University, he warned that poverty and militarism had joined racism to become the three ‘great evils’ that threatened the world. He insisted that the profound links between these issues all combined to destroy the inherent feeling of ‘somebodiness’ that all human beings deserved.
The nature of this overseas recognition celebrating his role as Christian pastor and social revolutionary was a small but real balm for the civil rights leader fretting about burning cities back home and wounded by a critical American media, an openly hostile federal government, and the dismissive rhetoric of Black Power advocates. His home nation had turned on him for broadening his calls to issues of poverty and violence in the world run amok. His allies were aghast that he would alienate the federal government by criticising the Vietnam War. The media wanted him to stick to the race issue. And he was considered quaint and washed-up by new forms of black militancy that cared not at all about integration and the brotherhood of man, but only achieving equal resources and power “by any means necessary”, as the Black Power phrase of the time put it.
We must – as King did – make sense of these apparent contradictions. He was obsessed, intellectually speaking, with finding middle ways to reconcile supposedly mutually exclusive notions, and continually wrestled with how to do so. Thus he spoke of both love and justice, and that faith by its nature commanded humankind to enact God’s love on earth. Indeed, he highlighted the imperative that either element was lost and inadequate without the other. The contradictions underscore a fuller appreciation of his leadership: how he could countenance law-breaking because of a higher redemptive belief; how he could warn against Black Power but comprehend and empathise with the energy that fuelled it, and how he could be immersed in radical beliefs but still work in the confines of the American political system to reform it from within. If the tightrope he walked meant his choices were often compromising, overly conscious of tactical exigencies, it was only in sacrifice of an overarching goal, what King called ‘the Beloved Community’, encompassing the full dignity and humanity of all people.
Balancing King’s legacy
Perhaps equally importantly, a good start to understanding King requires grasping how easily people mischaracterise him for their own purposes. The same King approvingly (if mistakenly) cited by contemporary conservatives calling for colour-blindness was the same man who excoriated white moderates for inaction in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963). The Martin Luther King exalted today was passionately loathed by many – indeed, most – Americans at the time of his death; a public opinion poll in 1966 recorded negative views from two-thirds of the country. One historical account captures the moment King’s death was announced to a meeting of southern white ministers from a theologically conservative denomination; they responded with applause.
It was not just the wider public, but people in power. When King publicly denounced the Vietnam War, one year to the day before his death, President Lyndon Johnson ranted in response, “What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?… We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?”
Before that, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been wiretapping, surveilling, and harassing King, to the extent of sending him a letter encouraging him to kill himself. In mid-1967, he tried to mobilise the black ghettos of Cleveland, Ohio, in an ultimately successful attempt to elect Carl Stokes as the first African-American mayor of a major American city. This led the incumbent mayor to demonise King, which the minister sardonically commented on: “This Mayor Locher here in Cleveland, he’s damning me now and calling me an extremist, and three years ago he gave me the key to the city and said I was the greatest man of the century. That was as long as I was safe from him down in the South.”
And so we see how the process of pernicious mistruths attached to Martin Luther King began even as he still lived. He remains safe as long as you venerate him from afar, preserve him in a noble amber, quote him selectively to keep him unthreatening. When we sand off the rough edges of King’s critique, when we cite him selectively, when we cherish his vision but ignore his obstacles, we misunderstand. But when you read him, hear him, study him holistically, and as his message speaks to your world and the society you live in, somewhat more uneasy feelings emerge. So instead we elevate him into an American hero: bestow a national holiday, quote his Dream rather than his righteous anger, use him to confirm American greatness and the country’s ability to remake itself, to reach consensus, default to equality, and to heal its worst sins – even when all proof to the contrary exposes that notion as a lie. Or we disrupt his global legacy as we study him in the UK and across the world, viewing him as a solitary leader from a history now resolved. We ignore his contemporaries from the global black freedom struggle who worked around the world. We decline to reflect on how his insights apply to the racial, class and social conflict that torment and stagnate the UK and other countries from within today.
He becomes, in short, a false myth. As African-American scholar C Eric Lincoln put it precisely, in linking how Americans view King with how they treat race: “It was inevitable that we would have to kill Martin Luther King, and it was just as inevitable that we would make of him a myth…. We do not have to be serious about a myth, and if the myth obscures the reality behind it or in some ways qualifies that reality, we do not have to be serious about the reality either.”
More powerfully, African-American theologian-scholar Vincent Harding distilled it simply: “At our best, we know that the fundamental question is not what we shall do with Martin Luther King, but what shall we do with ourselves?” In cloaking King in mythology, we lose the chance to echo his ability to fashion harmony out of dissonance, to avoid muting the deeper, more lasting chords that sustain us. Our own ability to be both moored in the local but connected to the global atrophies. We lack the chance to destroy other myths that trap us in old ways of thinking and acting. When King remains only a caricature, we lose our grasp in reaching towards his Dream.
This article was first published on HistoryExtra in April 2018.
]]> Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat: what happened next? https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/rosa-parks-what-happened-why-arrested-montgomery-bus-boycott-civil-rights/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/rosa-parks-what-happened-why-arrested-montgomery-bus-boycott-civil-rights/ Rosa Parks' stand off with an Alabama bus driver in 1955 turned into a wider movement that fought against segregation and inequality African-Americans had wilfully violated the segregation of public transport before Rosa Parks, even in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, where 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months earlier for the same crime of refusing to give up her bus seat. Yet it was Parks’ now immortalised act of defiance that proved to be the spark that set the civil rights movement ablaze.
- From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream
On 1 December 1955, Parks finished a tiring Thursday as a department store seamstress and boarded a bus to go home, taking a seat right behind the whites-only section. All the seats were soon taken, and so when a white man got on and stood in the aisle, bus driver James Blake instructed four black passengers, including the 42-year-old Parks, to move.
This was not her first run-in with Blake as, in 1943, he kicked her off his bus for entering through the front door rather than the back. The others got up; Parks remained seated. She wasn’t physically tired, as was claimed afterwards, but tired of giving in. Parks had been a passionate activist and member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for years already, and knew the consequences of her refusal to move. She was arrested.
Her story came to the attention of Edgar Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter, and lawyer Fred Gray, who had been waiting for an opportune case to attack segregation in the courts. They considered Parks to be the ideal spokesperson and she agreed, at great personal cost. Parks lost her job, put her family in danger and received death threats for her commitment.
A one-day bus boycott was organised for the day of her trial, 5 December, but this was only the beginning. The resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott, lasting 381 days, successfully ended segregation on Alabama buses and signalled the next steps in the civil rights march: mass mobilisation, non-violence and the emergence of a charismatic leader, Martin Luther King.
This content first appeared in the December 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]> American spotlight: how today’s protests echo historical outrage https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-todays-black-bives-matter-protests-echo-historical-outrage/ Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:22:23 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-todays-black-bives-matter-protests-echo-historical-outrage/ In the first of a series of blogs exploring how the past manifests itself in today’s world, BBC World Histories editor Matt Elton gathers the views of historians who have written for us on race relations and civil rights in the US, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement that has gained momentum across the world… The issue of race relations in the United States has once again been making headlines around the world, following the death of an African-American man in police custody. George Floyd, 46, died in Minneapolis on 25 May after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer. The incident sparked protest and unrest in cities around the country, and reignited longstanding tensions both about police killings of black Americans and wider racism in the US.
It’s a complex subject about which feelings, understandably, run extremely high. Here, in the first of an occasional series of blogs exploring how the past manifests itself in 21st-century America, I’ll be looking at the ways in which historians writing for this website have tried to make sense of race relations and civil rights in the US. Although the current riots may, in part, have been fuelled by frustrations caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they’re also evidence that the issue of race remains very close to the surface in the United States.
A great starting point is this in-depth podcast interview with US historian Kevin Gaines, who is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. Part of our new ‘Everything You Wanted to Know About…’ series, it’s an expert run-through of the history of the civil rights movement, racial tensions in America, and the history behind the police violence of recent weeks.
This is, of course, a subject that has repeatedly intersected with police brutality. There are parallels with the 2014 death of Eric Garner, another African-American man who also repeated the words “I can’t breathe”. But there are older echoes, too, both in the actions of the police and the outrage they provoked. The 1992 LA riots, which remain the worst episode of civil unrest in American history, were sparked after three white police officers filmed beating construction worker Rodney King were acquitted of assault.
In this 2017 piece, Benjamin Houston sensitively explores the events, their repercussions, and what they tell us about the wider US. “It is, in my opinion, especially wrong to relegate King’s legacy to just a story of a corrupt police department, noxious as daily practices in the LAPD were,” Houston writes.
Rodney King survived; many others did not. The murder of teenager Emmett Till in August 1955 highlights not police brutality – he was kidnapped and killed by two men who accused him of whistling at a white woman – but, instead, the longstanding failure of the US legal system to quell endemic violence against its black citizens.
The acquittal of Till’s murderers provoked rallies and protests around the US, and became a pivotal moment in the development of the civil rights movement. Maria Margaronis’s account of its place in American history is thorough, considered, and moving. “Till’s story echoes every time the killing of an African-American person by a white man goes unpunished,” she writes. Till’s murder also features in this brief rundown of the key moments in the campaign for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
No overview of that period would be complete, of course, without significant mention of two of the most famous people in US history: Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, whose contributions reshaped modern America. John Kirk profiles the activism of both in this feature and you can read more about King’s story here.
If ongoing American racism can’t be solely attributed to particular individuals or groups of people, the next question must be what causes its recurrence. This long, thought-provoking feature by Adam IP Smith suggests we can trace the underlying schisms right back to a foundational moment in US history: the American Civil War. Only by more fully understanding its true nature, he argues, can we make sense of the deep divisions that run throughout the 21st-century United States.
Smith, always fascinating on American history, is in great company in this conversation with fellow historian Sarah Churchwell. The two met to discuss Churchwell’s book Behold, America, which investigates how the ideas of ‘the American Dream’ and ‘America First’ have shaped US history. That might sound conceptual but is anything but, touching on the civil rights movement, white nationalism and the rise of libertarianism. You can also listen to an audio version of the conversation on our podcast here.
As Churchwell puts it, “Notions of democracy, equality and justice are not ideas we achieve and then put on a shelf to admire. They are part of an ongoing process”. In moments when they feel more distant than ever, they’re a reminder of how making sense of history can help us understand the present.
]]> The civil rights movement: everything you wanted to know https://www.historyextra.com/membership/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-civil-rights-movement-but-were-afraid-to-ask/ Sun, 14 Jun 2020 11:05:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-civil-rights-movement-but-were-afraid-to-ask/ Kevin Gaines responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the American civil rights movement In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Kevin Gaines responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the American civil rights movement
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