Conclusion: The Long Stride Toward Freedom1

Author(s):  
John Kyle Day

The conclusion assesses the long term implications of the Southern Manifesto for both the course of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the larger racial dynamic s of Postwar America. Under the circumspect rhetoric of moderation, the Southern Manifesto undermined the efforts of civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to desegregate the South, and empowered southern officials to ignore the Brown decision for years. This conclusion thus places the Southern Manifesto in proper historical perspective and provides a summary of the implications of this event, the greatest episode of antagonistic racial demagoguery in modern American History.

Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien

Martin Luther King Jr. grew up in a black southern clerical family, earned graduate degrees at Crozer Seminary and Boston University School of Theology, and electrified the Montgomery boycott on its first night, becoming a movement leader. His training, temperament, and brilliance enabled him to catalyze and hold together the historic, institutional, mostly secular civil rights movement in the North and the fledgling, dramatic, mostly church-based movement in the South.


2011 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Hanes Walton ◽  
Josephine A.V. Allen ◽  
Sherman C. Puckett ◽  
Donald R. Deskins

Best known for the innovative historical and analytical concept of the “Second Reconstruction,” Professor C. Vann Woodward is much less known for his other related and linked concept the “Third Reconstruction.” Moreover, this latter concept is clearly not as well understood, described, and explained, as was the initial one. Yet, it exists. Professor Woodward in the updated third edition of his classic, The Burden of Southern History (which came out initially in 1968, 1991, 1993, and 2008 with an added Postscript in April of 1968 after the assassination of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King), discusses the “Third Reconstruction” in Chapter Eight entitled: “What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement” (Woodward 2008, 186).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Werner

Martin Luther King and East Germany are connected both directly and indirectly. The Communist Party had the power to make public decisions on agenda-setting topics related to Martin Luther King. The Christian Bloc Party mostly represented the state and published books by Martin Luther King, which churches and the civil rights movement liked to use. Moreover, pacifists and civil rights activists used these books to undermine the political system in East Germany. Church institutions reported by far the most on Martin Luther King. This empirical study, which can also act as a basis for further research on Martin Luther King and East Germany, will appeal to both church staff and admirers of Martin Luther King.


Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck

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.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

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.”


Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch

The paradigmatic ’50s exposé is The Phenix City Story (1955). Phil Karlson’s film, set in Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” possesses voice-over narration and location photography like other ’50s exposés, but it also emits a vérité vibe that’s unmatched in the ’50s crime canon. What separates Karlson’s film from every other “city confidential,” not to mention syndicate picture, is its deep racial-political subtext, which, in the martyred figure of Alabama attorney general nominee Albert Patterson, evokes the pacifist, civil rights movement spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. Accordingly, if the anti-Communist films of the 1950s can be said to constitute what R. Barton Palmer calls a “national confidential,” The Phenix City Story not only exposes the raced political unconscious of the syndicate picture but also foregrounds its status as both a local and national confidential.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document