The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement.

1991 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 550
Author(s):  
George E. Sims ◽  
David J. Garrow ◽  
J. Mills Thornton III
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

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.

scholarly journals Closing Ranks: Montgomery Jews and Civil Rights, 1954–1960

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIVE WEBB
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
The Many ◽  
Southern City

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

„I Have a Dream“

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Werner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political System ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Staff ◽  
Martin Luther King

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.

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.

Conclusion: The Long Stride Toward Freedom1

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The South ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Martin Luther King

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.

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