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Retracing the footsteps of the civil rights movement
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out of place
“I am the darker brother [...] I, too, am America.”
- Langston Hughes, "I, Too"
Depending on the pigment of his skin the sphere in which an individual can move about freely in society either shrinks or expands. For African Americans, their place in society is almost non-existent.
Similarly, there are hardly any physical spaces for them to exist as they are, without having to endure hostility, discrimination and fearing for their lives.
Public spaces collectively alienated African Americans as a group, branding them with negative stereotypes that put them down as being less than human and hence less deserving of humane treatment.
The Places
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A humble motel that catered to African American travellers during the height of Jim Crow became forever etched in history as location civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
On April 4 1968, while standing on the balcony of his room, King was struck by a single bullet that hurled him back violently and severed his spinal cord. He was brought to the hospital, where he was then pronounced dead.
In many ways, this was a shot that was heard around the world. Anger, disbelief and shock reverberated through the nation, causing riots to break out in more than a hundred cities, leaving in their wake 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured, and an estimated $65m worth of damage.
Though King was gone too fast and too soon, his legacy still stands - stronger than ever in the face of the injustices that still plague us in today's world.
Pictured: King lies at the feet of civil-rights activists pointing in the direction of his assassin.
“We had to make a big decision: allow one bullet to kill a whole movement for which we worked and forfeit the game, or fight even harder, and we did that. In his name we kept fighting”
The events that transpired here eventually led to the gruesome and tragic murder of 14 year old Emmett Till. Down South visiting relatives in Mississippi, he was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white women who was also the store owner’s wife. Four days later, Bryant’s husband and his half brother abducted Till from his great uncle’s home.
The men proceeded to severely beat him up, before shooting him in the head and tying him to a 75-pound cotton gin fan to weigh him down in the Tallahatchie River. Three days after his abduction, two boys discovered his horribly disfigured body.
At Till's funeral, his mother chose to have his casket remain open as evidence, to “let the world see what has happened”. Feelings of anger and indignation arose throughout the country, as media coverage became widespread and graphic images of Till’s corpse were published.
It was unjustified. It was brutal. It was cold-blooded through and through. Yet, it served as an important catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement.
Named after Edmund Pettus, a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, a Confederate general and a Senator all-in-one, the bridge was the site of the Bloody Sunday conflict during the Selma to Montgomery march.
On March 7, 1965, state troopers, armed with tear gas and nightsticks, attacked peaceful, unarmed civil right demonstrators who were protesting the voting rights of African Americans. Numerous protestors were badly injured, especially John Lewis, then-chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and current U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district, who had suffered a fractured skull.
The violent clashed provided brutal images that were televised throughout the nation, rousing support for the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The injustice suffered by the protesters prompted a national outcry and the attention garnered enabled President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It was from within the cells of the Birmingham City Jail in which he was imprisoned where King penned his infamous open letter "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to criticisms directed towards his non-violence methods of protest.
King had been arrested earlier for his participation in the Birmingham campaign, a non-violent protest organized by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) against segregation.
King was criticized by a group of white clergymen who acknowledged that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, and that whatever he was participating in would serve no other purpose than to disrupt peace and create even more tension.
King defended his actions, citing the only reason why a superficial peace could exist was because a black person would suffer great retribution if he did not abide to it. His intentions were to force people to think about the injustices suffered by the African American community through the disruption of the illusion of peace, making it difficult for citizens to continue turning a blind eye.
Till today, this letter is arguably the most important document of the Civil Rights Movement
“We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied."”
Freedom Riders (comprising of both white and black civil rights activists) rode interstate buses into the South to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions which had ruled segregated public buses to be unconstitutional, and Montgomery was among the stops that they would pass through on their journey.
Right at the beginning they met with violence from white supremacists who had battered them in Anniston, and despite being promised a police escort as they entered Montgomery, there was no law enforcement personnel in sight - leaving the Freedom Riders at the mercy of the violent mob.
The state's governor at that time, John Patterson, was resisting U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's demands that the Freedom Riders be protected.
Even more chillingly, Birmingham Police Sergeant Tom Cook and police commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police to assist the Ku Klux Klan in perpetuating violence towards the riders instead.
“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
On December 1, 1955, 42 year old Rosa Parks made a defiant decision that would ultimately change her life and alter the course of history forever.
After boarding the bus at Court Square, she refused to give up her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger after the whites-only section was filled, despite being ordered to do so by the white bus driver.
She was not the first person to resist bus segregation laws, but was deemed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be the most suitable candidate for a lawsuit after being arrested for civil disobedience.
This incident happened months after the lynching of Emmett Till, and sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts - the first major direct action campaign of the civil rights movement.
“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. [...] No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Lasting over a year, the boycotts nearly caused the bus company to go bankrupt. It finally ended on December 20, 1956 when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared bus segregation laws to be unconstitutional.
During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King addressed a crowd of over 250,000 people in the defining speech of the civil rights movement.
Appropriately titled "I Have a Dream", King called for an end to racism in the country, pushed for equal rights for coloured people in different spheres of society, and perhaps most iconically, spoke of his dream of an undivided America where every person would be treated equally regardless of the pigment of their skin.
The speech, which incorporated numerous elements of historically important documents in the United States (such as the Bible, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution), forced President Kennedy to address civil rights legislation in Congress, and remains influential even to this day.
“The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
