Martin Luther King: Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis

Today we will reflect on the life of Martin Luther King as told by
David Levering Lewis in his classic biography.
Martin Luther King sincerely sought to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s
example by staging nonviolent protests, even when provoked.
Many local jurisdictions in the South made protesting illegal,
often hundreds of protestors were arrested. Several times the
civil rights organizations petitioned the federal courts to overrule
localities trying to stifle protests, which the Bill of Rights protects
under Freedom of Assembly. Unfortunately, as militants became
more influential, violent protests, even riots, erupted in many
cities, souring many whites on the Civil Rights struggle.

What struck me was how violently the KKK and the white supremacists
opposed civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Twice King family houses
were bombed, dozens of black homes and churches were bombed, once
during Sunday school, many blacks were murdered, many were beaten
both by police and protesters.
The Civil Rights Era was near the dawn of the television age. What
distinguished Martin Luther King from prior generations of black leaders
is he was the first celebrity civil rights leader. Now when southern Sheriffs
sicced their dogs and drew their clubs on protestors, everyone in America
could see the blood and watch the violence in real time on their living
room television sets. Martin Luther King was also a spellbinding orator,
he was great television.

Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments. Let us learn and reflect together!
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources
used for this video.
Please feel free to follow along in the PowerPoint
script we uploaded to SlideShare, which includes
illustrations. Our sister blog includes footnotes, both
include our Amazon book links.

YouTube Channel (click to subscribe):
Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History:
© Copyright 2023 Become a patron:
https://amzn.to/3SvyBVu
https://amzn.to/3xOZADs
https://amzn.to/3kfEXbT
https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0
Martin Luther King, Summary
https://youtu.be/XtdVGx2C3Cc
https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom
https://www.youtube.com/@ReflectionsMPH/?sub_confirmation=1
https://amzn.to/3TJ5WQl
https://amzn.to/3vErJ1M
https://amzn.to/493tfZT

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2024
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
affiliate commissions.
Blog: https://wp.me/pachSU-YW

SlideShare contains scripts for my YouTube
videos. Link is in the YouTube description.
© Copyright 2024

Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta, a city that
had a large black professional class, which included
ministers like his father and grandfather.

His family was known for their involvement with civil
rights. His maternal grandfather was one of the
charter members of the local NAACP chapter and
advocated building Booker T Washington High
School, the first black secondary school in Atlanta.

Booker T Washington High School, in Atlanta,
Martin’s grandfather pushed for its construction.

Unlike other smaller Southern cities, there was a sizable
black professional class in Atlanta, including professors,
businessmen, insurance executives, and professionals like
doctors, dentists, and morticians.
Like WEB Du Bois, he discovered that his white playmates
distanced themselves from him once they started
advancing in school. The parents of two of his white
playmates forbade them to associate with him when they
were old enough to attend elementary school.

His mother cautioned him: “Don’t make this feel
that you are not as good as white people. You are
as good as anyone else, and don’t you forget it.”

As a young minister graduating from a prestigious
seminary, Martin Luther King was honored by his
calling to be the minister of the renowned Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, a prestigious colored church
in Atlanta, Georgia in early 1954.

But in December 1955, during the busy Christmas
season, after a long day at work, during some nasty
weather, a courageous, courteous, and unassuming
black lady broke both the law and Southern
etiquette by refusing to give up her seat to a white
passenger and move to the back of the bus. The
police were called, and they arrested Mrs Rosa Parks.

The No.
2857 bus on
which Parks
was riding
before her
arrest,
Henry Ford
Museum.

In response, the local NAACP chapter and local black
ministers organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott
that lasted over a year. They selected Martin Luther
King to lead the boycott. Carpools were organized to
ferry black workers to their jobs.

Why did this bus boycott succeed when so many past
protests had been futile? Martin Luther King was a great
orator, he was great television. But the other key factor
that enabled the Civil Rights protests to succeed was the
Supreme Court decision in 1954, Brown v Board of
Education, which desegregated public schools, signaling
the court’s willingness to advance civil rights causes.
Federal judges, affirmed by the Supreme Court, ruled that
buses could no longer be segregated.

Warren Supreme
Court in 1953.
Bottom from left:
Felix Frankfurter;
Hugo Black; Earl
Warren; Stanley
Reed; William
Douglas. Back
from left: Tom
Clark; Robert H.
Jackson; Harold
Burton; Sherman
Minton

In response to the desegregation of the buses, violence erupted,
“a black teenage girl was beaten, a pregnant woman was shot.”
Homes and churches were dynamited, and four black Baptist
churches were destroyed. But five white men were found guilty
of these bombings by a white jury, which was one of the first
times that whites were found guilty of grave crimes against
blacks by white juries in the Deep South.

The Problem We
All Live With, by
Norman
Rockwell, 1963

After the successes and struggles in the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, a regional conference formed the SCLC, or the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King was elected
President, and Rev Ralph Abernathy was elected Treasurer.
In that era, blacks were not permitted to eat lunch with white
customers at lunch counters in department and variety stores. In
1960 college students, black and white, protested in North
Carolina by sitting at lunch counters, and if they were not served,
they would simply stay to protest. These sit-ins spread to Atlanta
and thirteen other cities in five states across the Deep South.

To organize the student protest movement
nationally, the SCLC provided the initial funding to
found the independent SNCC, or Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. The future Congressman
John Lewis was selected to be the leader of SNCC.

Diorama of Lunch
Counter Sit-Down
Protests, National Civil
Rights Museum,
Memphis, Tennessee

SNCC issued a student manifesto, An Appeal for
Human Rights, that demanded “community action in
education, housing, jobs, voting, law enforcement,
hospitals, and entertainment facilities, including
restaurants, movies, and concerts.”

Civil Rights
protesters,
Woolworth's
Sit-In, 1960,
Durham, NC

Freedom Riders Challenge Segregation
Freedom Rider Greyhound bus burns after being firebombed by KKK mob at Anniston, Alabama, 1961

In 1961, Freedom Rides were organized where black and white
students and activists rode interstate buses to challenge
segregation. Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and the SCLC
participated in the protests.
The first two buses carrying the Freedom Riders, who were black
and white protesters, boarded in Washington DC, bound for
Alabama. One bus was set on fire by angry whites. When the
other bus reached Birmingham, Alabama, the Freedom Riders
were beaten severely by white thugs while Bull Conner and the
police looked on, and while the television cameras rolled.

Freedom Rider bus fire-bombed by KKK in Anniston, Alabama, 1961

When another group of Freedom Riders departing from
Tennessee arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, they were
initially threatened by a mob of three hundred angry
whites, which swelled to nearly a thousand. John Lewis of
the SNCC, a future congressman, a leading journalist, and a
special White House representative were among those
injured in the ensuing violence. While the mobs rioted, the
television cameras continued to roll, and public opinion
shifted. Hundreds of protestors, including Martin Luther
King, were arrested.

Freedom Rider
bus fire-bombed
by KKK in
Anniston,
Alabama, 1961

In September 1961, the ICC, or Interstate Commerce
Commission, abolished segregation aboard buses
and terminal facilities, including bus stations.
Violence erupted in response to these protests. The
Ku Klux Klan then dynamited four black churches in
nearby towns, destroying or heavily damaging them.

A mob of racists
beats Freedom
Riders in
Birmingham,
Alabama, 1961

Birmingham, a major center of iron and steel in the
South, was one of the toughest cities in Alabama,
and Bull Connor was the ideal white supremacist
villain. The SCLC trained hundreds of volunteers in a
civil rights boot camp, teaching them the basics of
how to conduct a nonviolent campaign. They were
warned that they might face violence and possibly
death.

Bull Connor had been Commissioner of Public
Safety for several decades, off and on. He was
notoriously vigilant and cruel. Lewis notes that in
Birmingham, “segregation was total and the
slightest betrayal of discontent with the racial
order was severely, often capitally, punished.
Police brutality to blacks was the custom rather
than the exception.” “Of the 80,000 registered
voters in 1963, only 10,000 were black. When
desegregation was mandated, “they closed the
city’s parks rather than allow blacks to sully
them.” “Whites still sipped water from designated
fountains and tried on clothing in fitting rooms”
for whites only. Blacks were intimidated by the
bombing of seventeen black churches in 1963.

Martin spoke at a packed prayer
meeting. “We are heading for
freedom land, and nothing is
going to stop us. We are going
to make Birmingham the center
of antidiscrimination activity in
the nation. I have come here to
stay until something is done.”
Martin Luther King promoting his book
Why We Can't Wait, based on his Letter
from Birmingham Jail, 1964

Seeing the television cameras roll, Bull Connor’s men
behaved civilly for three days of the demonstrations,
anticipating that the local court would issue an injunction
forbidding future protests.
When this injunction was issued, there was a panic. Martin
Luther King and Ralph Abernathy decided to go to prison
as a form of protest, along with fifty other volunteers.
Martin was placed in solitary confinement, without access
to a phone, without access to his attorney.

With all contact cut off, this was the most pressing
question: Was Martin Luther King alive? Or had he been
lynched? On Easter Sunday, his wife, Coretta Scott King
placed a call to the White House asking if they could
inquire into this. The Attorney General, Robert Kennedy,
called her and told her, though he was not able to arrange
for her husband to call her, that he was indeed safe. On
Monday morning, the President, John F Kennedy, called
her to say she would be expecting a call from her husband
and that FBI agents were on the scene in Birmingham.

This controversy prompted eight white Birmingham
pastors, scandalized by the movement’s breaking the
unjust laws preventing demonstrations and the militancy
of the black leaders and clergy, to issue an Appeal for Law
and Order and Common Sense. In response, Martin Luther
King wrote his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail,
which forcefully contended that blacks had been patient
enough for decades, that the time is NOW for positive
racial change.

https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
What was the message from Martin
Luther King’s Letter From a
Birmingham Jail? “Every Negro was
familiar with the cry of ‘WAIT!’ It
nearly always meant ‘NEVER.’”

Sensing an impasse, Martin Luther King and Ralph
Abernathy accepted release on bail in late April.
When tried a week later, they were fined fifty dollars
and five days loss of liberty.

School Children March in Protest

This was good television, but they needed better
television. They launched the most controversial
tactic of all. Six thousand children, aged six to
sixteen, marched and protested from the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to downtown. A
thousand children were arrested. Up to now, Bull
Conner showed restraint for television, but for
some reason, he decided to brutalize these
children.

Bill Hudson's
image of Parker
High School
student Walter
Gadsden being
attacked by dogs
was published in
The New York
Times on May 4,
1963.

Lewis recounts the rising violence.
Two fire hoses “were dislodged by
their water pressure and rocketed
into a group of policemen; one
officer’s ribs and another’s legs
were crushed. Connor’s men were
no longer attempting to control
the crowds. They had been
ordered to drive them brutally
into the black section of the city. It
was not surprising that nonviolent
discipline collapsed under naked
provocation. A hail of rocks,
bottles, and brickbats showered
the police and firemen.”
Protestors in Birmingham, by Charles Moore, Black Star agency

Lewis notes that later that
month, “the US Supreme
Court’s decision legalizing
sit-in demonstrations in
cities enforcing segregation
nullified the Alabama laws
under which the large
majority of Birmingham’s
demonstrators could be
prosecuted.”

Lewis recounts, “On Thursday morning,
the white negotiators agreed to the
essential demands of the black
community. Lunch counters, restrooms,
fitting rooms, and drinking fountains in
the large downtown stores were to be
desegregated.” “Similarly, the hiring and
promotion of black personnel was to
take place over the next sixty days.” “The
nearly three thousand persons arrested
were to be released immediately.”
Demonstrators, March on Washington, 1963

Violence Continues in Birmingham

But the violence did not cease. Martin’s brother’s
house was demolished by a bomb, though
miraculously he, his wife, and his children were not
harmed. A motel used by SCLC leaders was partially
destroyed by a bomb. The rioting continued.

Bomb-
damaged
home of
NAACP
attorney
Arthur Shores
in 1963

Four months later, in September 1963, the KKK
detonated dynamite under the stairs of the 16th
Street Baptist Church in Birmingham during Sunday
School, killing four young black girls, including Addie
Mae, Cynthia, Carole, and Denise, ages eleven to
fourteen, and injuring several dozen others. A white
jury eventually convicted several of the perpetrators
for murder.

The 16th Street Baptist Church, headquarters for the Birmingham campaign

John F Kennedy said this to
the American people in his
television address: “One
hundred years of delay
have passed since
President Lincoln freed the
slaves, yet their heirs, their
grandsons, are not fully
free. They are not yet freed
from the bonds of
injustice.”

Next was the March on Washington and Martin Luther
King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the
Lincoln Memorial, heard by 250,000 participants. Before
the speeches, they were entertained by many star
performers, including Joan Baez, John Dylan, and Peter,
and Paul and Mary.
We reflected on this short and remarkable speech, which
drew from the Declaration of Independence and the
Emancipation Proclamation, which ended with the I Have a
Dream refrains.

MLK peered into the future: “I Have
a Dream that one day on the red
hills of Georgia, the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slave
owners will be able to sit down
together at the table of
brotherhood.”
MLK proclaimed: “I Have a Dream
that my four little children will 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.”

A few months
later, in
November,
President John
F Kennedy was
assassinated in
his motorcade
in Dallas, Texas.

When Lyndon Johnson became President, he used
the momentum from the March on Washington and
the assassination of John F Kennedy to pass the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.

President
Lyndon
Johnson signs
the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.
Among the
guests behind
him is Martin
Luther King.

Next was an unsuccessful struggle to battle
segregation in the small racist city of St Augustine,
Florida, then the efforts to register black voters and
protest for Civil Rights in Mississippi and in Selma,
Alabama.

In the Freedom Summer of 1964, many enthusiastic white, and a few
black, college students traveled to Mississippi to assist in voter
registration efforts, which was risky, because in many small towns blacks
who attempted to register to vote were sometimes lynched.
Three volunteers, one black and two white Jews, disappeared when
returning from registering voters in Mississippi. Their car was found, they
were not. Federal authorities became involved, LBJ ordered Navy divers
to search the canals of Mississippi for bodies. They found one body, then
another, then another, of blacks who had been lynched, but none were
the bodies of the three students. Finally, an informant came forward to
tell them where they had been buried alive with a backhoe.

https://www.nrm.org/MT/text/MurderMississippi.html
Murder in
Mississippi,
by Norman
Rockwell,
1965

The full horrifying story is in our Yale Lecture Notes.

Bloody Marches From Selma, Alabama

Tensions mounted as Martin Luther King swooped in from out of town.
Martin was encouraging voter registration and was planning a massive
nonviolent demonstration in Selma, Alabama.
Selma was deeply segregated. Although blacks narrowly outnumbered
whites in Selma, Alabama, only one percent of the registered voters were
black. Sheriff Jim Clark was the Bull Connor of Selma, firmly determined
to preserve white supremacy.
The newly elected Progressive Mayor of Selma, Joseph Smitherman, was
supported by white businessmen who sought to attract Northern
industry by toning down racial issues. He appointed Wilson Baker as
Chief of Police to undermine the authority of Jim Clark.

The SCLC chose to concentrate on Selma to end
barriers to voter registration. Hundreds of protesters
were carted in police wagons to jail by Sheriff Clark,
enraging Chief of Police Baker. But the brutality of
Jim Clark, like that of Bull Conner, ensured great
television.

Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy led a giant
demonstration towards the courthouse, they and a
thousand others were arrested in two days. As in
Birmingham, many of these demonstrators were
schoolchildren.

There were many brutal incidents, police shot several
protesters, one died from his wounds. On a Sunday
afternoon, five hundred disciplined nonviolent
marchers attempted to march from their church in
Selma to Montgomery to present demands for
greater civil rights. Sheriff Jim Clark ordered the
marchers to disperse. When they refused, the police
attacked.

The 1965 Selma March is
represented by a stamp
featuring a 1965
photograph called Youths
on the Selma March, by
Bruce Davidson

Our biographer Lewis recounts, “First,
there was gas, then the posse on
horseback galloped into the swarm of
fleeing blacks with cattle prods and they
flailed their clubs like maniacs. The
marchers were driven back across the
bridge and into the houses” of brave
friends. John Lewis, with a fractured skull,
and Hosea Williams “led many of the
protesters back to the church. At one
point, some blacks retaliated, hurling rocks
and bricks at the police, even forcing Clark
and his men to momentarily retreat.”

Jim Clark and his men were preparing for more retaliatory
violence when Wilson Baker intervened. Defusing the
situation, he persuaded the marchers to retreat into the
church, and talked Jim Clark into withdrawing his men.
Baker likely saved many lives that day.
“In Atlanta, Martin was stunned.” He promised he would
return to Selma on Tuesday to lead another march. On
Monday morning, a federal Judge issued an injunction
forbidding the march. For the first time, Martin prepared
to defy a federal injunction.

Bloody Sunday,
Alabama police
attack Selma to
Montgomery
Marchers, 1965.

Lewis described this moment in
history: “The scenario was
perfect: intractable segregation
in a small Southern city,
courageous black common folk
demanding their overdue
minimal rights, and police
officers whose every sadistic act
reified the demonology of the
South.” In short, this was great
television, many who watched
television that night would see
images seared into their memory
they would never forget.
March from Selma.

Lyndon Johnson pleaded with the officials of the SCLC to call off
the Tuesday march. Martin Luther King threatened to march to
Montgomery, but few of the marchers had prepared for the long
march. The marchers crossed the bridge, encountering a line of
state troopers, who ordered the marchers to halt. Martin was
granted permission for them to kneel and pray. When they stood
up, the troopers moved to the shoulders of the road, apparently
so they could pass. But then Martin led the marchers back to the
church.
Meanwhile, President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the
Selma crisis to push through new legislation.

Alabama Police
watch Selma
marchers turn
around on Tuesday,
March 9, 1965.

President Johnson presented his
Voting Rights Act before
Congress in prime time on
national television. He
addressed the American people:
“I speak tonight for the dignity
of man and the destiny of
democracy.” “At times history
and fate meet at a single time in
a single place to shape a turning
point in man’s unending search
for freedom.” “So it was a
century ago at Appomattox,”
where the Civil War ended, “and
so it was in Selma, Alabama.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, 1965

Final March From Selma To Montgomery

The SCLC lawyers petitioned the federal court to allow another march from Selma
to finally reach Montgomery. Two days after Lyndon Johnson’s speech, federal
“Judge Johnson authorized the Selma to Montgomery march, specifically enjoining
Sheriff Jim Clark, Governor George Wallace,” “and other state officials from
interfering with it.” Judge Johnson’s order only allowed three hundred to march the
distance. Four thousand federal troops and many FBI agents were also dispatched.
This final peaceful five-day march to Montgomery was great television.
The actions of white supremacists helped ensure the passage of the voting rights
bill. Three houses were dynamited, and several bombs at the mayor’s house were
disabled. Most tragic was the death of a white Detroit mother and housewife who
had volunteered to drive protestors home to Selma from Montgomery. As she was
driving to Selma, white thugs drove up beside her and shot her in the head, killing
her.

Our biographer Lewis lists the main issues that
Martin Luther King and the SCLC were considering as
they expanded their civil rights campaigns to include
Northern cities:

Main issues for Martin Luther King and the
SCLC:
• “The growing conviction among whites
that the blacks, with federal backing,
were moving too rapidly.
• The fierce objections by black militants
that racial progress had not only been
too slow but was being subtly
manipulated by powerful whites.
• Practical programs to deal with urban
and Northern black poverty.”
• Whether the military spending on the
War in Vietnam was hampering funding
for civil rights programs.

The problem was that although combatting urban black
poverty was the more important battle, these were not
simple battles, they did not make for good television like
the dramatic protests in places like Birmingham and
Selma, where there were snarling dogs, fire hoses, and
villainous Southern state troopers with clubs and ominous
sunglasses. What was unique about the large Northern
cities were the multistory substandard housing projects
that dwarfed anything in the South.

Close up of
some leaders
of the March
on
Washington
walking along
Constitution
Avenue.

In addition to protesting for Civil Rights, Martin
Luther King felt compelled to join the protests over
the unpopular Vietnam War. But the SCLC, at first,
voted that Martin could publicly only express his
opposition to the war as a private citizen, not as an
officer representing the SCLC. Martin’s opposition to
the war muddled his civil rights message and
distracted from his efforts.

1970 protest at Florida State University.

Two weeks later, rioting and looting erupted in
Harlem, where white merchants and police were
assaulted. LBJ immediately conferred with the
leading civil rights activists, chief among them was
Martin Luther King, who traveled to New York City,
where black leaders issued a statement condemning
the rioting, asking that demonstrations be suspended
until after the November election. This was followed
by large-scale rioting in Los Angeles, California.

Demonstrators
march on 125th
Street during the
Harlem Riots of
1964.

The administration had passed a billion-dollar
program to fight poverty, but these sums barely
touched the problems of pervasive poverty.

Lyndon Johnson
meeting with
civil rights
leaders Martin
Luther King,
Whitney Young,
and James
Farmer in the
Oval Office,
1964

Lewis notes: “Of
Chicago’s 3.5 million
people” in 1964 “nearly
one million are black,
and almost half of these
are impoverished. Of
those who are not, not
many are well above the
poverty line. And the
overwhelming majority
are concentrated in the
appalling residential
slums on the city’s south
and west sides.”
The Arthur family arrive in Chicago in 1920, during the Great Migration.

Martin rented an apartment in Chicago to publicize the
substandard housing, but his wife Coretta could not stand
the stench of urine. But Chicago differed from the
Southern states in that the boss of Chicago, Richard Daley,
was not a white supremacist, and was not only willing to
confer with the civil rights leaders, but also tried to steal
their thunder with pronouncements of new city programs
to defuse whatever protests they planned. Chicago was
not good television.

President
John F
Kennedy
poses with
Mayor
Richard J.
Daley and
family in the
Oval Office
of the White
House, 1961

Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis

In Memphis, “two black garbage crewmen were crushed to death when
the automatic compressor of their truck was accidentally triggered.”
Angry workers in Memphis voted to strike in February. Meanwhile,
sanitation workers in New York City went on strike for wage increases and
additional benefits.
Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO offered material assistance to their
Memphis Local, but Memphis Mayor Loeb, whose election had been
opposed by eighty percent of black voters, refused both to recognize the
union and refused to sign a written contract to end the strike.

Some sanitation
workers in
Memphis used
antiquated trucks
they called
"wiener-barrel"
trucks which
killed two
sanitation
workers.

This was a simpler contest more
suited to the confrontational
nonviolent protests that Martin
Luther King and the SCLC
preferred. Many blacks
welcomed his swooping down to
assist in Memphis, but that did
not include many of the young
militant blacks in Memphis. The
youth organization Invaders
declared, “If you expect honkies
to get the message, you got to
break some windows.”

Then the nation was stunned when Lyndon Johnson
announced that he did not plan to run for reelection
as President. But this also meant that he now had a
freer hand in pursuing Civil Rights legislation.

President Lyndon Johnson announcing he will not run for re-election on March 31, 1968.

A nonviolent protest was planned in Memphis. Over six
thousand nonviolent protesters began the peaceful march,
but when they heard the sound of glass breaking, Martin
and the nonviolent protesters retreated back to the church
or went home. The militant protesters continued with
what was now a riot, in the melee the police shot a
teenage black. Fifty people were injured and over a
hundred were arrested, though property damage was
largely limited to broken windows and the looting of
window display cases.

Protesters outside
Clayborn Temple
during the
Memphis
sanitation workers
strike in 1968.

Martin Luther King announced immediately that
another march, far better organized, was planned for
that Friday. He persuaded the Invaders to participate
in a nonviolent protest. But a federal court issued an
injunction against further demonstrations, backed up
by a Justice Department Attorney.

Memphis
policemen using
mace during a
demonstration on
Main Street in
Memphis,
Tennessee, 1968.

An injured
Memphis
policeman during
the sanitation
workers' strike in
1968.

Martin Luther King did not defy the federal injunction
forbidding further Memphis demonstrations planned for
Friday. On Thursday evening, Martin was standing on the
balcony of his Memphis motel with Ralph Abernathy and
other associates. Across the street, James Earl Ray
carefully pulled the trigger of his Remington rifle.

The Lorraine
Motel in
Memphis,
where King was
assassinated, is
now the site of
the National
Civil Rights
Museum.
The wreath
marks the spot.

Aftermath of Assassination of MLK

What was the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther
King? While he was publicizing the economic and housing plight of the
Negro, President Lyndon Johnson was shepherding further Civil Rights
legislation through Congress. Martin Luther King was assassinated on
April 4, and then the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed by Lyndon
Johnson on April 11. Included in that legislation was the Fair Housing Act
that forbade racial or any other form of discrimination when dwellings
are rented or sold. Hate crimes were addressed, and federal protections
for voting, schooling, and employment were strengthened. This
legislation did address some of the issues Martin Luther King had
publicized in his protests in Chicago.

President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968

Massive riots in more than a dozen cities erupted
after the assassination of Martin Luther King. These
riots persisted for years, off and on.

In her biography on LBJ, Kearns writes
that after Lyndon Johnson “canvassed
the opinion in Congress,” he was
“convinced that the riots had destroyed
whatever sense of injustice,
compassion or guilt King’s death had
produced; that the country was in no
mood for progressive words on race.”
Martin Luther King statue,
Westminster Abbey, 1998

That November the Republican Richard Nixon won an
overwhelming landslide victory in the 1968
Presidential Election. But Democrats retained a
healthy margin in both the House and the Senate,
though many Southern Democratic Congressmen
were not enthusiastic supporters of Civil Rights.

1968 Presidential Election Results
1968 House Election Results 1968 Senate Election Results

The author, David Levering Lewis, was planning to write the
biography of Martin Luther King when he was assassinated. It
was initially published sixteen months later and quickly became
the classic biography of this Civil Rights icon.
Likewise, Doris Kearn’s Lyndon Johnson, The American Dream is
part autobiography, since a major source were her notes of his
extensive comments while she was a guest at his Texas ranch.
We discussed these biographies in greater depth in our
reflection on Martin’s youth and school years and our reflection
of his closing years.

We are planning reflections on Doris Kearns
biography of LBJ and how he was able to shepherd
effective Civil Rights legislation through Congress.

Doris Kearns Goodwin will release
in April 2024 An Unfinished Love
Story from her and her late
husband’s notes on the
momentous Sixties, including the
Great Society programs and the
Vietnam War.

We are also planning reflections on Thurgood
Marshall, who was a future Supreme Court Justice,
and his legal attacks on segregation, voting rights,
and discrimination as lead counsel of the NAACP,
whose litigation led to the Supreme Court’s Brown v
Board of Education decision, which enabled Martin
Luther King to fight for Civil Rights.

https://www.meetup.com/Reflections/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg/

Martin Luther King: Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Similaire à Martin Luther King: Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis

Similaire à Martin Luther King: Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis (14)

Plus de Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History

Plus de Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Martin Luther King: Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis