News and Features
Let Justice Roll Down (Civil Rights Activism, Social Justice, Civil Rights Movement, Historical People, Society)
From 1961 to 1966, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay for The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in America. In 1965, he wrote about the power of demonstrations and "legislation written in the streets."
All profound social movements reach a plateau of this sort, short of the summit, and the presence of new opposition should not dismay us. New obstacles should not be deplored but welcomed because their presence proves we are closer to the ultimate decision.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
The article presents information on the U.S. civil rights movements. At the end of 1965 the civil rights movement was widely depicted as bewildered and uncertain, groping desperately for new directions. The substantial legislative accomplishments of the past several years, it was argued, dealt so extensively with civil rights problems that the movement had become stagnated in an embarrassment of riches. Negro leaders, did not know how to maintain their assembled armies nor what goals they should seek. The dominant white leadership of the nation, in perceiving the civil rights movement as uncertain and confused, is engaged in political projection.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
In this article the author presents his annual report on the progress of civil rights. When 1963 came to a close, more than skeptical progress had been achieved through the demonstrations that had drawn more than a million Negroes into the streets. The two years of 1963 and 1964 marked a historic turning point for the civil right movements; in the previous century no comparable change for the Negro had occurred. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is important even beyond its far-reaching provisions. It is historic because its enactment was generated by a massive coalition of White and Negro forces.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in March of 1964, 'Exactly one hundred years after Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation for them, Negroes wrote their own document of freedom in their own way. In 1963, the civil rights movement coalesced around a technique for social change, nonviolent direct action.'
FROM THE ARCHIVE
In 1963, the civil rights movement, coalesced around a technique for social change, nonviolent direct action. It elevated jobs and other economic issues to the summit, where earlier it had placed discrimination and suffrage. It thereby forged episodic social protest into the hammer of social revolution. Within a few months, more than 1,000 U.S. cities and towns were shaken by street demonstrations, and more than 20,000 non-violent resistors went to jail. It was a major upheaval in the history of Afro-Americans. The impact of this new strength, expressed on, a new level, means among other things that the civil rights issue can never again be thrust into the background.
An arresting paradox emerged in 1962. History will doubtless judge the year as making a favorable turning point in the struggle for equality, yet it was also the year that civil rights was displaced as the dominant issue in domestic politics.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Early in 1963, the U.S. President backed away from the Senate fight to amend Rule 22, the so-called filibuster rule. Had he entered the fray, the amendment would probably have passed and the greatest obstacle to the passage of civil-rights legislation would have been smashed. The decline of civil rights as the Number One domestic issue was a direct consequence, the author believes, of the rise and public acceptance of "tokenism." The American people have not abandoned the quest for equal rights.
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