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The Splintering of the Civil Rights Movement |
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In many ways the protest at Selmaand the rapid enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965represented the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., enjoyed widespread support throughout the North and the West when he confronted the Alabama state troopers at the bridge in Selma. The vast majority of Americans, black and white, clearly supported the haste with which Congress moved to grant that most basic of all democratic rights - the vote - to minority Americans.
But just days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, blacks living in the Wattssection of Los Angeles rioted, burning and looting their own and neighboring sections of that city. There were subsequent riots in other major cities, and these riots "were in no sense demonstrations for [minority] rights." They thus tended to greatly weaken white support for the minority cause.
In 1966, when Martin Luther King, Jr., led a drive for equal employment and equal housing opportunity in Chicago, much of the white community there opposed him rather than supported him. King eventually withdrew from Chicago without achieving the major goals of his Chicago Freedom Movement. On Capitol Hill, a housing rights bill failed to gain the requisite 2/3 vote for cloture when Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen declined to support it.
Within the civil rights movement itself, there was disagreement over the proper way to further the minority cause in the United States. New leadership at the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to question the effectiveness of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protests and openly advocated more confrontational techniques. Other voices and organizations, such as the Black Muslims, talked of "black nationalism," "black separatism," and "black power." The unity and singleness of purpose that had characterized the civil rights movement in the early 1960s had begun to dissipate and fall apart by the late 1960s. |
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