We look at a selection of the men and women at the vanguard of the American Civil Rights Movement
WORDS: JONATHAN WRIGHT
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR (1929–68)
The campaign for civil rights was a mass movement, but between 1955 and 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was its figurehead. A Baptist minister whose parents were also campaigners, King first came to national prominence when he led the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56).
Via establishing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organised education projects and voter-registration drives, his influence grew. In 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, a soaring demand for equality, to around 250,000 people. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite simmering tensions in the wider Civil Rights Movement over King’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance, he remained active until his assassination, in April 1968, by gunman James Earl Ray, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. “I’ve seen the promised land,” he told a crowd the night before he died. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
ROSA PARKS (1913–2005)
▶ On 1 December 1955, after spending the day at work, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery. Public transport in Alabama’s capital was segregated and Parks took a seat in the first row of the “colored” section. Gradually, the bus filled up, which, in the era of segregation, was a cue for driver James Blake to set aside more seats for white people and demand that black passengers move.
Although she knew she faced arrest, Parks refused to comply, an action that has sometimes been portrayed as being down to tiredness. Which isn’t how Parks, a longtime activist, saw things. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she later wrote.
While she was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat – people such as Claudette Colvin (b1939) had done the same a few months earlier – Parks’ defiance inspired the Montgomery bus boycott. On her death, she was the first woman to lie in honor beneath the dome in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington DC.
MAMIE TILL (1921–2003)
The death of 14-year-old, Chicago-born Emmett Till (1941–1955) while visiting cousins in Mississippi was cruel and brutal. Accused of offending a white woman, 21-year-old
