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Elective English–II

Notes That night, back in Selma, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, James Reeb, who had
marched that day, was murdered by Klansmen when he emerged from a black-run restaurant.
This tragedy produced just the right amount–and just the right kind–of publicity to push the
Selma campaign to a level of critical influence. In Washington, thousands of religious leaders
picketed the White House. On 15 May, in a televised address to a joint session of Congress,
Johnson compared events in Selma to events in Lexington and Concord during the Revolutionary
War, and at Appomattox during the Civil War. He then proceeded to unveil his Voting Rights
Bill to legislators and the nation.
Meanwhile, in Alabama, the federal injunction was lifted, and Johnson sent four thousand
troops to accompany a third—this time successful–march to Montgomery. On 24 March, the
protest reached Montgomery, and culminated in a rally on the capitol steps, from which King
addressed a crowd of 25,000. The crowd included Rosa Parks, as well as celebrities Harry
Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Eckstine, Nina Simone, and Sammy Davis, Jr. But the joy
of the day did not go untempered: that night a white woman, who was driving protestors back
to Selma, was shot dead.
As Birmingham had led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Selma led to the Voting Rights Act of
1965, which Johnson signed into law in August. The legislation prohibited the kind of tactics
that had been used in Selma to hinder black voter registration (deliberately slow service, odd
courthouse hours, excessively difficult literacy tests, etc.) and gave the federal government
more power to police local instances of abuse. Insofar as federal legislation was concerned,
Selma marked the final stage of the Civil Rights Movement. It was the last major gain obtained
by non-violent direct action. After the Selma victory, King changed his focus.

3.3 Final Years

Five days after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, the black neighbourhood of Watts
in south central Los Angeles, California, erupted in riots. Police brutality and poor living
conditions provoked the uprising, which ultimately took 34 lives, destroyed 209 buildings,
and led to over 4000 arrests. King visited the city on 17 August, condemning the violence, but
emphasizing the validity of its causes. After Selma, and encouraged by Watts, King turned his
attention to Northern and Western cities, which suffered a kind of racial tension that his
victories in the South had not relieved.
Late in 1965, he and the SCLC chose Chicago as the site for a Northern urban campaign. In
February 1966, King rented an apartment in Chicago slums for his family and himself, and
began organizing protests against poverty and discrimination in housing and employment.
Increasingly his focus was economic: for the Johnson Administration would go no further with
federal legislation, and only by securing decent jobs and homes could African Americans
escape the kind of conditions that had proven so explosive in Watts.
King planned a massive rally in Chicago for 10 July, 1966, a day he named “Freedom Sunday.”
Developments in the South, however, took him away from Chicago shortly before the event:
in June, a man named James Meredith, who had been the first black student at the University
of Mississippi, was shot by whites and seriously wounded while working on a voter-registration
drive. The major civil rights organizations–CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC– descended on Mississippi
and coordinated a march, called the Meredith March, from the site of the shooting to Jackson,
Mississippi.
In Mississippi, however, King sensed divisions within the movement that he had sensed
before–indeed, they now seemed to be deepening: members of SNCC considered King’s strategies
to be decreasingly effective as racial violence increased. This attitude was embodied by Stokely

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