King: A Life

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. A secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP, Parks had expressed a willingness to challenge the city’s segregation ordinances and may have gotten herself arrested to spark a protest. She succeeded, and under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), Black participation on city buses declined precipitously. At the time, King was not demanding full desegregation, only equal first-come first-serve treatment for Black and white passengers, but the boycott still triggered a fierce backlash from city officials and even white churches. The boycott lasted for 382 days, ending once the Supreme Court affirmed the unconstitutionality of segregated public transportation, a decision that effectively ended the “separate but equal” doctrine that had upheld segregation since 1896. The modern civil rights movement was born.

Formed in 1954 to resist implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, White Citizens’ Councils are an umbrella term for a collection of local organizations throughout the South dedicated to protecting segregation against legal and political challenges. In addition to resisting the integration of schools and public facilities, they organized resistance to voting registration efforts targeted at Black Americans. Such efforts often mirrored the tactics of civil rights activists, such as boycotting integrated businesses in retaliation for boycotts of segregated ones, as well as utilizing the economic power of prominent members to punish Black individuals and businesses tied to desegregation efforts. The Councils formally disavowed violence, acting as a counterpart to the more outwardly brutish tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, but membership in the two organizations often overlapped, and Council members frequently promoted, justified, and took part in violent actions against civil rights activists.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a Black nationalist organization whose chief spokesperson of the 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm X, was in many respects a rival to Martin Luther King Jr. The NOI rejected integration on the grounds that white America would never treat its Black citizens equally, and so Black people would have to define their own collective existence as separately as possible. While Malcolm X himself never used or stoked violence, he often warned that violence might at some point be necessary to address the evils of racism, and in his speeches, he often mocked and derided King’s approach of nonviolent resistance. King in turn warned that if the white establishment was not willing to work with him, they would be left to deal with more radical parties like the NOI.