policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
The civil rights movement reflects deep undercurrents of black
social and political history.
black woman in Montgomery,
The modern expression began in 1955 when a
Alabama refused to take a seat at the back of a
"bus, where blacks were customarily required to sit. Her action was
strongly defended by Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1960, the first of the
"sit-ins" occurred at a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth's lunch
counter. From 1960 to 1965 the civil rights movement was dominated by the
interracial nonviolent approach of King who attempted to mobilize black
and white support in demonstrations that would focus national and international
attention on the plight of blacks in the South.
King's objective
was to break the political stranglehold of the whites on the repressive
state governments throughout the region. The movement led by Martin Luther
King has its greatest success in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The coalition of organizations
King had stitched together had within it serious divisions and disagreements
that would disrupt the unity of the civil rights movement.
Three issues were at the heart of the growing division.
Could
the movement remain nonviolent in the face of violence? Could the black
leadership continue to work with whites? Was the movement pushing for
reform or revolution? King continued to answer that the movement could
remain a nonviolent, interracial, reformist force, but more radical elements
in the movement were developing far different responses to those
questions.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
mass membership organization.
more than one hundred and fifty SNCC
whole of the South.
was-never a
At the height of its activity there were no
staff workers in the field in the
Four-fifths of the staff workers were black, mostly
from working-class families, assisted by a small but tenacious group of
whites.14/ SNCC had developed a voting rights strategy in 1961 to obtain
registration of black voters in the South and thereby break the white
racist hold on local and state goveriments. In 1964 SNCC launched the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Nearly a thousand white youths, many
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