The Ripple Effects of Ministry

Life." The sermons argued for man's need for God's love and criticized the racial
injustices of Western civilization.
Harry Wachtel joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers
of the SCLC in the libel case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan; the case was litigated in
reference to the newspaper advertisement "Heed Their Rising Voices". Wachtel
founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the expenses of the suit and to assist the nonviolent
civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising. This organization
was named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights." King served as honorary president
for the group. He was displeased with the pace that President Kennedy was using to
address the issue of segregation. In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a
document that called on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and
issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil rights as a kind of Second
Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order.
The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it
began tappingKing's telephone line in the fall of 1963. Kennedy was concerned that
public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil
rights initiatives. He warned King to discontinue these associations and later felt
compelled to issue the written directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other
SCLC leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and
investigated the allegations of communist infiltration. When no evidence emerged to
support this, the FBI used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years
in attempts to force King out of his leadership position, in the COINTELPRO program.
King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern
segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the
struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage
of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by Southern blacks, and of
segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced
a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the
civil rights movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early
1960s.
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights,
and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law
of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
1965 Voting Rights Act.
King and the SCLC put into practice many of the principles of the Christian Left and
applied the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the
method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often
dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.
King was criticized by many groups during the course of his participation in the civil
rights movement. This included opposition by more militant blacks such as Nation of
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