Between Contending Forces: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African American Freedom Struggle

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In 1959 Ella Baker, the interim executive director ofthe Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), urged Martin Luther King, Jr., and other SCLC officers to emphasize local organizing and protests. Since its founding two years earlier, SCLC had accomplished few of its ambitious goals, and Baker was especially disturbed that the organization had failed to stimulate coordinated action by local groups or to develop potential capable of building vital movement of nonviolent direct mass (2). Within months of Baker's remarks, the lunch counter desegregation sit-ins in Greensboro ignited the type of movement she advocated, but black college students, rather than King and his SCLC colleagues, were spearheading the new movement. After years of working under NAACP officials as well as King, Baker wrote early in i960 of her scars of battle, the frustration and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay. She found refreshing the inclination toward group-centered leader ship ofthe student protesters (3). Baker's comments suggested the difficulties King faced during the early 1960s as desegregation protests escalated in many southern communities. Although many lauded him for his courage and cha risma, King moved cautiously as he attempted to build on the success of the Montgomery bus boycott. Baker was not the only person affiliated with SCLC who believed that the group should move beyond its voter registration emphasis and begin mobilizing mass protests. Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth was the most vocal of King's SCLC colleagues in pushing for more aggressive tactics against the Jim Crow system in the South. Even before becoming a SCLC founder, he had organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights after Alabama officials banned the NAACP from operating in the state. Despite having his home bombed and suffering a severe beating when he attempted to enroll his children in previously all-white public schools, Shuttlesworth consistently pushed King toward greater militancy. It is my conviction that it is our duty and right to move courageously against Segregation: to attack it rather than waiting to defend ourselves, he insisted in a 1957 letter to King (4). Outside SCLC's ranks there were many other signs of grassroots militancy during the late 1950s. The bravery ofthe Little Rock Nine as they confronted white mobs seeking to prevent them from desegregat ing Central High School in 1957 was one of many instances of black teenagers assuming prominent roles in the civil rights movement. The following year, members ofthe NAACP Youth Council in Okla homa City launched a series of protests against segregated lunch counters, and similar protests occurred in Wichita, Kansas. Youth Marches for Integrated Schools, held in Washington, D.C, in 1958 and 1959, attracted thousands of young participants. Although most of these youthful activists followed King's nonviolent strategy, King's public debate at the end of the 1950s with Robert F. Williams, the North Carolina NAACP leader who sparked controversy by advocating armed self defense, gave hints ofthe forceful tactical and ideological challenges King would later face from black militants such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael (5). The student led sit-in campaign of early i960 was another clear indication that King's status as the preeminent symbol ofthe African American freedom struggle would remain tenuous. He publicly supported the sit-ins but also realized that had taken the struggle for justice into their own hands. During the spring of i960 he spoke at the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), urging student leaders to recruit volunteers willing to go to jail rather than pay bail or fines (6). But the increasingly militant, self-reliant SNCC activists were more will ing to take King's advice than he was. While several thousand student protesters went to jail during i960, King limited himself to sporadic involvement in civil disobedience while defending himself against trumped-up charges of falsifying his Alabama state tax returns, for which he was ultimately acquitted. When students convinced him to join an October i960 sit-in in Atlanta, King's impulsive decision had unexpected consequences that reminded him that celebrity was at times a liability as well as an asset. Georgia officials used his arrest as an opportunity to imprison him for violating an earlier traffic offense. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy then intervened