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Speaking of Andrew Young and his personal accomplishments is difficult to relate to without involving a whole society and their struggles. It is also unkind to speak of the Civil Rights Movement and the heights it attained without illustrating the great dignity of Andrew Young. Many years of his life, has been dedicated to the movement; in a sense he has lived it. For many years his family was a state of mind rather than a physical being from his constant absence. He would crash with fatigue almost every night in strange motels across the bitter south after countless marches and demonstrations just to better the lives of millions of people he never met. Along with Andrews assemblage, the SCLC, left an impression that will never be forgotten.
Many famous humanitarians had their roots in the SCLC; such as Jesse Jackson, the activist who fights for the poor (ranked the 47 th most influential black American ever). Fannie Lou Hamer, who came up through her grass roots as a sharecropper, to become one of the strongest pushers of black votes, (she is ranked the 75 th most influential black American). Ralph Abernathy, a very strong strategist and pastor for the SCLC, who became leader of the SCLC after his best friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , was assassinated. Dr. King, the force behind the whole movement, is ranked the number 1 most influential black leader in America.
Andrew Young was the Executive director of the SCLC and also was the down to earth man that reasoned some of the crazy ideas out of his peers (Mr. Young is ranked 65 th among the most influential). The main focus of this book was the battles the SCLC fought across the nation, leaving a very vivid account of each movement. If you look at the general trend of the specific movements, the issues are all attacking different problems. Specifically, as the movements progressed, the SCLC issues deepened. Before the successful social reform of the 1960 s, there were obviously many deep troublesome issues concerning the treatment of blacks in the South.
Generally, in the South, the black man who was supposedly a freedman after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1883, was treated subhuman and had almost no rights. Racial injustice was accepted, even given a name, Jim Crow. These unwritten laws oppressed the black race from obtaining any sort of dream. Their basic rights set for them by our founding fathers; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were stripped from them. Martin Luther King made this famous by his quote from his speech I Have a Dream. He said that: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... America has given the Negro people a bad check, which has come back insufficient funds. The mindset of the South was separate but equal, which is totally unacceptable. For instance, in the transit system, the blacks were forced to the back of the bus, and the whites were given the front. If the white section overflowed, they would make a black man get out of his seat to let the white man sit; but if the colored section was crammed to the top, under no circumstance could they take a seat in even an empty white section. The examples of white tyranny are endless.
Yes, along the way there were many blacks that fought back. For example, Marcus Mosiah Garvey devoted his life to the cause of correcting the injustices that blacks were subjected to. Leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. , cite him as the inspiration for their work. Progress slowly was made but not without great effort by many black leaders. Not until the day the black men came back from fighting the Second World War was there a new look at black expectations and attitudes. Servicemen returned home with broader mental horizons, increased confidence, and greater self-esteem.
They had fought and defeated the racist tyranny of the Axis; they were in no mood to readapt passively to the Souths humiliating caste system. The social transformation was started by laymen that were sick and tired of being treated as second class citizens. The most famous of these people was Rosa Parks, the seamstress who wouldnt get up and give a white man her seat, then the bus driver got up and demanded her to give up her seat. She decided to be arrested rather than deal with the humiliation of giving in to the racist men. When the Negro community heard about this they united overnight. Forty thousand handbills were printed, sparking a citywide boycott of the transit system.
The clergyman took the torch and led the revolt due to their economic independence. The young minister who led was Martin Luther King Jr. This whole boycott was pre SCLC, but I involve it due to the beginning of Dr. Kings career in racial equality. It is not right to depict Montgomery as the decisive, initiating event of the Civil Rights Movement. Such a view ignores the earlier Baton Rouge boycott, and the significant win by the NAACP in the Supreme Courts Brown vs.
Board of Education. The subject of this movement was the tip of the iceberg of the problem. It was covering the most visible examples of oppression. This was telling the Negro to his face that they were second-rate. The people of this movement fought remarkably hard and were extremely determined.
They finally won after almost a year of fighting. The Supreme Court declared that segregation of the transit system was unconstitutional. After the boycott, King recognized the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful Montgomery action. He set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to redeem the soul of America. This gave him a base of operation throughout the South, as well as a national platform from which to speak.
The Negro race was now ready to fight a long hard battle, realizing that it is possible to win over their social oppressor. After the Sclc's birth, they decided to place their headquarters in Atlanta. They hired a young executive clergyman from the National Council of churches to become part of their staff; his name was Andrew Young. These men and women in a short period of time would change the history of this country forever. It all started off in Albany, where a past colleague, Ella Baker, was leading a sit-in movement to desegregate the public facilities with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was getting a little deeper into the white mans psyche compared to Montgomery, because the white man wasnt just going to have to share transportation with them, the Negro wanted to live among the white folk.
Unfortunately, the movement was not successful, due to a demonstration getting out of hand. The court ordered an injunction, which stopped the marches. This was the end of Albany, but gave the SCLC new vision and determination to bring them into their next battle, Birmingham. Birmingham, between 1957 and 1962 had seventeen black churches and homes bombed, including a member of SCLC, Fred Shuttlesworth. With a strongly racist government leader, Governor Wallace promised segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. If Birmingham could be victorious, the rest of the Southern cities would fall.
It was repressed by an extremely fanatical police leader, Eugene Bull Conner. He would use high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs to stop non-violent protests. This was, as King put it to subpoena the conscience of the nation. Telegrams started to flood the White House conveying outrage, and it became clear that the Kennedy Administration would have to confront civil rights issues more directly. The protests and boycotts led to negotiation and the government agreed to desegregation of lunch counters and other facilities, also promising to confront the issue of inequality in the hiring process.
Birmingham led to the signing of the Civil Rights Bill of 64 ending segregation. Birmingham was the most memorable movement in the Sclc's history. Most of the country backed them up...
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Research essay sample on Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights Movement
