Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Two.

   Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior : Part Two.




    The officially approved story of Martin Luther King Junior's life usually ends in 1965. By the middle of this year King had won the Nobel Peace prize, played a major role in the desegregation of the American South and had created tremendous pressure on then president Lyndon Johnson to pass a Voting Rights Act. This act for the first time in  a hundred years enabled many African Americans, especially those in the south to vote in elections.
    After this, King's later acts aren't mentioned. Then under the very conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan, King's birthday on January 15th was proclaimed a national holiday.  "King's elevation to national sainthood during the 1980's and 1990's," writes historian Tom Adam Davies, "was freighted with political purpose."
     Davies is a lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex in England. He notes  that the struggle for black equality in the U.S.A., from about 1954 to 1965 is celebrated by many Americans. "These moments of U.S. history," Davies writes, "are woven into a story of racial enlightenment." It's a soothing morality tale, he points out "in which King's noble civil rights movement opened white America's eyes to racial injustice."
     After 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, everything just great. There's no need for any more marches or the militancy of the Black Panthers or the Black Power movements of the late 1960's. The U.S. is once again a perfect equal society that Reverend King and hundreds of thousands of black  male and female protestors, and some white allies had created. Or so goes the officially approved version of King's life.
      Of course people should remember that Martin Luther King Junior didn't create the civil rights movement.  Let's recap some of the highlights of this great tide of protest that flowed across the U.S. after World war Two. The 1954 Supreme Court's decision in 1954 in Brown Versus Board of Education struck a big blow in favour of equal education for black and white students. Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus where black people were forced to sit in Montgomery and other southern cities that had public transportation. Parks helped trigger the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 that propelled Reverend King into a leadership role in the civil rights movement.
     Black and then some white youth sat in at white only restaurant counters in the American south in 1960. The protestors refused to move even when white assaulted and beat them. Young African Americans and some whites rode on buses into the segregated south in 1961. White mobs beat these protestors viciously. Then the Freedom Riders as they were then known as,were thrown into prisons where they were treated terribly. Black people helped create the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 where white and black people tried to register African Americans in the most racist state in the union.
   Reverend King was only part of this great movement for racial equality. Yet all movements need a leader and he became the most important leader in this struggle. His assassination in 1968 was a major blow to the African American struggle for justice.