Tuesday, April 4, 1967: 'Beyond Vietnam'

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his most public and comprehensive statement against the Vietnam War. Addressing a crowd of 3,000 people in New York City’s Riverside Church, King delivers a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” King points out that the war effort is “taking the young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 13,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Although some activists and newspapers supported King’s statement, most responded with criticism. King’s civil rights colleagues began to disassociate themselves from his radical stance, and the NAACP issued a statement against merging the civil rights movement and peace movement. 

     -- From "A Time To Break Silence: The Essential Works of Martin Luther King Jr. for Students" (The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University): @

* Text and audio (American Rhetoric): @

* Text and audio (King Research and Education Institute): @

* Summary (King Research and Education Institute): @

* "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (et al.) speak on the war in Vietnam" (booklet, 1967): @

* "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" (King speech, April 30, 1967; typed speech from The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia): @

* "King's FBI File -- Riverside Church Speech on Vietnam" (American RadioWorks): @ 
* "When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam" (The New York Times, 2017): @

* "Martin Luther King's Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later" (The New Yorker, 2017): @

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Tuesday, May 18, 1965: James Karales' civil rights photo

James Karales' photo of the Selma-to-Montgomery march appears across two pages in Look magazine, with the words TURNING POINT FOR THE CHURCH printed across the top edge. (It was part of a story titled "Our churches' sin against the Negro.") The accompanying text reads:

There have been marches before, but never marchers like these -- a weaponless, potluck army, moving in conquest through hostile territory under the unwilling protection of the enemy. So did a Georgia preacher lead of pilgrimage of enfranchised Alabama Negroes 54 miles this spring to the steps of their state capitol. The concept was biblical. The execution was 1965 American. The Army and FBI guaranteed White House support. Patrol cars, helicopters, truck-borne latrines and first-aid vans bracketed the column; the marchers ate from paper plates with throwaway plastic spoons and slept under floodlit tents. Sustained by rationed peanuts-butter sandwiches, they never faltered in their pace and bitter humor. "I've been called 'nigger,' " said somebody up front. "Well, from now on, it's got to be 'Mister nigger.' " Across the Black Belt farmland rolled the pickup words of their new battle hymn: "Oh, Wallace, you know you can't jail us all; Oh, Wallace, segregation's bound to fail." In it, the white ministers, priests, rabbis and nuns, who had jetted vast distances to reinforce the march, found a new statement of faith.

Karales' son, Andreas, recounted how the photo came to be: " ... he described trying to find an image that would symbolize the meaning and feeling of the march. He struggled over the course of the five-day march, making countless attempts to produce something that he felt worthy of his goal. On the last day a storm swept in and he knew that this was his moment. He rushed to get to the right spot to frame both events as they happened. He was fortunate to get the shot as the storm moved on quickly. ... The menacing clouds and synchronized stride of the marchers happened in one short moment and is what makes this photograph so special. It was one of my father's greatest catches and was the result of his great patience." -- From "Andreas Karales' Memories of his Father, James" (via Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina): @

* Karales' obituary (Los Angeles Times, 2002): @

* Earlier post on Selma-to-Montgomery photographers: @ 

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Monday, March 15, 1965: LBJ and MLK speeches

WASHINGTON -- President Johnson took the rallying cry of American Negroes into Congress and millions of American homes tonight by pledging that "we shall overcome" what he called "a crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice." In his slow Southern accent, Mr. Johnson demanded immediate action on legislation designed to remove every barrier of discrimination against citizens trying to register and vote.

     -- Story by The New York Times: @

     -- Photo by Cecil Stoughton

* Video and transcript (from LBJ Library): @

At Brown Chapel AME in Selma, Alabama, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at an interfaith service for the Rev. James Reeb, who died March 11 from a beating two days earlier.
     -- Photo by Flip Schulke

* Audio (from www.uuworld.org): @

* Transcript (www.beaconbroadside.com): @ 

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1965: Selma, Alabama

Chronology from "Centers of the Southern Struggle" (University Publications of America, 1988): @

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Thursday, October 10, 1963: FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King

With the FBI increasingly concerned about possible Communist involvement in the civil rights movement, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorizes the bureau to wiretap the Atlanta home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the New York offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (of which King was president). The FBI's investigation into King's life, activities and associates began in 1955 and lasted until his death in 1968.

Photo from June 22, 1963, following a meeting at the White House between civil rights leaders and administration officials to discuss pending legislation and the planned March on Washington. From left are King, Kennedy, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins and Vice President Johnson.

* JPEG of request and authorization (Kennedy's signature is in lower left-hand corner): @ 
* Text of FBI memo, October 10 (from "From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover," 1991): @ 
* PDF of August 30 FBI memo calling King "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation": @ 
* FBI files on "Surreptitious Entries (Black Bag Jobs)": @  
* "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Case Study" (from "Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on  Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans," 1976, United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations of with Respect to Intelligence Activities -- aka the Church Committee): @

* Department of Justice review of FBI's activities (1977; go to Part 2 of 2, page 113, "FBI Surveillance and Harassment of Dr. King"): @

* "The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald,  Frank Church, et al." (National Security Archive, 2013): @

* FBI entry from MLK Research and Education Institute: @

* "The FBI's War on King" (American RadioWorks): @ 

* "King Address That Stirred World Led to FBI Surveillance" (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 2013): @ 

* "The FBI and Martin Luther King" (David J. Garrow, The Atlantic magazine, July 2002): @ 

* "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From 'Solo' to Memphis" (Garrow, 2001): @ Author's website: @

* "The Pursuit of Justice: Martin Luther King" (chapter from "Robert Kennedy and His Times," Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1978): @ 

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Wednesday, August 28, 1963: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

     More than 200,000 Americans, most of them black but many of them white, demonstrated here today for a full and speedy program of civil rights and equal job opportunities.

     It was the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen.
     One hundred years and 240 days after Abraham Lincoln enjoined the emancipated slaves to "abstain from all violence" and "labor faithfully for reasonable wages," this vast throng proclaimed in march and song and through the speeches of their leaders that they were still waiting for the freedom and the jobs.
     There was no violence to mar the demonstration. In fact, at times there was an air of hootenanny about it as groups of schoolchildren clapped hands and swung into the familiar freedom songs.
     But if the crowd was good-natured, the underlying tone was one of dead seriousness. The emphasis was on "freedom" and "now." At the same time the leaders emphasized, paradoxically but realistically, that the struggle was just beginning.
     -- New York Times (link to front page below)
     -- Aerial photo from Associated Press; Lincoln photo from New York World-Telegram and Sun
    

-- Summaries and links

* National Museum of American History: @

* Federal Highway Administration: @

* Civil Rights Digital Library: @

* Civil Rights Movement Veterans: @
* PBS: @

* NPR: @
* 50th Anniversary March on Washington website: @

* "One Dream" (Time magazine): @

-- Printed materials
* Program (from Wright State University Libraries): @ and @

* Final organization plans (from Tulane University Digital Library): @
* "An Appeal By The March Leaders" (from Social Welfare History Project): @
* Other materials (from crmvet.org): @
* Other materials (from Library of Congress): @

-- Videos

* Universal Newsreel: @ 

* Same newsreel as above, with different narration: @
* U.S. Information Agency: @

* "The March" (James Blue): @

* "The Bus" (Haskell Wexler): @
* Edith Lee-Payne: @

* Hollywood roundtable: @

* "Reflections on the 1963 March on Washington" (George Washington University, 1998): @

-- Photos
* Library of Congress (search for March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom): @
* National Archives (search for Civil Rights March on Washington): @
* Walter P. Reuther Library: @
* Life.Time.com: @
* Time LightBox: @
* Smithsonian Magazine: @

-- Speeches

* Audio and transcript of King's speech (from American Rhetoric): @

* Video: @

* Early draft of speech (from Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change): @
* Annotated version of 1963 speech in Washington (by Clayborne Carson, director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University): @
* Post on earlier "I Have a Dream" speech (November 27, 1962): @
* "Freedom March on Washington" (from PRX; album includes other speeches from event): @
* "Two Versions of John Lewis' Speech" (from billmoyers.com): @

-- Radio
* Educational Radio Network coverage (from WGBH): @

-- Oral histories
* Smithsonian Magazine: @
* Capitol Hill History Project: @
* Robert Romer: @

-- Books / magazines / newspapers
* "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights" (William P. Jones, 2013): @
* "Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington" (Charles Euchner, 2010): @
* "Like A Mighty Stream: The March on Washington, August 28, 1963" (Patrik Henry Bass, 2002): @

* "Memory, History and the March on Washington" (by Clayborne Carson): @
* Life magazine, August 23 (pages 4 and 63): @

* Life magazine, September 6: @

* The Crisis, October (NAACP magazine): @

* Ebony magazine, November (coverage starts on Page 29): @
* New York Times front page, August 29: @

* Washington Post front page, August 29: @
* "I Have a Dream ... / Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up A Day The Capital Will Remember"  (New York Times): @

* Associated Press, August 28: @
* Miami News, August 28: @ and August 29: @

* Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 29: @

-- President Kennedy's meeting with march leaders (August 28)

* "JFK, A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington" (from White House Historical Association): @

* Kennedy statement (from American Presidency Project): @

* Photo (from JFK Library): @

-- Earlier post

* Plans for March on Washington (July 2, 1963): @ 

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Friday, May 17, 1957: Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom

1957. Photo by Bob Henriques

1963. Photo from Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis

     A crowd of over 30,000 nonviolent demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the third anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In addition to celebrating the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to end segregation in public education, the Prayer Pilgrimage also dramatized and politicized the failure of most Southern states to work toward or implement the court-ordered desegregation of their schools. The program featured addresses, prayers, songs and scripture recitations by Mahalia Jackson, Roy Wilkins and Mordecai Johnson, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.'s first address before a national audience. The march earned the distinction of being the largest organized demonstration for civil rights and was instrumental in laying the groundwork for future marches on the nation's capitol.

-- From Civil Rights Digital Library (full entry and links: @)

* Summary (from Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University): @

* Text and audio of King's speech (from MLK Institute): @
* Typewritten copy of speech (from Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia): @ 
* Flyer: @
* "Negro Assemblage Hears Pleas to Ike for 'Teeth' in Laws" (Associated Press, May 17): @ 
* "Massed 'Pilgrims' Mark Court Ruling" (Associated Press, May 18): @ 
* Excerpt from "The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders, 1955-1968" (Frederic O. Sargent, 2004): @

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Tuesday, July 2, 1963: Plans for March on Washington

     NEW YORK -- Leaders of the six largest national Negro groups decided today to march on Washington Aug. 28 in "the strongest action, numerically speaking, that we have ever held."
     The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the demonstration will press for civil rights legislation and dramatize the Negro unemployed situation.
     He said the march will not be limited to Negroes. "We'll have machinery that will control the demonstration. No acts that could be considered civil disobedience will occur," he added.
     The march is scheduled to coincide with debate in Congress on President Kennedy's civil rights bill.
     -- Associated Press, July 2

Note: The Associated Press photo shows the leaders of the six groups. From left:
   * John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
   * Whitney Young, National Urban League
   * A. Phillip Randolph, Negro American Labor Council
   * Martin Luther King, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
   * James Farmer, Congress of Racial Equality
   * Roy Wilkins, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
* "Proposed Plans for March" (planning document; from crmvet.org): @ 

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Monday, June 24, 1963: 'The Negro and the American Promise'

The special one-hour program was a brilliantly conceived examination of racial crisis in America, illustrated through interviews with powerful Negro leaders of widely varying viewpoints. Brought together, in separate interviews, were the Rev. Martin Luther King, author James Baldwin, and Black Muslim leader Malcolm X. Under quiet, penetrating and perceptive probing by Dr. Kenneth Clark, a professor of psychology at City College of New York, these three seethed with emotions and ideas that were communicated with force and immediacy.
-- From WGBH in Boston, which produced the show that was carried on educational television stations

* Introduction and interviews (from PBS): @

* "King, Malcolm X Differ" (United Press International, June 25, 1963): @

* Excerpt from "The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years" (Mary Ann Watson, 1990): @

* "The Negro Protest" (Kenneth B. Clark, 1963): @

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April 1963: 'Letter From Birmingham Jail'

From "Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives: Findings in the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." (1979; full report here):

     Dr. King led an all-out attack in the spring of 1963 on racial discrimination in Birmingham, Ala., which he described as "the most segregated city in the United States." Civil rights activists sought removal of racial restrictions in downtown snack bars, restrooms and stores, as well as nondiscriminatory hiring practices and the formation of a biracial committee to negotiate integration. Sit-ins, picket lines and parades were met by the police forces of Eugene "Bull" Connor, commissioner of public safety, with hundreds of arrests on charges of demonstrating without a permit, loitering and trespassing.
     On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Dr. King, Reverend Abernathy and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth were arrested for leading a demonstration in defiance of an injunction obtained by Bull Connor. Dr. King was placed in solitary confinement and refused access to counsel. During his incarceration, he penned his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," a response to a statement by eight leading local white clergymen -- Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish -- who had denounced him as an outside agitator and urged blacks to withdraw their support for his crusade. In this eloquent statement, Dr. King set forth his philosophy of nonviolence and enumerated the steps that preceded the Gandhian civil disobedience in Birmingham. Specifically citing Southern segregation laws, he wrote that any law that degraded people was unjust and must be resisted. Nonviolent direct action, Dr. King explained, sought to foster tension and dramatize an issue "so it can no longer be ignored."

From the Encyclopedia of Alabama (full entry here): 

     Early in his eight-day imprisonment, King read the white ministers' statement and began composing a response. He gave bits and pieces of the letter to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters, where the Reverend Wyatt Walker began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle. The men settled on a final version on April 16, 1963. The 21-page, typed, double-spaced essay appears as though it is personal correspondence, addressed to the eight white ministers. It opens with a salutation reading "My dear fellow clergymen" and concludes with "Yours for the cause of peace and brotherhood." The final version of the letter explores two central themes: justification and admonishment. King justifies his presence in Birmingham, his uses of nonviolence and direct action, his timing, his willingness to break laws, and his apparent extremism. The civil rights leader also admonishes white moderates and white churches for not doing more to help the movement's quest for equality.

Image from The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta (link to two handwritten pages here)

King was released from jail on April 20. Portions of the letter were published in the New York Post Sunday Magazine on May 19. It was published in its entirety by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, on May 28 (see link below).
* Summary (from Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University): @
* Letter (from MLK Research and Education Institute): @
* Annotated letter (from MLK Research and Education Institute): @
* Clergymen's letter (as published in Birmingham News, April 13, 1963; from Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections): @
* Text of both King's and clergymen's letters (booklet published by American Friends Service Committee, May 1963): @

* Readings of both letters (video from McCombs School of Business, University of Texas): @
* "Martin Luther King Arrested in Birmingham Demonstration" (Associated Press, April 13): @
* "Martin Luther King Released From Jail" (Associated Press, April 21): @
* "Martin Luther King, Walker v. City of Birmingham, and the 'Letter From Birmingham Jail" (David Benjamin Oppenheimer, U.C. Davis Law Review, 1993): @

* "Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the 'Letter From Birmingham Jail' " (S. Jonathan Bass, 2o01): @

* "Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation" (Jonathan Reider, 2013): @
* "Letter From Birmingham Jail: A Worldwide Celebration" (Birmingham Public Library): @ 
* Earlier post on King's letter from jail in Albany, Georgia (July 1962): @

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Tuesday, November 27, 1962: 'I Have a Dream'

Speaking in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gives a speech using the "I Have a Dream" construction, nine months before his famous speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. (King is also said to have used the phrase even earlier, including in a speech in Albany, Georgia, on November 16, but the Rocky Mount speech is the earliest known recording, thanks to the efforts of W. Jason Miller, whose book is linked below.) News accounts of the speech did not mention "I Have a Dream"; it quoted King as saying: "Old Man Segregation is on his death bed. The only thing now is how costly the South will make his funeral."

-- Photo from www.waymarking.com

* Audio excerpts from speech:  @
* "King Urges 'Nonviolence' " (Associated Press, November 28): @
* Marker description from North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program: @

* "Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric" (W. Jason Miller, 2015): @

* "Making a Way Out of No Way" (Wolfgang Mieder, 2010): @

* "The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation" (Drew D. Hansen, 2005): @

* "A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." (edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard, 2001): @ 

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July 1962: Martin Luther King's first letter from jail

On Tuesday, July 10, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy are jailed in Albany, Georgia, on charges stemming from their arrest in December 1961 during a civil rights protest. While being held, King writes "A Message From Jail," making several of the same arguments -- and, in some cases, using nearly the very same language -- that he would later put forth in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in April 1963. (King and Abernathy were released on July 12; King's letter was written as his regular column for the New York Amsterdam News, where it appeared July 21.)

"A Message From Jail"

This is the heart of civil disobedience. Some of our critics complain that our non-violent method fosters disrespect for the law and encourages "lawlessness." Nothing could be further from the truth. Civil disobedience precludes that the non-violent resistor in the face of unjust and/or immoral law cannot in all good conscience obey that law. His decision to break that law and willingly pay the penalty evidences the highest respect for the law.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

* Text of "A Message From Jail" (from The King Center, Atlanta, Georgia): @

* Text (from "The Empire State of the South," Christopher C. Meyers, 208): @
* Text of "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford, California): @

Albany Movement

* From King Research and Education Institute: @

* From Civil Rights Digital Library: @

* From Civil Rights Movement Veterans website: @

* From The New Georgia Encyclopedia: @

* Albany Civil Rights Institute: @

* Interview with Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett (for "Eyes on the Prize" documentary): @
* Interview with Laurie Pritchett (from Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): @

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Saturday, November 26, 1960: Debate over sit-ins

On NBC's nationally televised program "The Nation's Future," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. debates James J. Kilpatrick on the subject of sit-in demonstrations. Kilpatrick, editor of The Richmond News Leader at the time, was a prominent segregationist. The subject: "Are Sit-In Strikes Justifiable?"

Kilpatrick: "... it is an interesting experience to be here tonight and see Mr. King assert a right to obey those laws he chooses to obey and disobey those he chooses not to obey and insist the whole time that he has what he terms the highest respect for law, because he is abiding by the moral law of the universe."

King: "... I think in disobeying these laws, the students are really seeking to affirm the just law of the land and the Constitution of the United States. I would say this -- that all people should obey just laws, but I would also say, with St. Augustine, than an unjust law is no law at all. And when we find an unjust law, I think we have a moral obligation to take a stand against it ..."

For footage of the debate, go to www.nbclearn.com/portal/site/learn, then click on "Free resources" and "Finishing the Dream." The footage is under "1960-1962: Freedom Fighters."

* Transcript: @

* Passage from "Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr." (book): @

* Richmond Times-Dispatch article (November 27, 1960): @

* Kilpatrick obituary (New York Times, August 2010): @

* "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" (book): @

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