For his time, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of privilege. He was born the son of a pastor; attended private colleges; pledged a fraternity; earned a doctorate; married a college-educated woman; and, owned a car. He could have been satisfied as part of the black elite.
Instead, he eschewed his own privilege to fight on behalf of the disadvantaged. King led a bus boycott when he had a car and died fighting for a better working environment for trash collectors when he clearly had stable employment. That makes him a beloved figure in our memory, but even the best leaders cannot hold the favor of everyone.
The year 1965 represented major change in America, and King deserves some of the credit. Just as he was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act the year before, he was essential in the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
On the ground, the actions of that period would leave the most hardened modern “Black Lives Matter” demonstrators in awe. The march from Selma to Montgomery was just one of the many campaigns for freedom across the nation and in the world.
The year started on a sad note with the February assassination of beloved black prince Malcolm X, who had begun to greatly influence the consciousness of youth and members of the black underclass in urban areas. Many consider the Black Nationalist’s death a major catalyst for the nascent Black Power movement that received a name the next year.
Local Selma activists had already been advocating voting rights when police killed teenage protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was protecting his mother at a rally. His death set off the demonstrations that brought King to Selma in March 1965.
Near the time that the Voting Rights Act took effect in August, the Watts neighborhood exploded when driver Marquette Frye was arrested. In the way that activists protested police abuse after the death of Michael Brown Jr. in August of last year, Watts residents took to the street in August of 1965.
The year ended with the passage of the Higher Education Act that made college education attainable to students in financial need; it changed the racial demographics on college campuses. That was King’s America.
Currently, the public is enjoying Ava Duvernay’s film “Selma,” which allows people the chance to view King from various vantage points.
In the United States, King has been placed on a level that few mortals ever achieve. Rarely does an African-American man have the opportunity to reach such as status (unless he runs, dribbles or catches a ball). So goes memory; time allows us to arrange things in our minds that may not have as clean-cut in the past. One thing, however, is for certain: many liberal, moderate, and conservative Americans treated King as an annoying troublemaker during the period he was alive.
This should not be hard to imagine because we presently see people making trouble by shutting down traffic with die-ins and marches. They want policy changes. We would do well to take stock of how legislative change actually occurs. True, it requires bills and voting, but if King taught Americans anything, it was that the issue of freedom has to be forced from the ground up.
For centuries, black citizens wrote letters, sought audiences with officials and petitioned for their rights to take effect. The members of SNCC tried desperately to register voters in the South, but their efforts during 1964 ended largely in death and disillusionment. Although significant, such efforts were not enough to change the power structure’s position on black freedom. In 1965, SNCC leaders decided to march for rights.
King, a student of history, realized that he had to get beyond his own privilege to achieve freedom. That meant disrupting the status quo with a well-publicized march, which hurt King’s standing in parts of the white community, but also within some pockets of the black community. Most black people did not participate with him as he took what was, at the time, extreme methods to acquire freedom rights. Like those who currently march with their hands up and disrupt life in public spaces, King was part of a minority of the minority; yet, he still pushed forward knowing that he was on the side of righteousness.
By the time King participated in the Selma campaign, his reputation in the world had been elevated to “leader of black people.” Among some black youth, however, King remained respected, but many lost faith in his dogmatic adherence to moral suasion as a method and nonviolence as a way of life. The events in Selma shed light on the fissure that existed between King, who represented the older guard of the movement (which included Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young National Urban League) and the younger leadership (which included Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers of SNCC).
At this time, King had been meeting with presidents, senators and congressman, while young activists had been grassroots organizing in rural Southern towns. Some young people secretly called King the “Lawd” and sniffed at the fact that whenever he arrived so too did reporters and cameras, while the young activists daily suffered in silence with locals. They questioned whether King (who led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, went to jail for the cause in Birmingham, and received a Nobel Peace Prize to later donate the cash award to the movement) was really for the masses.
In essence, where King was winning the war for legislative and constitutional rights, he was losing the battle for the hearts and minds of an increasingly militant youth. For the sake of the movement, however, these estranging groups worked together to win gains for their disfranchised brethren.
There is a lesson to be learned from the movement in 1965: achieving freedom requires the righteous to focus on the larger goal while moving beyond differences of class and privilege. King, thankfully, modeled that for us.
Stefan M. Bradley is an associate professor of history and the director of African American studies at Saint Louis University.
