Word: southernism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...causation and execution, the murder of Martin Luther King was both a symbol and a symptom of the nation's racial malaise. The proximate cause of his death was, ironically, a minor labor dispute in a Southern backwater: the two-month-old strike of 1,300 predominantly Negro garbage collectors in the decaying Mississippi river town of Memphis. The plight of the sanitation workers, caused by the refusal of Memphis' intransigent white Mayor Henry Loeb to meet their modest wage and compensation demands, first attracted and finally eradicated Dr. King, the conqueror of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma...
...Negro riot ensued during his first Memphis march a fortnight ago, and Loeb (along with Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington) responded with state troopers and National Guardsmen, King felt that his nonviolent philosophy had been besmirched and wanted to withdraw. Only at the urging of his aides in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference did he consent to return...
Repairing the Image. King was more concerned with his planned "camp-in" of poverty-stricken Southern Negroes in the nation's capital, planned for April 22. There, as he wrote in a news release that reached S.C.L.C. supporters the morning after his death, he hoped to "channelize the smoldering rage of the Negro and white poor" in a showdown demonstration of nonviolence. Memphis was supposed to be only a way station toward Washington. Yet when he agreed to continue the Memphis struggle, it was under threat of both death and dishonor...
...personal loss that pervaded the nation with his death, Martin Luther King's heritage of nonviolence seemed to have endured its architect's demise. Those who predicted that racial pacifism had passed with him were contradicted last week from Harlem to Watts, in Northern ghettos and Southern grit towns, where black leaders and youths in great numbers took to the tense streets and urged their brothers to "cool it for the Doc." Mississippi's Charles Evers curbed a Jackson rising with Kingly oratory. Even such hardcore militants as Harlem Mau Mau Leader Charles 37X Kenyatta...
...Hoax." The initial triumph annealed his philosophy but taught him little about strategy. When the following years brought sit-ins and freedom rides, King was there with organizational support. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and midwifed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Nonetheless, his preoccupation with ideas instead of details was irking his own camp, and Albany, Ga., gave him a rueful jolt. In 1961, just two days after he led a mass demonstration and found himself in jail, vowing to stay there until Albany consented to desegregate its public facilities, King was out on bail and the campaign...