American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Table of Contents
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      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
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      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume Two: 
Historical Episodes from Reconstruction to the Present, Chapter Twelve


                                          "Martin Luther King Jr." courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons

12. The Civil Rights Movement
       Martin Luther King Jr. and the Road 

       to Birmingham

Picture

Summary

This essay begins by surveying early civil rights activities including the formation of the NAACP. We then focus on events in Montgomery that began the modern civil rights movement and the events in Birmingham that tipped the balance of public support towards a civil rights bill. We follow Martin Luther King, Jr. career through these episodes and read his classic statement about the evils of segregation in the letter from Birmingham jail.

Author reads from the Text

King’s method consisted of nonviolent resistance to oppression. He regarded the civil rights movement as a great moral struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed; the villain was the person who lived by injustice, and the hero was the person who resisted tyranny without being degraded by it. Cowards ran from injustice; knaves became corrupted in fighting it. But the virtuous won the struggle by forcing the oppressors to reveal their cruelty to the world; for when the cruelty of segregation was fully exposed, no right-thinking person would accept its continuation. At Birmingham, King believed, the mindless villainy of segregation had been revealed in all its tawdry colors, and the heroic persistence of integration had won a great moral and political victory.

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Chapter 11: The Cold War
Chapter 13: Turmoil on the Campuses