It’s easy to knock the education system, and I understand there’s difficulty in teaching history, so I don’t mean this to be a critique as much as I mean it to be a prod. Among the so many neat-and-tidied aspects of Martin Luther King Jr., and of his colleagues, and of their collective work, there’s a chronological one. Covering it takes a few weeks, tops, in our grade schools and high schools. But even narrow definitions of the movement are decades long.
- Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954.
- In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began following Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus. Months earlier, Emmett Till was lynched.
- In 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for the first time—this time for his role in the boycott. His house was bombed. Later that year, the National Guard was called upon to stop a segregationist riot in Clinton, Tennessee. The segregationists, sparked by the Ku Klux Klan, were rioting against the desegregation of Clinton High School.
- In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Armed Forces to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Earlier that year, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed, with King its chairman.
- In February of 1960, the Greensboro Sit-Ins began at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. Later that year, Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which protected the constitutional right, established in the 15th Amendment, of Black Americans to vote. Still later that year, Ruby Bridges—six years now after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools—became the first student to integrate an all-white elementary school in the South, in New Orleans.
- In 1961, the first Freedom Riders left Washington D.C. in their effort to integrate interstate buses. Later that year, Mississippi state representative E.H. Hurst assassinated Herbert Lee: a dairy farmer, cotton farmer, and voting rights activist. Hurst would later be found in court to have committed the murder in “self-defense” despite several witnesses to the contrary. Also that year, Black Like Me was published.
- In 1962, James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, prompting a riot from segregationists in Oxford. Later that year, President Kennedy signed an executive order banning segregation in federally funded housing.
- In 1963, King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Riots in Birmingham occurred later that year following bombings in the city, one of which originated from a package a witness saw a uniformed police officer leave near the front of King’s brother’s house. One month after the riots, federal marshals were needed to integrate the University of Alabama after Alabama governor George Wallace blocked the effort, physically standing in front of a schoolhouse door. One day later, Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and civil rights activist, was assassinated by a KKK member, Byron De La Beckwith. De La Beckwith was allowed to go free following two trials the next year, one of which featured Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, interrupting Evers’s widow’s testimony to shake De La Beckwith’s hand. De La Beckwith would not be found guilty for the killing until 1994. Eleven weeks after Evers’s assassination, King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Three weeks after that, the KKK killed four girls in Birmingham in a bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
- In 1964, the 24th Amendment abolished the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning racial, religious, and sex-based discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Still later, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
- In 1965, the Selma to Montgomery march was attacked by Alabama’s state troopers. Five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Days later, the Watts riots began in Los Angeles.
- In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled against the prohibition of interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. That summer, riots erupted in cities across the country, most notably in Detroit and Newark. That fall, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in, becoming the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
- In 1968, King was assassinated. Riots followed. The next week, Congress passed and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, banning housing discrimination among other things. In that year’s Summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black power salute on the podium after the 200-meter dash.
This is just a selection. Events that jumped out to me. And it’s just from the narrowest timeline of the Civil Rights Movement. Fifteen long, bloody years.
The timeline can be expanded, of course. It can be traced back to the turn of the 20th century, the height of lynchings in America. It can be traced back to the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died due to some Americans’ refusal to cease owning other Americans like cattle. It can be traced back to the 1500’s, when the Portuguese began the Atlantic slave trade.
It can be expanded beyond 1968, too. It can be expanded to 1969—when the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton. It can be expanded to 1986, when the Anti-Drug Abuse Act established sentencing 100 times worse, per gram, for possession of crack cocaine relative to that required for powder cocaine. It can be expanded to 2016, when Colin Kaepernick, after meeting with retired Green Beret Nate Boyer, altered his national anthem protest to a kneel. It can be expanded to 2020, when Ahmaud Arbery was lynched, and when George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police set off the largest riots since those of 1968.
The point is, even just Martin Luther King’s chapter of the Civil Rights Movement lasted at least fourteen years. Those years, like those that preceded, like those that followed, were filled with bloodshed, progress, hate, and hope, among so many other elements—elements interspersed. On the weighing, it would seem the elements balance out towards the positive: Towards progress. Towards equality. Thanks to the sufferings of so many, like King. Slavery is no longer the law of the land. Segregation is no longer the law of the land. And yet simultaneously, Black American men are six or seven times more likely to be incarcerated than white American men, and even a 2010 change to that Anti-Drug Abuse Act only brought the ratio down to 18:1. And that’s just one arm of the societal and legal inequality.
There are many thoughts to think on this. Civil Rights, literally taken, means Constitutional Rights, and yet Constitutional fealty is so often inconsistent, and so often disingenuous. Progress is made, but new ways to discriminate are invented, and each seems to be less patently obvious, and therefore more deceptive, seemingly to the point where it deceives many of those who implement it. And these are just a few thoughts. There are others, equally weighty if not more so. But to bring this back to time:
When we consolidate MLK Day to a day. When we consolidate Black History Month to a month. When we treat this as open and shut, begun and completed, good and evil…we get it very wrong. In the time that passed between Rosa Parks’s refusal to yield her seat and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, it will be 2034. Children who are currently four and five years old will be finishing their first year of college. The Biden Administration will have come and gone. Another will quite possibly have followed it to extinction, or will be on its way out. There will undoubtedly be major hate crimes. There will likely be riots. There will hopefully be progress.
But that progress, like all before it, will take time.
