The Sixties (2013) s01e05 Episode Script

1 Martin Luther King, Jr: All people should obey just laws, but I would also say that an unjust law is no law at all.
I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
America is not living up to its dream of liberty and justice for all.
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.
We're willing to be beaten for democracy.
They'd give anything in the world if we had trouble here.
Would you be willing to go on a demonstration again? Yes, sir.
We want our freedom and we want it now.
Open hostility towards the Civil Rights demonstrators.
This is the wrong way.
We talk about it here as a separation of the races, customs and traditions that have been built up over the last 100 years that have proved for the best interest for both, the colored and the white people.
It was almost 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and America is still rigidly and racially segregated.
Black people couldn't vote in the south, they couldn't even go into the public libraries, the public libraries were segregated, the churches were segregated.
We are in Atlanta, Georgia in the Ebenezer Baptist Church where a father and son are the co-pastors.
Martin Luther King, Jr: Frankly, as others have said I don't know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.
And this is our hope, this is that something that keeps us going.
Martin Luther King was immensely frustrated by the end of the 1950s 'cause he had become famous, he's preaching all over the country, he knows that's his gift, but he says people cry at my sermons, and then the next morning it's still segregated.
Martin King called about 50 ministers from across the south to start a non-violent movement.
The understanding of teaching nonviolence was clear that there wasn't anybody that could teach it like Jim Lawson.
James Lawson's been to India and comes back with this storehouse of Gandhian tactics.
Martin King said come to Nashville now, we need you now, so I went to Nashville and organized other people.
Now tonight we have a most important business to try to accomplish, and that is to try to have one major role-playing experience, which sort of tries to set the stage for an actual demonstration, for an actual sit-in.
When you talk about the Civil Rights movement in the 60s people often talk about Selma, and Birmingham, and Montgomery, but the incubator of it all was Nashville, Tennessee where James Lawson started teaching his classes on non-violence.
In an act of beating him Teaching people like John Lewis, and James Bevel, and Diane Nash how to not swing back if somebody hits you in the head with a nightstick.
- Nigger.
- Nigger! We actually practiced sitting in.
Some took the role of students who were sitting at a lunch counter, and others took the role of white thugs.
We were practicing how to remain non-violent even in the face of violence.
There had been other sit ins in those early months of 1960, but no one is centrally organizing or coordinating this like the student group from Nashville.
It was on February the 13th when we had the very first sit-in in Nashville.
I took my seat at the counter, I asked a waitress for a hamburger and a Coke.
Those students sit down at a lunch counter, asking to be served, knowing full well that it's against the law.
We were prepared to be arrested and to go to jail.
And if necessary stay in jail.
It was a moving feeling within me that I was sitting there demanding a God given right.
I could no longer be satisfied or go along with an evil system.
The big surprise for them was that they weren't arrested.
They sat there all day.
And they realized that white people were flummoxed.
The new tactic came as a surprise, creating bewilderment and confusion in the white communities, and even among the Negroes themselves.
When this disciplined platoon comes in to a store, occupies all the seats at the lunch counter, they refuse to move on the request of the store owner, they put on a boorish exhibition of what seems to be plain bad manners in crashing into a place where they are not welcome.
I'd submit to you, sir, it comes with singularly poor grace for their spokesman to then charge the store owner with bad behavior.
Mr.
Kilpatrick, I think on this point you would have to agree with me that all people should obey just laws, but I would also say that 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.
During the weeks after the sit-ins began opposition in the white communities of the south solidified.
And the first signs of violence appeared.
They're telling a man came out and said that there was a fight on the inside.
There was a bunch of colored boys and girls on the stools at the counters, so I instructed the men to put them Place them under arrest.
On February 27th 80 Nashville students were arrested out of over 300 who were participating in the sit-ins that day.
As the students were confronted with a choice of paying the $50 fine, or spending over a month in jail, each of them chose jail.
I felt free.
I felt liberated.
I felt like I had crossed over.
While we were in jail, black women got on the phone and organized an economic withdrawal.
The Negro has a terrific purchasing power, so the merchants of course was feeling the pinch 'cause they were definitely not coming downtown to spend that money.
The next day in Nashville, Tennessee in the morning newspaper had a headline, Mayor Favors Desegregation.
It was a great victory for the Movement and for the city of Nashville.
The economic boycott was withdrawn, and Nashville became the first major city in the south to permit whites and Negroes to eat together in public places.
That remarkable group that Lawson brought together in Nashville, they became a cadre.
We all applauded, and here is a situation that, that turned out right.
The ideas that they promoted very quickly spread across the region and across the nation.
The sit-in movement that has challenged certain fundamental concepts of law, and is shaking the regional traditions in the south in an entirely new way.
King is extremely pleased with the emergence of the student sit-in movement in early 1960.
There were sit ins in Atlanta where Dr.
King is living by that time.
King himself gets arrested in one at Rich's Department Store.
King is kept in jail when everyone else is released.
And that's when it got involved in the presidential campaign.
John Kennedy, the Presidential candidate calls Mrs.
King to express his concern, very unexpected public gesture.
Within 24 hours Robert Kennedy called that judge and asked that he let King out of jail.
Next thing we knew is 'Daddy' King had gone public and had said I was against having a Catholic for President, but if he can wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law's eyes I have the courage to vote for Kennedy for President, and I have a suitcase full of votes.
Dr.
King, have you heard anything from Vice President Nixon, or any of his supporters? Martin Luther King, Jr: I've been confined and I haven't talked with anybody from Washington, or from the campaign.
Do you know of any efforts made on behalf of the Kennedy group? Well I understand that the Kennedy group did make definite contacts, and did a great deal to make my release possible.
It turned out that, that phone call was given credit for Kennedy's victory in one of the closest elections in modern history.
King said I hope that at last we have a President with the intelligence to understand this problem, I'm convinced that he has that understanding, and now we'll have to see what his passion leads him to do.
But what together we can do Kennedy, in his inaugural speech did not have a single mention of the domestic issue.
Harris Wofford said all these people out there, and particularly black people, who voted for you, and you've gotta give them something.
What they did then was add two words talking about freedom and human rights abroad and at home.
That was the only mention.
Kennedy's administration is trying to keep a lid on the Civil Rights issue, and Civil Rights activists are determined to push ahead.
Brave blacks and whites rode into the deep south together on Greyhound and Trailways buses to challenge segregation as Freedom Riders.
The freedom ride started with two buses, 13 people going from Washington D.
C.
to New Orleans.
The concept of the freedom rides was to show that desegregation laws were not being enforced in the south.
Even though the law demands that a passenger can ride interstate and participate in lunchroom waiting rooms and bathrooms that even though law says this everyone cannot, particularly the Negro.
They're buying tickets from town to town and getting off in each town, going into waiting rooms, restaurants, cafes, which are traditionally segregated in such a manner as to enrage them and to provoke them into acts of violence.
That's what they're doing.
We were aboard a Greyhound bus going to Birmingham.
We were surrounded by a mob who followed us out of Anniston for about four miles until one of our tires went flat, and finally threw a bomb into the bus.
The bus filled very rapidly with black smoke.
Meanwhile, when the Trailways bus got to Birmingham it was even worse.
They dragged about six of the passengers out, both Negro and white, they took them into corridors and alleys and began beating them, began hitting them with lead pipes, they knocked one man, a white man down at my feet, and they beat him and kicked him until his face was a bloody red pulp.
Freedom Riders who were severely beaten could not continue.
The Nashville Movement decided that we had to take up the freedom ride where it had left off.
Groups will be dispatched Diane Nash said the line that made the difference.
She said we will not allow violence to destroy nonviolence.
This was the test.
Ten of the kids said we will go tonight, and that's the stuff that makes you free.
That's the stuff that is freedom.
A group of them got on a bus in Birmingham.
When the bus pulled into the Montgomery station John Lewis could see hundreds of whites headed towards them with baseball bats, bricks, rocks.
An angry mob just came out of nowhere.
They started beating the Freedom Riders.
I was hit with a wooden crate, beaten, left lying in a pool of blood.
Before police finally broke up the crowd with teargas they beat and injured at least 20 persons.
After the riders are attacked and brutally beaten the Freedom Riders essentially become trapped in Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church.
The church was surrounded, and people were setting fire to cars.
That is a very dangerous situation outside.
No one, but no one could leave the church.
Dr.
King had gone over to Montgomery from Atlanta to lend support to the Freedom Riders.
And so King too, along with the riders, is trapped at this church.
Now it's very easy for us to get angry and bitter, and even violent in a moment like this but I think this is a testing point.
I hope that we will remain calm, as we have done in so many touchy, difficult moments, and I know we're gonna do it.
Martin Luther King, Jr placed a call to Robert Kennedy and said to the Attorney General something must be done.
We are planning during the course of this afternoon to send in several hundred more U.
S.
Marshals from around the country to help and assist.
President Kennedy had called out the United States Marshals to place the city of Montgomery under Marshal Law.
In this situation I want to make this announcement that the city is now under Marshal Law, and troops are on their way into Montgomery.
Now the best thing for King and all of the so-called Freedom Riders is to return to their homes, go back to their books, and mind their own business.
Finally with federal intervention the Freedom Riders were put on a bus and headed to Jackson.
We pull on into Jackson, the wagon was waiting for us.
You're under arrest for refusing to obey my order.
We didn't know it at the time, but the Kennedy's had agreed that the Freedom Riders could be imprisoned.
The Kennedy administration makes a deal whereby the Mississippi police units agree that there'll be no violence, but the tradeoff is that every Freedom Rider arriving in Jackson immediately will be arrested.
Officials in Mississippi think they found a legal way to circumvent desegregation.
Their method calling any defiance of segregation a threat to the peace in an area where popular feelings run so high.
The Freedom Riders included James Bevel, John Lewis, James Lawson, among others were sent to Parchman State Penitentiary.
So this guy takes me back to the jail cell, when prison doors slam it has an effect on you.
That sound you felt you would never get out again.
As soon as the agitators leave, and get tired of trying to stir up trouble.
We're going back to the same old way of living that's made our city such a wonderful place in which to live.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Mayor.
Well.
This attempt to stop the freedom rides only served to fuel the flames of the Civil Rights Movement.
I'd like to see the show of hands of those of you who will be willing to continue the freedom ride in the near future.
Let's see a show of hands please.
Freedom ride after freedom ride would come through, they'd get arrested in Jackson, they'd go to the Hines County Jail, or the Jackson Jail, and then they would get moved to Parchman Penitentiary.
During the time they spent in prison a bond formed, and they came out of prison more dedicated than ever, and they began to fan out across the south.
James H.
Meredith, son of a cotton farmer, grandson of a slave, and applicant for admission to the University of Mississippi.
James, why do you want to enter the University of Mississippi? Well, I think that every citizen should have an opportunity to receive an education in his own state, I think he have an education an opportunity to receive the best possible education.
Mississippi Air Force veteran James Meredith insists on being admitted to the University of Mississippi, and Ross Barnett the governor of the state, he's not gonna let this happen.
I do hereby deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.
And it becomes a crises.
Ross Barnett withdrew local police and allowed the campus to turn into a kind of war zone.
Finally the Army arrives from Memphis and comes rolling onto campus and stops the riot at that point.
I deeply regret the fact that any action by the executive branch was necessary in this case.
But all other avenues and alternatives, including persuasion and conciliation had been tried and exhausted.
James Meredith went to school at Ole Miss today, but his travels to and from classes were not those of a regular student.
Go home nigger! For everywhere that Meredith went so did his escorts of federal marshals and troops of the United States Army.
There is no country where the violence of Sunday and Monday has gone unreported.
For example, a bigger story in the London Evening Standard was the violence on the Mississippi campus.
The outburst of violence was described as humiliating for American democracy, and embarrassing for American prestige abroad.
I think my father and my uncle were originally focused on those foreign policy issues out of America's leadership in the globe, and saw the Civil Rights Movement in our country as kind of a distraction.
I think this is a charge before the President.
He must start now making moral decisions rather than purely political decisions.
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this Earth.
I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
George Wallace became almost a mythic figure for white southerners, and that speech in which he promised segregation forever is the fullest expression of that commitment to becoming the leader of the resistant white south.
I'm sorry, Mr.
Wallace, God has spoken to me.
That he wants freedom for his people.
It may even mean physical death, but if it means that I will die standing up for the freedom of my people.
God has spoken to me.
King, very wisely, sees an opportunity to give more exposure to the Civil Rights Movement, and to prod the Kennedy administration.
Martin Luther King decided that they should have major demonstrations only in areas that local law enforcement would react violently.
Do you think that you can keep Birmingham in the present situation of segregation? I may not be able to do it, but I'll die trying.
Bull Connor has a well known identity as one of the hardest hardliners in defense of segregation.
He encouraged the hiring of Klans-men on his police force.
King is assuming that Bull Connor is gonna provide the pictures and the footage they need to outrage the country.
Safety commissioner Bull Connor used mass arrests, fire hoses, police dogs to break up the demonstrations.
The demonstrations continued for weeks.
You got 12, 14, 20 adults maximum per day marching, they're making no news, and numbers were dwindling.
And the movement was on the brink of extinction when Bevel from the Nashville movement comes along and said I've got plenty of teenagers in my youth workshops who are willing to go to jail.
I was on the phone constantly with Jim, with Diane, and others about making it happen.
There's an understandable reluctance on King's part of organizing students to get arrested when their parents are gonna be furious for putting their children in the line of fire.
Finally it's King who makes the decision to send the children into the streets.
Will you use the hoses and dogs? We will use the dogs if they start draw Drawing knives again, and throwing rocks.
We will use the hose if it becomes necessary to stop the mob.
Most of the pickets and the marchers were juveniles instead of the adults seen in previous protests.
Officers quickly moved in to make the arrests under the direction of Commissioner Bull Connor.
Police overflowed juvenile hall with the youthful demonstrators.
All kinds of vehicles had to pressed into service to carry the Negroes, cars, police paddy wagons, and later in the day school buses.
The sheriff's department estimated upwards of 400 had been arrested.
Instead of 14 adults you had 600 teenagers, and then the next day a thousand, and that's when the dogs and the fire hoses came out.
Of course what he was doing was exactly what the head of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham wanted him to do, to create the theater.
That was gonna be broadcast on national television that would show just how bad things were in Birmingham.
Demonstrators attacked with water hoses were as young as six, eight, nine years old.
Why did you want to take part in the demonstrations? If all the colored folks get together and take part in, in fighting for freedom maybe they'll get some.
But if they don't they won't get nowhere.
Birmingham was a crucible in which the soul of a nation was being forged.
The Negro drive for equality gathered momentum this week.
The Supreme Court sanctioned sit-in demonstrations, still another court removed the strongly segregationist city government of Birmingham dominated by Eugene "Bull" Connor.
Well all that I can say is that I have enjoyed my 22 and a half years as public safety commissioner in the City of Birmingham.
I don't believe I owe the taxpayers of Birmingham anything.
They're going to owe me almost two and a half years back pay.
Don't shop for anything on Capital Street.
These are the stores that help to support the white citizens counsel.
Medgar Evers was operating in and around Jackson, Mississippi, Really the heart of resistance to desegregation.
The NBC networks affiliate was notorious for featuring segregationist speeches.
It became such a problem that Medgar Evers demanded equal time.
When the Jackson, Mississippi television station found itself under threat from the FCC they agreed to allow Medgar Evers to go on television and make a statement about the goals of the movement.
To many white Mississippians it was an outrage.
That's the first time a black man had ever been allowed to appear on television in Mississippi.
Certainly to argue against segregation.
It made him in some ways a kind of marked man in Mississippi.
We'll be demonstrating here until freedom comes to Negroes here in Jackson, Mississippi.
Our guest today on Meet the Press is Governor George C.
Wallace of Alabama.
This state is the only one in the country today whose schools are completely segregated.
Next week the issue heads for a climax when two Negro students will seek to enroll at the University of Alabama.
Governor Wallace has been quoted as saying that he will personally bar their entrance, despite a federal court order and a threat of federal troops.
Don't you believe that the Negroes in the south are human beings created by God? Of course they are.
I said so in my campaign address.
Do you think they should be discriminated? For obvious reasons.
Can they be enrolled without the use of troops? Well of course I We'll just have to wait and see exactly what transpires on that occasion.
At the center of this potential storm are two young Negro students, Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood.
She's 20 years old and made the National Honor Society when she attended a segregated high school in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
He is also 20, was president of his class in high school at Gadsden, Alabama, and president of the student counsel.
What's the general feeling around the campus concerning the agreement to admit the Negro here this summer? Well all the students that I've talked to and my friends feel that there's not gonna be any repeat of a Mississippi situation, and there's not gonna be no violence.
Well I feel like it won't be as much trouble as, you know, have been on other campuses.
But it will be bad news when the nigger comes in.
Mr.
Smith? Does the government plan to use federal marshals if he does go through with his last intention to prevent these Negro students from entering? I know there's a great opposition in Alabama, and indeed in any state, to federal marshals and federal troops.
And I would be very reluctant to see us reach that point.
You know, those Kennedy's up there in Washington, that little old Bobby sox and his brother the President, they'd give anything in the world if we had some trouble here.
Now George asked me to ask you that you do him one favor.
Tell your friends when you leave here, between now and Tuesday don't go up there, leave it alone.
They gonna handle this situation.
Governor Wallace has ordered 500 Alabama National Guardsmen into Tuscaloosa.
At the moment they are under his control.
It would require hardly more than the flourish of a pen to convert their status to federalized troops and place them at the disposal of President Kennedy.
National Guard units are commanded by a governor unless they're federalized and the President becomes their Commander in Chief.
Kennedy had to make the decision of what to do next.
President Kennedy has done some significant things in Civil Rights, but at the same time I must say that President Kennedy hasn't done enough.
And we must remind him that we elected him.
Under a searing Alabama sun that already has the temperature near 100 degrees the waiting continues.
Governor George Wallace's direct confrontation with federal authorities and two Negro students at the University of Alabama is now believed to be only a very short time away.
The two Negroes, Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood reportedly are en route from Birmingham to the campus.
Governor Wallace purportedly about ready to make his appearance on campus.
Coming into it nobody knows what's gonna happen.
The Justice Department doesn't know what Wallace is gonna do, Wallace doesn't know whether he's gonna be put in jail.
As governor and chief magistrate of the State of Alabama I deem it to be my solemn obligation and duty to stand before you.
Representing the rights and sovereignty of this state and its peoples.
And now being mindful of my duties and responsibilities under the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the State of Alabama, and seeking to preserve and maintain the peace and dignity of this state and the individual freedoms of the citizens thereof do hereby denounce, and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the central government.
Governor Wallace I take it from that statement that you are going to stand in that door and that you are not going to carry out the orders, is that correct? I stand in front of this statement.
You stand up on that statement.
Governor, I am not interested in a show, I don't know what the purpose of the show is.
I am interested in the orders of these courts being enforced.
That is my only responsibility here.
The choice is yours.
I would ask you once again to responsibly step aside.
Very well.
The students will remain on the campus.
The Justice Department says that the Negro students will be enrolled some time today.
After Ole Miss the Kennedy's learned their lesson about negotiating with a southern governor.
Kennedy just decides to go ahead and federalize the guard.
He's not gonna play games anymore.
The National Guard General, Henry Graham, goes up to Wallace, he says it is my sad duty to tell you to step aside.
We shall now return to Montgomery for the purpose of continuing this fight, this Constitutional fight because we are winning.
Governor Wallace moved away from the door, and has left after being confronted with about 150 federalized National Guardsmen.
The United States Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach now all smiles as the two Negro students are to enter the registration building.
Each time a big issue came up the President and the Attorney General did everything they could not to have to get involved, and it was after the encounter with Wallace that the Civil Rights became top priority.
This is not a sectional issue.
Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the union, but law alone cannot make men see right.
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.
It is as old as the Scriptures, and is as clear as the American Constitution.
That was the first time the President made the question of ending racial segregation not because its politically expedient to do so, because it is morally right to do so.
Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.
It's his most eloquent speech in some ways, most heartfelt speech.
And this nation for all its hopes and all its boasts will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
There's a kind of bitter irony in that.
Within hours afterwards Medgar Evers comes homes and his wife and children are up because they want to tell him about the President's wonderful speech.
Shortly after midnight Medgar Evers stepped from his car in this driveway, then Evers was murdered.
The fatal bullet was fired from a vacant lot across the street from Evers home, crashing through his body and through the window of his home.
He was 37.
It was a cold, cowardly ambush of him at his home in front of his wife and children.
He said something about how far we still had to go in reaching any semblance of social and civic justice.
We are going to Washington to urge the Congress to pass strong Civil Rights legislation this year.
The nationwide response to the power of Alabama supplies the energy that allows the march on Washington to start coming together.
We will keep this demonstration nonviolent, it will be peaceful, it will be dignified, and disciplined.
And I think it will have a great impact.
In my judgment there was perhaps only one man or woman in America who could have put that march together, and it was Bayard Rustin.
At any moment we need the cooperation of the best minds, many of which are white as well as black.
Rustin was simply an organizational genius.
He was the best and the brightest.
Do you feel that the President's Civil Rights program is actually not needed? I don't think it's needed, and furthermore I think it's unconstitutional.
Segregationist senators like Strom Thurmond are attempting to trumpet the fact that Bayard is known to be gay as a way to undercut the march.
There was an effort to block Rustin being selected, and Martin King said let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
Dead silence.
"I recommend very strongly Rustin be designated as the director and chief of staff for the march.
" A.
Philip Randolph says "I second that".
Freedom now movement hear me, we are requesting all citizens to move into Washington, to go by plane, by car, bus, anyway that you can get there, go to Washington.
I'm gonna start on this side, pass them down.
The White House, the Washington Police Department, the Defense Department were all drawing up these tremendous contingency plans for mass violence.
If you have any questions before you contact your captains for anything.
And they will take it from there.
The whole thing is an orderly march.
They came from all over America, Negroes and whites, housewives and Hollywood stars, more than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to a historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.
The march on Washington was probably the most joyous "protest" march I've ever seen.
This turned out to be a huge interracial gathering that clearly did send a national message that there was tremendous support for racial equality.
I admired the people my age, and I knew that John Lewis was the The youngest speaker at the march.
As a student, and as a participant in a national movement I was ready to go.
I wanted to push.
I wanted us to stand up and speak up and speak out.
We're tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler be patient.
How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.
And I would never forget the speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.
On that day Dr.
King spoke out of his soul, and he used that day and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to preach a sermon not just to America but to the world.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
As he's speaking Mahalia Jackson shouts to him tell them about the dream, Martin, tell them about the dream.
And I see him take the written text, and he slides it to the left side of the lectern, looks out on the 350,000 people there, and then he speaks.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of it's creed.
We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring and when this happens.
When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city we will be able to feed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the way of the old Negro spiritual free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last.
I don't think they quite anticipated just how successful it would be.
It represents the Civil Rights Movement in a kind of high watermark.
The momentum of change seems to be accelerating.
In the hearts of 21 million American Negroes and untold millions of sympathetic whites their beat tonight the hope that the dream of Negro equality was at last overtaking the reality of history.
In the immediate wake of the march on Washington the Civil Rights Movement has a national glow to it that it never before had had.
But that glow tragically lasts hardly two weeks.
The bombing of this Birmingham, Alabama church claimed the lives of four little girls attending Sunday School.
That was the church out of which all the kids had marched in May, so it was clearly a punishment.
We felt like we were involved because if there had been no movement chances are that bombing would not have taken place.
Kids were murdered in Birmingham on a Sunday and in Sunday School in a Christian nation, and nobody cares.
White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff has just announced that President Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 Central standard time, which is about 35 minutes ago, - after being shot at - after being shot - by an unknown assailant - by an unknown assailant during a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas.
During a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas.
What's your feeling right now? I really couldn't say, really.
Right now I just don't know what to do.
I don't even know where to go, what to say.
There's nothing for me to say.
It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant.
But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief.
No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.
Lyndon Johnson wasn't that widely known to the country at large.
Johnson's aids say to him in this speech don't fight for Civil Rights.
It's a noble cause, but it's a lost cause.
You know what Johnson says to them? "Well what the hell's the presidency for then?" No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.
Johnson gets that Civil Rights Bill moving in the first few weeks after Kennedy's assassination.
Dixie crats led by Richard Russell announced a filibuster.
That is they would continue to talk and prevent the bill from coming forward for a straight up or down vote.
This bill, which we feel is a perversion of the American way of life, and a great blow at the right of dominion over private property that has been the genesis of our greatness.
LBJ and his allies knew that they were short, so thus began a 24/7 campaign.
He bullied, he cajoled, he made deals in order to get enough senators on board.
Surprisingly after a year on Capitol Hill this bill is stronger than the one President Kennedy first requested.
President Johnson should have the bill on his desk by the Fourth of July.
We hope to send in to Mississippi, to Selma, upwards of 1,000 teachers, ministers, and students to open up Mississippi to the country.
Freedom summer, an operation to flood the State of Mississippi with volunteers, white and black students.
We were there because we could assume that if the white Mississippians mistreated us the way they mistreated the black people that would be a basis on which to mobilize national opinion.
We will treat anyone with great respect here in Mississippi, but we will treat the people who come here, these children, like any other back wood children should be treated.
And here is the news.
There is some mystery and some fear concerning three Civil Rights workers, two whites from New York City, and a Negro from Mississippi.
Police say they arrested the three men for speeding yesterday, but released them after they posted bond.
They have not been heard from since.
They paid the fine and I released them, I escorted them to their car, and that's the last time we saw any of them.
We got word that Mickey, and Andy, and James had been arrested.
And there was no word what had happened to them.
We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty, yet millions are being deprived of those blessings.
Not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin.
We can understand without rancor or hatred how this all happened, but it cannot continue.
Our Constitution, foundation of our republic, forbids it.
The principles of our freedom forbid it.
And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.
Senator Hubert Humphrey has called the Civil Rights Bill the greatest piece of social legislation of our generation.
Go tell somebody on my staff to make sure we get some more pens here.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not going to create instant brotherhood, no one pretends that, but the Attorney General gets new power to bring suits against racial discrimination in voting, in public accommodations, in education, in employment.
If a court finds you guilty of violating some part of the Civil Rights law, and if you continue violating the law you can be fined or put in jail until you stop violating the law.
The three Civil Rights workers that disappeared in Mississippi still have not been heard from.
At search has thus far produced only one clue, the burned-out station wagon in which the three were last seen riding.
There is little hope that they are still alive.
Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were found shot to death in a grave at the base of a recently built dam just six miles from the City of Philadelphia.
Their bodies wrapped in plastic bags numbered one, two and three, were taken to the state medical center in Jackson for identification and examination.
The two white boys were shot once each through the heart.
James Chaney, the black youth, had been beaten with chains until every bone in his body was broken.
Then he was shot three times.
The finding of the bodies of the three Mississippi Civil Rights workers is a saddening and shocking reminder of the brutality of race hatred.
We naturally expect that those responsible for these terrible murders will be brought to justice.
I know they're gonna say not guilty 'cause no one saw them pull the trigger.
I'm tired of that.
Don't bow down anymore.
Hold your heads up.
We want our freedom now.
I don't want to go through this anymore.
I'm tired of funerals! Tired of it! We've got to stand up.
The arrests had started before dawn.
In all FBI men picked up 21 men, included in the group were the chief law officers of Neshoba County, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price.
They were murdered by Ku Klux Klanmen with the conspiratorial help of the local sheriff.
Bond was set, but less than a week later the accused were set free, their bond lifted.
For James Chaney's mother who attended that hearing it was a shock, frustration, disappointment.
The legal answer to her son's murder seemed to her as far away as ever.
I have the great honor to hand over to you the insignia of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the gold medal.
Some critics have charged that the Nobel Peace Prize was not appropriately given this year, what's your reaction to that one? Well first I should say that I don't think the peace prize was given to me personally, and I don't accept it as a personal honor.
I think it is rather a tribute to the wise restraint, and discipline, and dignity with which Negroes and white persons of goodwill have carried out the whole struggle for Civil Rights.
By the end of the 1964 Dr.
King is aware that the one major southern Civil Rights challenge that had not been dealt with in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was voter registration.
The bewildering hodgepodge of election laws from state to state prevents many from voting.
Boss controlled political machines disfranchise others by downright fraud.
The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent.
There are five counties in Mississippi, each at least 57 percent Negro in which no Negroes at all are registered.
Today marks the beginning of a determined organized mobilized campaign to get the right to vote all over this state.
Martin Luther King chooses the City of Selma because it has the worst record of any southern city on black voting.
We will dramatize this whole situation and seek to arouse the conscience of the federal government by marching by the thousands on places of registration all over.
Student protestors had already had a presence in Selma going back to 1963, but had found it exceptionally tough going because the Dallas County Sheriff, Jim Clark was an even tougher version of Birmingham's Bull Connor.
The Registrar is not in session this afternoon, as you were informed.
You came down to make a mockery out of this courthouse.
This courthouse is a serious place of business, you seemed to think you can take it for just be a Disneyland or something on parade.
We have had numerous niggers that couldn't read and write come down and say that they were told to come, and if they didn't come they would lose their pensions from the welfare department, or their social security, or have their land confiscated if they didn't show up to register to vote.
And when they came down they had no idea then what they were supposed to do.
You are breaking the injunction by not allowing these people to come inside this courthouse and wait.
This courthouse does not belong to Sheriff Clark, this courthouse belongs to the people of Dallas County and these are the people of Dallas County, and they have come to register.
And you know this within your own heart Sheriff Clark.
Clark, he knew what he wanted to do to me, but he couldn't do it in the open 'cause of all those cameras, right? We have come to be here because they are registering at this time, and Why don't you get out from in front of the camera and go on? It's not a matter of being in front of the camera.
It's a matter of facing your sheriff, and facing your judge, we're willing to be beaten for democracy, and you misuse democracy in the street.
You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote.
I'm here to tell you tonight that the Mayor of this city, the police commissioner of this city, and everybody in the white power structure of this city must take a responsibility for everything that Jim Clark does in this community.
We're marching today to dramatize to the nation, dramatize to the world that hundreds and thousands of Negro citizens of Alabama, but particularly here in the Blytheville area are denied the right to vote.
We intend to march to Montgomery to send grievance to Governor George C.
Wallace.
Governor George Wallace is the head of the Alabama State Patrol.
In tandem with his good buddy Sheriff Jim Clark, thinks that what these marchers deserve is a good beating.
When we arrive at the highest point on the Edmund Pettus Bridge down below we saw a sea of Alabama State Troopers.
Opposing the protestors was a force of Alabama State Troopers, Sheriff Clark, and then Clark's private army, the so-called posse men.
We saw these men putting on their gas masks.
They came toward us.
It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march.
You're ordered to disperse, go home, or go to your church.
This march will not continue.
This is an unlawful assembly, you have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse.
I thought we were gonna be arrested.
The major said troopers advance.
They used electric cattle prods, bullwhips, wooden clubs wrapped with barbed wire.
I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick.
I thought I saw death.
I thought I was going to die.
Hey! Sheriff Clark and his volunteer army the posse men sent 80 men, women and children into the hospital.
ABC broke in with this footage that was now being called Bloody Sunday.
And white middle class Americans sitting in their comfortable living rooms suddenly had the whole racial ugly mess thrust into their face.
It was a watershed moment in television, a landmark moment in the Civil Rights movement.
For the first time since Birmingham that footage sets off a national firestorm.
In our country we don't tolerate police by terror taking the law into the own hands.
This is unacceptable, and just not American, and I believe the time has come for the President to step in.
The Pettus Bridge incident is one of those seminal events that helped create a political groundswell for Lyndon Johnson to quickly, and this time without nearly as much opposition as the Civil Rights Act of '64, to push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The President of the United States Johnson feels that he needs to go before the country in a joint session of congress about why this should be done.
I was in the home of a local family in Selma with Dr.
King, and we watched and listened to President Johnson.
At times history and faith meet at a single time to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.
So it was at Lexington and Concorde, so it was a century ago at Appomattox, so it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There long suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans.
Their cause must be our cause too because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
To hear Lyndon Johnson, the President of the United States, use the theme song of the movement, 'we shall overcome', I looked at Dr.
King, tears came down his face, he started crying, we all cried a little.
Dr.
King decided that the only proper response to this was to continue the march to Montgomery and a court order forced the state of Alabama to permit said march.
Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and Constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery.
Come and follow me You know the master said Don't wait until tomorrow Or you may be dead I was young and I wanted to play Said I'd wait just one more day Don't you know I would No, I would No, I would Martin Luther King, Jr: Now to those who said that we will get here only over their dead bodies, well all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the State of Alabama saying we ain't gonna let nobody turn us around.
I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth will rise again.
How long? Not long.
Because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long.
Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
How long? Not long.
Because my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Glory hallelujah, Glory hallelujah.
Glory hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
In the summer of '65 Johnson gets that Voting Rights Bill passed.
Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Certainly the '64 Civil Rights Act led to dramatic changes, politically at least in the short run the Voting Rights Act was even more dramatic.
This is an examination room at the central post office in downtown Birmingham where under the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 federal officials are examining people to determine their qualifications to register and vote under the laws of Alabama.
Once the Voting Rights Act was passed and people got the right to vote they stopped sitting-in and started voting.
And that turned out to be much more effective.
The number of blacks who began voting across the south, the number of black office holders at the local level, at the state level, at the congressional level, one of the greatest changes in America society.
This is what James Meredith intends to do for the next two weeks, march along the highways of Mississippi, a state where he is one of the most hated men alive.
His purpose, Meredith hopes to encourage unregistered Negroes along the way to qualify as voters.
He also, by his very presence, hopes to dispel some of the fear Negroes have in the south.
In 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act you'd a thought any thing was possible.
But then very quickly after that things start to fall apart.
I'm shot in the leg.
As James Meredith was walking along the highway a gunman stepped out of the woods and just blasted him with a shotgun.
Meredith was taken to a Memphis hospital under police guard, his blood still remains on the highway.
Once he was shot then there had to be some response by the movement, they had to show that the segregationist can't win that way.
They got together and decided to continue the march, Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King.
Stokely Carmichael was very much unlike the Nashville group in terms of his perspective.
We feel that we must continue this march right now, that is It is urgent to do it, and we will be calling on people of goodwill from all over the nation to join us in this march.
Martin Luther King was almost at level of sainthood, Stokely Carmichael understood that he needed that symbol in order to provide legitimacy for what he was trying to do.
We want to put President Johnson on the spot, he called a conference two days ago to fulfill these rights, we want those rights fulfilled.
They cannot be fulfilled with words, words cannot stop bullets, and we need action, and we need it now from the federal government.
No more questions.
No more questions, gentlemen.
We've got the march.
The most impressive thing about this march on Mississippi is a developing coalition among Civil Rights leaders.
There are reports of differences between leaders, and they are true, but their organizations have always been divided, a split among them is nothing new.
Put them all together on a march in a highway in Mississippi and frictions emerge because of personal competition and individual ego.
Our sweat and blood built Mississippi, and we got to take it over 'cause we deserve to have it.
That's what we working for.
Stokely Carmichael started expressing the goal now is black people exercising power.
Let me say first this march is nonviolent, it is a non-violent expression of our determination to be free.
This is the principle of the march, and certainly we intend to keep this march non-violent.
Mr.
Carmichael, are you as committed to the non-violent approach as Dr.
King is? - No, I'm not.
- Why aren't you? Well I just don't see it as a way of life, I never have.
But I also realize that no one in this country is asking the white community in the south to be non-violent, and that in a sense is giving them a free license to go ahead and shoot us at will.
If there was a symbol of white anger at Negro protest in the north this summer it was Cicero, Illinois, a town chosen by Dr.
Martin Luther King as the pressure point in his open housing drive.
Dr.
King takes the Civil Rights movement north to Chicago, and the issue is housing.
The northern scene was a far more complicated scene, and did not have the advantage of the Jim Crow law as a target.
It was one thing for northern liberals when the issue was integration in Selma, quite a different thing when it was in Cicero.
If lets say 10 or 20 families moved into Cicero, which is a town of 70,000.
They'd get killed.
It was the beginning of serious white backlash against the entire Civil Rights movement.
The nation suddenly learned what it should've known, that racial prejudice was not just a southern problem, it was nationwide.
If whites in the north formerly could comfort themselves by pointing an accusing finger at the south they could do so no longer.
Cicero once again is showing open hostility towards the Civil Rights demonstrators.
These people here are firmly opposed to these marches, moreover they don't see where they serve any useful purpose.
Most of the national press categorizes Chicago as a defeat for King.
I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate filled as I've seen in Chicago.
There was a growing feeling that King's movement wasn't working.
He had lost a lot of support from whites and blacks.
Martin Luther King is a good man, he's my brother, he's still like me, we're all catching hell, he's got his approaches of freedom, he's doing his best, and he's changing now too.
He sees now that it seems to be impossible to do what he want to do.
King was rapidly being eclipsed by a younger and much more militant faction of the Black Power Movement.
We are not going to let these white people come into our neighborhood and kill us.
We're going to put every cracker in Atlanta on his knees.
There was a lot of disunity because the only thing that had really kept the black community together, ironically, was segregation.
Once that has been overcome then the question is what do you want? I would like for all of us to believe in non-violence, but I'm here to say tonight that if every Negro in the United States turns against nonviolence I'm going to stand up as a lone voice and say this is the wrong way.
I think that there's a realization in this country that black power is not just a mere slogan, nationally or internationally.
It is real that black people can come together and start determining for their lives how they're going to live, and controlling their economic and political lives.
So it means that you have to build a movement so strong in this country that if one black man is touched every black man will rise up and let this country know they're not gonna tolerate it.
You better quit running around here talking about loving these honkies to death.
During rebellions brother you got to stop looting and start shooting.
Black power brother.
Black power brother.
The issue is one that moves across Civil Rights, moves across poverty, you get this explosion of violence.
You have the Watts riots.
Then subsequently riots in Newark, in Detroit.
The riots bring to the fore the problems of inner city life, a consequence of a generation of neglect in America's urban centers.
This happened on 12th Street in Detroit in July.
Next time it could happen downtown, or in your town.
When you stood on the Lincoln Memorial you said I had a dream, did that dream envision the federal government preventing the society doing for the Negroes that which you think had to be done? It was a high moment, a great watershed moment, but I must confess that that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare.
Now I'm not one to lose hope.
I keep on hoping.
I still have faith in the future.
But I've had to analyze many things over the last few years, and I would say over the last few months, I've gone through a lot of soul searching and agonizing moments, and some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a solid realism, and I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go.
Martin Luther King, Jr was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Shot in the face as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room.
Martin was gone.
And the main part of everything was over.
And we knew that the Movement would never be the Movement as it was, but then the things that we had lived and really fought for was won.
I just want to do God's will, and He has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promise land.
I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promise land.
So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
There were many kinds of sacrifices made for freedom, most liberation struggle is trying to bring about a better world, and a better society.
We had to give everything we had to the Movement.
We accepted a way of peace as a way of life, a way of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.
We forged an agenda in the mind of the country.
The movement begins with Montgomery, becomes a Sit-in Campaign, the Freedom Ride, the Birmingham Campaign, the Mississippi Summer, the Selma to Montgomery March.
History will record that those singular cumulative acts of courage transformed the south, transformed the country.
We wanted to change America, make America better, not just for our generation, but for a generation yet unborn.
All of the civil rights, all the marches, all the people who have died in the civil rights struggle will have died in vain if, once the opportunity, once the doors are open, no one is prepared for it.
I know there's got to be several young people here who are like five years old, right? It's now becoming a possibility that that young man, by the time he's 50, could be running for the President of the United States.