9/11/2023 0 Comments Freedom first credit union mlk day![]() ![]() He had endured the “ whitelash” of those who saw civil rights gains as coming at the expense of whites but did not give up on the radical Christian ideal of redemption and agape love in which former enemies might become friends. With the key planks of American segregation countered by new civil rights laws, King turned to tackling poverty and economic oppression. These examples vindicate King’s philosophy that tension was necessary to spreading awareness of systems of oppression, which in turn gathered multiracial political power for change. But the legal imperative to “ affirmatively further fair housing” continues and, as I wrote for MLK Day last year, there are localities that work at inclusion and racial justice.īirmingham, Selma, Chicago. King’s radical vision of humans of all colors working together to replace residential caste with communities of love and justice may seem quaint or naïve. The agreement was not enforced but it inspired the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that would be passed only in the wake of King’s assassination. Two months of confrontation in the summer of 1966 led to negotiation and a written commitment to open housing from the City of Chicago and its Board of Realtors. In the interlude, King said before cameras that he had “never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Then they continued to march. They marched in white neighborhoods and were met with bricks, bottles, swastikas, firecrackers and chants of “white power.” At a march through Marquette Park on the South Side, as thousands of whites tried to thwart nonviolent marchers, a stone struck King’s head, and he knelt with supporters. They organized, including recruiting Black gang members to lay down their arms and join their nonviolent cause. As they had in Birmingham and Selma, they would seek change through nonviolent confrontation between those that resisted and those that demanded change. “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy, now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all God’s children,” he said. King refused to approach this movement with gradualism. And yet King and others in the Chicago movement had the audacity to try. This social system, a “ghetto prison” or a domestic colony, was in many ways more resistant to change than the caste system SCLC had attacked in the rural south. They could not leave Lawndale, nor could they access jobs that were elsewhere. King’s Lawndale neighbors paid more in rent or purchase price for wretched housing than whites paid for modern homes in the suburbs. And so he moved his family to North Lawndale, then a West Side locale of poverty that was more than 90 percent Black and minutes from the white suburban sundown town of Cicero, which had violently repelled Blacks. While the southern civil rights movement had been powered mainly by middle class people, in Chicago King wanted to begin organizing with people trapped in concentrated poverty. Their goal was to enable Black Americans to move out of dilapidated tenements, access opportunity elsewhere, and to transform all social institutions to include them and make upward mobility real for all people. Together they planned marches, rallies and other confrontations, what would become known as the Chicago Freedom Movement. A broad local coalition of Black groups had invited him and SCLC to join their campaign. In the wake of those victories, King thought that Chicago would be an equally strategic city for piercing the nation’s conscience to upend northern segregation. Similarly, the spectacle and horror of police clubbing the heads of John Lewis and others on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, watched by millions on television, accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ![]() ![]() Birmingham, where Bull Connor turned fire hoses and attack dogs on crusading children, was the symbolic city in which social confrontation ultimately altered politics, enabling passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. SCLC and its local affiliates had mounted successful nonviolent sit-ins throughout the South to enable Black Americans to sit, shop, eat, travel, learn and work where they desired. ![]()
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