4 Apr 1968 Jahr - MLK jr assassinated

Beschreibung:

Seeing the limitations of his previous work, Martin Luther King Jr. expanded his vision to the deep-seated problems of poverty and racism in America as a whole. He criticized President Johnson and Congress for prioritizing the war in Vietnam over the fight against poverty at home, and he planned a massive movement called the Poor People’s Campaign to fight economic injustice. In support of that cause, he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to back a strike by predominantly black sanitation workers. There, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated by escaped white convict James Earl Ray. The slaying of King cut short his plan for a broad assault on American poverty and touched off a further round of urban rioting, with major violence breaking out in more than a hundred cities.

As the 1960s ended, the civil rights movement could look back on a generation of success: Jim Crow segregation had collapsed, and federal law finally protected the fundamental rights of African Americans. The white monopoly on political power in the South was broken. The movement’s nonviolent demonstration and methodical progress encouraged countless other groups to organize and act. It was so successful that it remade the very nature of American liberalism. Joining New Deal liberalism’s attention to broad social welfare, this new liberalism affirmed the universality of the rights promised in the Constitution.

But the long and intense fight for equality brought out lasting divisions. The Democratic Party was splitting, and a new conservatism was gaining strength. Many whites resented the attention to civil rights and saw nonviolent black protestors as lawbreakers. Widespread rioting fed this belief, and many white Americans blamed Democratic Party officials for the failure to maintain law and order. The struggle for racial equality and the resistance to it unearthed fissures in American society not easily mended.

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