In contrast, Diane Mcwhorter presents King with less forefront leadership than contemporary Fred Shuttleworth, mentioning Shuttleworth’s letter to King after Randolph’s March threat, saying ‘We must move now or else be hard put – to justify our existence’. She says Shuttleworth recognized the need for direct action, seeing the Greensboro sit-ins as ‘the sort of mass action he had futilely been urging on Martin Luther King for nearly three years’, and detailing how the SCLC’s independence after Ella Baker turned to Shuttleworth to prevent King from making ‘the student movement an arm of SCLC’, made ”direct action a given’, and not simply the ‘neurotic compulsion’ of Shuttleworth.
Note that Ling’s interpretation, an article, is quoted from one header of five, each assessing the main aspects of King’s leadership role. It is more summative of how King’s leadership contributed to Civil Rights support and pressure, than an exploration of the deeper realities of how it operated. However, Ling’s expertise is King, lecturing on the Civil Rights movement at the University of Nottingham since 1989, becoming Senior lecturer of American studies in 1996, and writing the biography ‘Martin Luther King Jr 4 years before the article’s publishing in 2006- which Lewis V. Baldwin called a ‘well-balanced biography that draws on and synthesizes much of the scholarship previously produced on King’. A reputable specialist, Ling’s article, partly informed by his biography, advances and synthesizes a view based on the appreciation of others’ works, providing a specialist outlook that overviews how King’s leadership operated.
In contrast, Diane Mcwhorter presents a detailed look into ‘the people and events surrounding the protests, church bombings, and background political wrangling’ that climaxed with the 1963 Birmingham freedom struggle. ‘In addition to chronicling the ideas and actions of Civil Rights leaders and their antagonists’, Michael Ezra calls the memoir a ‘personal one’- McWhorter details how she grew up in Birmingham during the Crisis. The narrative behind it reflects detailed individual research consideration, ‘Packed with details and anecdotes from the contemporary press, archival sources, and interviews’. She gives a personal, but specialist perspective on Civil Rights history, having written extensive journalistic articles on race, politics, and culture, later lecturing on them whilst on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University. Despite Mcwhorter’s membership in the Society of American Historians, and Leah Rawls Atkins describing ‘completely accurate’ details in the book, being a memoir, it is written less objectively- Atkins describes ‘heavy reliance on interviews’ and conclusions not always flowing ‘logically from her information’.
Source 1, ‘The Crisis in Negro Leadership’ written in 1964, reinforces stagnancy in King’s ‘direct action’. Contemporary historian Carleton Mabee says ‘new militant integration leaders have been moving beyond King’s reconciliation-oriented nonviolent action towards a more pressure-oriented nonviolence- exemplified by- the SNCC, the Northern Student Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and CORE-‘, moving away from ‘what they regard as superficial middle- class concern-‘ towards ‘the poverty-stricken Negro mass- south – voter registration- political organizing’.
The sources’ provenance as a book written by a historian in 1964, means Mabee gives us a reliable contemporary impression of King’s stagnancy, highlighting forefront, persistent Civil Rights action from other leaders. We see student emphasis on immediate action against southern issues, which ‘Mission Summer’ in 1964 reinforces- SNCC leader Robert Moses tried registering the 93% of disenfranchised African Americans in Mississippi with CORE and the NCAAP- establishing 30 freedom schools. CORE and the SNCC were significantly active in organizing direct southern from the early 1960s- upon return from the NCAAP, CORE co-founder James Farmer organized The Freedom Rides in 1961, reinforcing conflicting approaches from King and his ‘middle class- concern’ being deemed necessary by other organizations, but one must be cautious of the source’s publishing date of 1964. Mabee, ignorant of King’s later leadership, emphasizes how King’s activism seemed less focused on the poor- undermined by King’s focus on the issue for African Americans after his 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting march. Disillusioned with ideas of community, King became, for William M. King, a threatening challenge to the central values of American society, challenging WW2 for ‘the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty’, and raising money in a ‘Poor People’s campaign’.
King gathered support towards solving inequality, but his March in Washington failed as the ‘strategy’ to ‘bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life’ that he told the SCLC was needed in 1967. Poor organization is reflected in the 1978 march King led, organized by the public, seeing $400,000 of property damage- his assassination cut the campaign short.
During the Reconstruction, bitter white southerners opposed societal opportunity for African Americans. The late 1860s saw Democratic secret societies opposing Freedmen becoming racist terror groups, appearing as armed whites fighting for southern societal control by 1871. The most famous, the Ku Klux Klan, grew to around 40,000 members in Tennessee alone and 500,000 in the south between 1868 and 1871, with juror Klansmen and alibis rendering Republican laws against Klan terrorism unenforceable. White supremacist ideas undermined unprotected black human rights, whereby lynchings continued even After the 1870 Force Acts gave President Grant power to crush the clan, seeing 2734 African American cases from 1885 to 1917. Later NCAAP Journalist Ida B Wells led anti-lynching campaigns from 1892, increasing anti-lynch outcry. She published accounts of southern racism, writing the popular 1901 book ‘Lynching and the Excuse’.
White senator Charles Sumner, born in 1811, led the anti-slavery forces in the state before the Civil War in 1863, and foundational efforts over the reconstruction assimilating African Americans into society – dying in 1874. Despite irreversible injuries and 4-year absence when Preston S. Brooks caned him after his 1856 anti-slavery oration ‘The Crime against Kansas’, Sumner encouraged the Emancipation Proclamation’s passing to Lincoln during the Civil War and contributed to the 13th Amendment passage. Over the Reconstruction, his political base pushed for the Freedman’s Bureau, which Sumner introduced in June 1864 as ‘a bridge from slavery to freedom’, stressing in a Senate oration that ‘Long have they suffered; much have they been abused;- and we seek to pro- vide a passage from – torments to a better condition-‘ – Sumner’s rhetoric contributed to its establishment in 1865. Opposing President Johnson’s attempts to Veto its extension, it was extended to at least 1870, starting 4500 schools and hiring 9,500 teachers from 1865-1870, with 21 desegregated institutions in New Orleans by 1871. Over 100 new hospitals saw 500,000 patients aided, and over 20 million food items were distributed. Sumner foundationally increased opportunity with education availability, – e.g. Howard Institute, bringing immediate African American issues around deprivation to light, whilst King only focused on poverty by 1965. King, significant to gathering mass Civil Rights support, was more integral to achieving Civil Rights legislation with lasting impact on African American lives, whilst Sumner’s 1870 Civil Rights Act draft brought rights and integration to the forefront of conversation- described as ‘carefully thought out and drafted with precision-‘ and of ‘immense strength’ by David Donald, who said he realized ‘more than – political contemporaries’ that ‘the future of American democracy depended upon the ability of the white and black races to live together in peace and equity’. However, after Sumner’s death equal and integrated education references were stripped, and it was declared outright unconstitutional in 1883. Ronald B. Jager reinforces the ineffectiveness of Sumner, saying he produced a surprisingly meager amount of legislation’ due to ‘ignorance of constitutional detail and – study’, lacking ‘the fine sense of discrimination in argument and logic- required of the true dialectician’. Nonetheless, his failings are attributable to radically anti-black Senatorial attitudes- African Americans entering it since 1867 were systematically excluded, with no black officeholders from 1901-1929.
By the 1890s income and literacy voting requirements in southern states meant only 3% could vote by 1900, whilst ‘Grandfather clauses’ meant illiterate white males could. Fearful southerners attacked African American rights educationally after The ‘Cumming v.Board of Education decision ruled the principle of ‘separate but equal’ as acceptable under the 14th amendment in 1896- highlighting racist legality. It reinforced ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws enforced since 1865, enabling Southern inequality- 10 times as much Southern school spending was on white schools compared to black.
Born in 1856, ex-slave Booker T Washington increased African American opportunity, bridged the races, and surreptitiously battled oppression, running his nationally recognized institution from 1881 until he died in 1915. Journeying to Samuel Armstrong’s Hampton Agricultural Institute in Virginia at 16, he was a module student, employed by Armstrong to educate the Plains Indians from 1879, enduring racist treatment to ‘civilize’ them. Later recommended to the Tuskegee Negro Normal Institute in Alabama, Washington was key to founding and running it – opening in 1881. 100 acres and minimal funding from the Alabama authorities became nearly 1000 acres by just 1900, teaching opportunistic fields of education like farming, carpentry, and brickmaking to push students up economically- he championed African American societal industriousness, improving the working relationship between the races. ‘His educational philosophy and practices allayed the fears of southern whites concerning blacks’ winning ‘the support of whites in both the north and south for the public education movement.’ Therefore, despite ‘structuring an educational plan that was ‘an adjustment to’ segregation rather than a source of conflict with it’, Washington lessened Southern efforts to minimize black education- rife after the 1896 Cumming v.Board of Education decision. King is less significant in actively advancing African American opportunity and wealth, uninvolved with ‘Mission Summer’ Freedom Schools set-ups in 1964 and failing his Poor People’s Campaign. His contributions were a by-product of battling segregation, urging Eisenhower’s firm action against the 1957 ‘Little Rock School’ backlash lest it ‘set the process of integration back fifty years’. Whilst King was key to decreasing 2nd class African American treatment, Washington accepted this, but improved African American confidence and status not long after the Civil War, enrolling 712 students to learn useful trades by just 1894. Nonetheless, Adolph Reed Jr criticizes dependence ‘on designation by white elites rather than by any black electorate or social movement’ – Washington championed African American labor and advised against equal rights demands.