Our "peaceful" civil rights movement

In a moment of nearly fatal masochism, I was touring around the year's best blog, trying to make sense of their various views of the "intifada" in France -- are the rioters victims? Or are they Islamofascists? Can't tell from the Hindrocket gang.

But I did come across this fine example of the rosification of American history.

The riots in themselves signal no such demise. We had our race riots in the late 1960s. But these riots are fundamentally different. Although members of the black power movement had reason to hate America, deep-down most of them didn't. Our riots came at the tail end of the great and peaceful civil rights revolution. By the time they occurred, Congress had already passed the legislation that would vastly diminish the injustices that sparked them. The movement that Martin Luther King led was profoundly pro-American. It challenged America to live up to its creed. The exponents of violence tended to be impatient kids who, to the extent they claimed to be separatists, were fooling themselves. It was their frustration with the pace of integration and black advancement which caused them to embrace the shock rhetoric of extreme black nationalism. [emphasis added]

Ah, yes, that peaceful civil rights revolution. Remember?

1954

July 11 First White Citizens Council is formed in Indianola, Mississippi.

1955

August 28 Emmett Till, a Chicago youth visiting relatives in the South, is lynched in Money, Mississippi, after he flirts with a white shopkeeper.

September 21-23 Till's uncle, Moses Wright, is the first black to testify against a white in a Mississippi murder trial. The murderers are acquitted.

[...]

1956

February-March Autherine Lucy is the first black student to attend the University of Alabama. After white students riot, she is expelled.

March 12 The Southern Manifesto condemning the Brown v. Board decision is signed by 102 southern members of the U.S. Congress.

[...]

1957

September The Little Rock Nine seek to enter Little Rock Central High School but are kept out by rioting whites. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends in the National Guard to enforce the school's integration.

[...]

1961

May 4 The first "Freedom Riders" leave Washington, D.C., aboard two buses in an attempt to desegregate southern bus terminals.

May 14 Freedom Riders are beaten by mobs outside Anniston, Alabama, and at the Anniston and Birmingham Trailways terminals.

May 20 Freedom Riders are beaten by a mob at a Montgomery bus terminal. Federal marshals are sent in.

May 24-26 Freedom Riders travel from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, escorted by National Guardsmen. In Jackson they are arrested and sent to jail.

[...]

1962

September When James Meredith attempts to become the first black to study at the University of Mississippi, rioting ensues, eventually quashed by federal troops. Meredith attends his first class on October 1.

[...]

1963

April 3 Project C is launched in Birmingham. A comprehensive attack on the city's discriminatory practices, it is meant to have national repercussions.

April 12 King is arrested in Birmingham for violating an injunction against demonstrations.

May 2-7 Phase III of Project C puts thousands of trained protesters on Birmingham's streets. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor, stages brutal attacks with police dogs and water cannons, which become an international scandal.

May 10 After King and Shuttlesworth announce an accord with white city leaders in Birmingham, King's motel room is bombed; black rioting ensues.

June 11 Governor George Wallace stages his "stand in the schoolhouse door," an unsuccessful gesture to block integration of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. President Kennedy makes an impassioned televised civil rights speech.

June 12 Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers is murdered outside his Jackson home by Byron de la Beckwith, who is not convicted until his third trial, in 1994.

August 28 The March on Washington brings 200,000- 500,000 demonstrators together for the biggest protest assembly in the United States to date.

September 15 Four black schoolgirls are murdered in the dynamiting of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

1964

June The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project brings hundreds of volunteers into the state to aid voter-registration campaigns and set up "freedom schools."

June 21 Three Freedom Summer workers are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson order an intensive search for their bodies and their assailants.

July 2 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed, outlaw- ing discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment.

August 4 The bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers are found. Twenty men, some of them police, are eventually charged with conspiracy to murder James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; seven are convicted.

[...]

1965

March 7 On "Bloody Sunday" the first Selma march is beaten back at Edmund Pettus Bridge by state troopers and Sheriff Clark's deputies. The nation is outraged by photographs and film of the attack. Washington responds by expediting voting rights legislation. King calls for clergymen from across the nation to join a second march.

March 9 On "Turnaround Tuesday," King leads the second Selma march over the Pettus Bridge and then right back to Selma. That evening Rev. James Reeb is clubbed to death.

March 21-25 Under the protection of a federalized National Guard, the Selma to Montgomery march proceeds to the state capitol, where a rally of 50,000 people is held.

August 6 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed into law. It bans voter examinations and provides for federal registrars to be sent to recalcitrant counties. It prompts a huge rise in black registration.

August 11-16 Rioting breaks out in the Los Angeles ghetto of Watts, the most devastating racial uprising in the United States to date.

1966

January The SCLC joins a campaign for better housing and schooling in Chicago.

June 6-26 James Meredith is wounded by a sniper on the second day of his solo March Against Fear. Leaders of SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC continue the 220-mile march from Memphis to Jackson. The notion of "Black Power" comes to prominence.

July 10 King leads a large march to Chicago's city hall.

July 12-15 As rioting breaks out in Chicago, King negotiates with Mayor Richard Daley.

August Marchers in outlying Chicago neighborhoods are attacked by "White Power" mobs. A compromise accord is signed by black leaders and white politicians.

October The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.

1967

April 4 King condemns the U.S. war in Vietnam in a speech at New York's Riverside Church.

July Large-scale rioting in Newark, Detroit, and other cities. The worst outbreak of urban rebellions in U.S. history leaves scores dead, hundreds wounded, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars' worth of property destroyed.

August 25 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover officially targets civil rights groups for his Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance and neutralization.

December 4 King announces his plan to bring thousands of poor people of all races to Washington, D.C., to press for jobs and income.

1968

March 28 King leads a march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. After youths at the rear of the march turn violent, King vows to return for another, more peaceful march.

April 4 King is assassinated by a white sniper on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Black rioting erupts in more than one hundred cities.

April-June Led by the new head of the SCLC, Ralph Abernathy, the Poor People's Campaign erects Resurrection City near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. About twenty-five hundred protesters -- mostly African American, Hispanic, and Native American -- take up residence in tents and shacks. They demonstrate to little effect; the last of the demonstrators are evicted by the police and the National Guard on June 24.

I know, I know, he means the civil rights movement was itself "non-violent." But to call that "peaceful" is a most illustrative way to term the violence and bloodshed that met that non-violence.

And the sepia-toned riots the stuffed bird refers to? Just a bunch of impatient kids.