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Civil Rights Movement: Difference between revisions
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Unfortunately for the bigots, they were stunned to see that, the more they frantically tried to intimidate and kill their "uppity" opponents, the more they shot their own cause in the foot as they drove national sympathy towards their non-violent enemies who refused to be intimidated. In the end, they learned to their horror that their foes would go down in history as heroes, while they would be remembered as violent, reactionary bullies.
Despite the gravitas of this movement, evidence of it was hardly seen in popular culture until later on in [[The Sixties]]. The mainstream media largely ignored the movements until the late 1950s, when the struggle and police violence against members of the movement began to be filmed, serving as ready-made fodder for the growing television news genre. Martin Luther King Jr. and company proved quick studies in media savvy and worked the reporters well, taking advantage of the fact that their enemies were all but threatening them. Politically, President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] was infamously silent on the matter in public, though in private he supported desegregation and even authorized the use of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, a state whose governor (Orval Faubus, not George Wallace as most people think) tried to use the National Guard to prevent black students from attending white schools. Both [[John F. Kennedy]] and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] supported the movement, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made illegal the "Jim Crow" trickery that kept minorities from being able to vote.
However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[Malcolm Xerox|Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, [[Malcolm X]], Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from the "white devils." To many people, white and black alike, it was little more than an inversion of the white supremacism that they had opposed. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in [[Los Angeles]], [[Motor City|Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately sparked white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of [[Richard Nixon]] on a platform of "returning to normalcy."
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