The Transformative Power of Democratic Uprisings

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35616-the-transformative-power-of-democratic-uprisings

In this context, civil rights activists were constantly counseled to embrace the mildest sort of incrementalism and avoid divisive tactics.

Those who reignited the civil rights movement did so by roundly ignoring this advice. Highly disruptive sit-ins at lunch counters starting in 1960 were followed by the Freedom Rides of 1961, in which interracial groups of activists dramatically endeavored to desegregate interstate busing in the South. These actions commanded public attention and compelled politicians who only wanted to ignore civil rights issues to take a stand. Gradually, the disruptions began to create a new consensus around the urgency of ending Jim Crow discrimination.

The genius of Martin Luther King, Jr., lay in recognizing that the explosive events altering the perceived limits of the possible were not accidents; rather, there was a craft to engineering them. With the Birmingham campaign of 1963, aimed at breaking segregation’s hold on that city, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference teamed up with local activists in a premeditated attempt to create a public crisis, using escalating acts of civil resistance to galvanize popular sentiment.

Liberal critics called the campaign “unwise and untimely.” Yet the gambit of the activists paid off handsomely. As historian Michael Kazin has pointed out, nationally televised scenes of police dogs snapping at unarmed demonstrators and water cannons opening up on student marchers “convinced a plurality of whites, for the first time, to support the cause of black freedom.” Moreover, the effort spawned a wide array of copycat protests. “A score of Birminghams followed the first,” explained the organizer of the Freedom Rides, James Farmer. By some counts, close to 1,000 demonstrations took place across the South during the summer of 1963, resulting in some 20,000 arrests.