Incidents Related to Violence Agaainst African-Americans

There was a lot of turmoil that came from events and people during the civil rights era. Just to name a few of these incidents and individuals, were Martin Luther King Jr, EmmettTillr, and Malcolm X. All of these people were very important to start the movements that brought down segregation in the United States.

While visiting his family in Mississippi, a young black boy from Chicago found a boy was who later kidnapped and murdered by the woman’s brother and husband.

The two men had gouged out his eye, beat him nearly to death, shot him in the head, and threw him down to the bottom of the Tallahatchie river with barbed wire around his neck and weighed down by a metal cotton gin fan. The woman, Carolyn Bryant, claimed that Emmett had grabbed her, made advances, and wolf-whistled at her before Emmet left and said the words “Bye, baby” which were the only words that witnesses heard. Roy Bryant, who had been on a business trip, later heard of what had been said to his wife in his store.

Enraged, he went to the home of Till’s great uncle, Mose Wright, with his brother-in-law J.W. Milam in the early morning hours of August 28.

The pair demanded to see the boy and dragged him to a toolhouse behind Milam’s residence to do what the pair did. 3 days later his body was found in the Tallahatchie and was so badly injured that he could only be identified by a ring with his dad’s initials on it that he was often seen wearing.

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Police wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, asked that it be sent back to Chicago. After seeing the mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so as the show what the men had done to her only son. Less than 2 weeks after the body was found, the two murderers were tried in a segregated courtroom and were declared not guilty by a white jury after only 1 hour because the body could not be properly identified. Many people around the country were outraged by the decision and also by the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping. This brought to light the brutality of Jim Crow laws in the south and started the movements to end them.

One of the very important people who were a huge power in the NAACP and civil rights movements was Martin Luther King Jr. King was a baptist minister who was extremely active in civil rights movements from the1950ss until 1968, the year of his assassination. He is very well known for his “I have a dream” speech, and he is also known for his involvement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. With the bus boycott, the night that Rosa Parks was arrested, E.D.

Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter met with Martin Luther King Jr. and other local civil rights leaders to plan a citywide bus boycott. In the spring of 1963, King organized a demonstration in Alabama. City police turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators. King was jailed along with many of his supporters, and the event drew national attention. By the end of the Alabama campaign, King and his supporters were planning for a huge demonstration in the capital. On August 28, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, where kingKinge his famous “I have a dream” speech, emphasized his belief that all men are equal. In the spring of 1968, King was assassinated with a sniper rifle by James Earl Ray, who was eventually caught, pleaded guilty, and sentenced to 99 years in prison, and he died almost 30 years later. In the end, King was probably one of the most important leaders of the civil rights movements in the history of America, or even the world. Another man who had a great influence on civil rights movements was Malcolm X.

African-American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s. Malcolm knew quite well how oppression was and had his first encounter with racism before he was even born.

“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home,’ Malcolm later remembered. “Brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out.” The harassment continued. When Malcolm was four, local Klan members smashed all of the family’s windows, causing the family to move to Michigan. However, the way his family was treated in Michigan was even worse, and a mob set fire to his home a few days after moving in. The all-white emergency responders just stood and watched his house burn to the ground. Two years later his father was murdered but the police rules suicide, thus cheating his family out of the large sum of insurance money his family would have gotten. When he attended high school, he was the only black child, but excelled academically and was well-liked by his classmates who elected him as the class president.

However, as Malcolm states, he felt like he was being treated as a class pet rather than a human being. After telling a teacher he wanted to be a lawyer, the teacher replied rather rudely with something along the lines of “Be realistic, why don’t you try carpentry instead?.” After being told in no uncertain terms that pursuing education as a black child has no point, he dropped out of school at the age of 15. Later in his life, he began to get involved with Elijah Muhammad, and worked with the group “Nation of Islam”. By the early 1960s, Malcolm had emerged as a leading voice of a radicalized wing of the Civil Rights Movement, presenting an alternative to King’s vision of a racially integrated society achieved by peaceful means. King was highly critical of what he viewed as Malcolm X’s destructive demagoguery. “I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice,” King said once. Though Malcolm and King disagreed on the ways to get rid of segregation, they both progressed it. Later on in his life, on the evening of February 21, 1965, in Manhattan, where Malcolm was about to deliver a speech, three gunmen charged the stage and shot him 15 times at the close range.

All of these had huge impacts on the rights of blacks, and peaceful or violent, they both had major impacts. Even though these events are in the past, and most rights activists have long since passed, there is no doubt that they will rememberred by what they have done for those who were oppressed.

Cite

1. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till
2. http://www.biography.com/people/martin-luther-king-jr-9365086#montgomery-bus boycott
3. ttp://www.biography.com/people/malcolm-x-9396195#synopsis