Abstract
Having defeated de jure segregation in the South and achieved most of their legislative goals by the end of 1965, the major civil rights organizations became divided as they sought a new direction for the black freedom struggle. At an SCLC conference in August 1965, James Bevel declared: ‘There is no more civil rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence when he signed the Voting Rights Bill’.1 The long-awaited victories of the recent past now seemed insufficient. Although the legal barriers to equality had been abolished, the majority of black Americans did not have the economic resources to take full advantage of the opportunities now available to them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did little to change the oppressive living conditions in the ghettos of the North, where millions of impoverished blacks were plagued by de facto segregation, unemployment, inadequate housing and schools, family deterioration and police brutality. The advances of the previous decade had not resolved the American Dilemma; in fact, its resolution would require deeper social and economic changes than most white Americans were willing to tolerate. Public opinion polls in 1966 indicated that increasing numbers of whites were opposed to the recent progress of the black American.
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Notes
Lee Rainwater & William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 75.
Kenneth B. Clark, The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King talk with Kenneth B. Clark, (Boston, 1963), p. 12.
Barbara A. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: The Man, The Movement, The Myth, (Chicago, 1985), p. 46.
Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984) p. 354.
Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, (Garden City, New York, 1970), p. 30.
Paul Good, The Trouble I’ve Seen, (Washington, D.C., 1975), p. 261.
Robert L. Scott & Wayne Brockriede, The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York, 1969) p. 71.
Bayard Rustin, ‘Convocation Address’, 5 March 1968, at Clark College, Atlanta, Georgia, in On Being Black: Writings by Afro-Americans from Frederick Douglass to the Present, edited by Charles T. Davis & Daniel Walden (New York, 1970), p. 320.
William Brink & Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of Racial Attitudes Today, (New York, 1967), p. 41.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point, (New York, 1971), p. 178.
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© 1988 James A. Colaiaco
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Colaiaco, J.A. (1988). A New Direction: Chicago, 1966. In: Martin Luther King, Jr.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22642-9_10
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