As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In his letter, King described his tactics for the Civil Rights movement in the Southern United States, where he believed a great injustice was occurring. However, different geographic regions of the US suffered from different types of racism; some places, such as Chicago, were plagued with less structural forms of racism, particularly in comparison with the Jim Crow South. While some parts of King’s letter are applicable to regions of America with de facto, or non-legal, segregation, there are some tenets of King’s strategy which did not translate to these regions. This paper argues that, while King’s methods were effective against the obvious and enumerated racism of the South, the subtle and social racism of the North proved less receptive to King’s ideas, particularly in comparison to other political strategies.
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When MLK organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he deprived Montgomery’s bus services of the money they made from blacks; this hurt them in the long run. In cities with large black populations, the absence of black funds can be extremely damaging. As told in Satter’s Essay “The Noose,” one black man, Dempsey Travis, actually tried to start an all black mortgage company, in order to get black money out of white banks and back into the black community. Malcolm X also mentions this when he says “we’re spending it with a man who, when the sun goes down, takes that basket full of money in another part of the town.” This shows the frustration many African Americans felt about the situation in Chicago; the segregation was not always a result of socioeconomic status, but it was always a result of racist protocol. Denied of mortgages by “redlining” practices, blacks had to pay out of pocket for the same thing whites received loans
When MLK organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he deprived Montgomery’s bus services of the money they made from blacks; this hurt them in the long run. In cities with large black populations, the absence of black funds can be extremely damaging. As told in Satter’s Essay “The Noose,” one black man, Dempsey Travis, actually tried to start an all black mortgage company, in order to get black money out of white banks and back into the black community. Malcolm X also mentions this when he says “we’re spending it with a man who, when the sun goes down, takes that basket full of money in another part of the town.” This shows the frustration many African Americans felt about the situation in Chicago; the segregation was not always a result of socioeconomic status, but it was always a result of racist protocol. Denied of mortgages by “redlining” practices, blacks had to pay out of pocket for the same thing whites received loans