Tension In The Civil Rights Movement

September 15th, 1963, families peacefully sit, lined up along the pews of the 16th street Baptist church, Birmingham, Alabama. Suddenly, an explosion strikes violently, killing four small female children and injuring 22 innocent churchgoers. Two years later, notorious religious and civil rights leader Malcolm X is assassinated during a gathering. Three years after that public speaker and activist Martin Luther King Junior is slain while sitting on a balcony of his hotel in Memphis Tennessee. Seven days after that current President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, an event often seen as the end of the Civil Rights Era in United States history. It took three major tragedies in the course of only five years to mount the tension needed to create change. As doctor King had once said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, Tension drives progress. He was right. The tension caused by certain activist groups such as SNCC, or even the Black Panthers, as well as individual leaders such as Malcolm X, created enough racial tension through the use of Black Nationalism in the latter half of the 1960’s that forced the …show more content…
What had once been the creators of the 1965 Freedom Summer and ‘64 Freedom Riders peaceful protest campaigns had now turned into a more radicalized and nationalist group, after the declaration of a change in heart. The SNCC’s change of tactics stated clearly that the black american public was growing weary and tiresome of the gradualism presented by the US government, creating a mind blistering tension which would be unrivaled in this country until the death of Doctor King. A change in heart which occured only shortly after the death of notorious Black Nationalist leader and civil rights activist Malcolm