Speech concerning Civil Rights Movement overview, no date

America's overseas commitment of men and money; more militant groups, like SNCC and CORE, argued that the war was wrong and that it drained needed resources and attention from the war on poverty and the struggle for racial justice.

First, CORE and SNCC publicly opposed the war. Then King finally broke ranks with his older colleagues, saying the promises of President Johnson's Great Society "have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam."

And the killings at home went on. On January 10, 1966, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer was killed when the Klan bombed his home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Ben Chester White was murdered by the Klan in Natchez, Mississippi, on June 10, and civil rights activist Clarence Triggs was killed by white supremacists in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on July 30.

Seeking new directions for the floundering southern civil rights movement, and alternatives to violence, King had begun to plan a Poor People's March on Washington for 1968. Battered by prominent Blacks for opposing the war and saddened by outbreaks

of violence he believed to be self-defeating, he hoped to revitalize the movement by creating an interracial coalition of the poor.

As 1967 passed by, racist violence claimed other victims. Wharlest Jackson was killed on February 27 after being promoted to a "white" job in Natchez. Benjamin Brown was killed on May 11 when police fired on student protestors in Jackson, Mississippi.

On February 8, 1968, three students at South Carolina State College - - Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith - - were killed when South Carolina State Troopers fired on a protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

By then, the weight of public opinion had turned against the movement's more militant groups, and the federal government -- through the FBI -- was engaged in a covert and illegal campaign to destroy them. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover targeted SNCC and CORE, among others, using illegal wiretaps, informers, dissemination of false information, and scurrilous charges by one group against another. Hoover had used the same tactics --

without much success -- against King, with the approval of John and Robert Kennedy.

In March 1968, King's plans for the Poor People's March were diverted by an appeal from striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, for his support.

He was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when James Earl Ray shot and killed him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. *********** From Montgomery to Memphis, the civil rights movement won great changes in American life. It ended legal apartheid in the American South and forever changed relations between Blacks and whites. It emboldened Black and other non-white Americans. In the process, it gave new life to the movement for women's rights and to the yearnings of other disadvantaged groups.

The movement succeeded because a largely unknown cadre of citizens, Black and white, many of them young, dared to risk life and limb for freedom's cause. And it succeeded because the strength of our democratic form of government is its ability to

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respond to the people.

That is why, as long as we have injustice -- and people willing to make it their cause -- the movement will continue on.

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