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Essay Subject: Communications successes of 1950s-60s: legal appeals for justice, bus boycott, nonviolent demonstrations, sit-ins, freedom rides, marches, propaganda, use of symbols.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Communications successes of 1950s-60s: legal appeals for justice, bus boycott, nonviolent demonstrations, sit-ins, freedom rides, marches, propaganda, use of symbols. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the civil rights movement as to the types of persuasive communication used to further the cause, and the contribution of these methods to the movement's success or failure. The civil rights movement in the United States involved a number of different types of persuasive communication, beginning with soft-spoken appeals for justice and equality and evolving into acts of "creative dissent" on a mass scale. Indeed, the movement derived much of its vigor and forcefulness from the in-genuity of leaders. Martin Luther King, in particular, helped dramatize the plight of blacks in the United States, especially in the Deep South. Antecedents for some of the methods used can be traced to the passive resistance movement instigated by Gandhi as India struggled to win her independence from Britain. But other Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.King, Martin Luther, Jr. Suddenly patience and passivity were no longertolerable, and blacks sought new forms of expression for their quest forjustice and equality. Antecedents for some of the methods used canbe traced to the passive resistance movement instigated by Gandhi as Indiastruggled to win her independence from Britain. and Zangrando, Robert L., eds. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP wrote that suchdemonstrations "act as a powerful persuasion upon the national conscience,"exhibiting "a courage in the face of psychological and physical threats"(Bosmagian and Bosmagian 9). They also served another, equally importantrhetorical function: they provided blacks with an opportunity to air theirgrievances, giving voice to their frustration and anger through nonverbalsymbols. Nor could the letter be dismissed as just another plea by ablack man for justice. If Martin Luther King was indeed the "Great Communicator" of the CivilRights Movement, what of the movement itself? In 196 , inGreensboro, North Carolina, four black college students sat down at a lunchcounter and ordered coffee. Or were the boycotts, sit-ins,marches, and speeches empty gestures that failed to arouse any sympathy forthe black cause and produce any changes in attitude and legislation? He could havewritten his response after his release from jail, but his choice of venueseems deliberate, a dramatic underscoring of his message. "Ihave a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the truemean-ing of its creed: "we hold these truths to be self evident that allmen are created equal" (Franklin and Starr 146). His famous "I Have aDream" address to the 25 , demonstrators who had marched on Washington,D.C in 1963 still stands as a rhetorical high point of the civil rightsmovement and American leadership. New York: Random Rouse, 1969.Blaustein, Albert P. King himself was a refutation of the Negro stereotype - he waseloquent, assertive, persuasive, and committed, traits which previously hadbeen reserved for "whites only." King himself was unparalleled in the useof both verbal and nonverbal symbols to create interest, attention, andsympathy. Louisiana, a casechallenging segregation laws, Justice John Harlan wrote that "we wouldsurely have to be blind not to re-cognize that petitioners were sitting atthese counters, where they knew they would not be served, in order todemonstrate that their race was being segregated" (Bosmagian and Bosmagian9). Augustine, the Apostle Paul,Thomas Aquinas, Socrates Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Christ, andeven Martin Luther. In Garner v. In Mississippi, more than 3 freedom riders were arrested forrefusing to vacate segregated areas. . During hisincarceration, he wrote a response to the eight clergymen who hadcriticized King's activities as "unwise and untimely." The occasion of theletter became as symbolically important as itscontents, which the Bosnajians termed "rhetorically superior to anyspecific persuasive discourse that his white critics andadversaries have produced" (Bosmagian and Bosmagian 16). Civil rights' leaders were fully cognizant of the rhetorical effect ofthese activities. Someblacks found that this reform measure was not enough, raising the fist ofBlack Power against their own helplessness to wrest power from whiteAmerica. New York: Washington Square Press, 1958.Franklin, John Hope, and Starr, Isidole. Hers was not an overt, calculatedact designed to trigger a mass protest against the inequities ofdesegregation. Stride Toward Freedom. But other facets of themovement are uniquely American, emanating directly from the blackexperience, first as slaves, then as disen-franchised citizens. King informed the world that "we will try to persuadewith our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with ouracts" (King 215). Following a march in Birmingham on Good Friday in 1963, Dr. King wasarrested and held for eight days in a city jail before being allowed tomake bail and secure his release. But the effectiveness of this nonviolent, nonverbal formof communication soon became evident. These youngactivists, both black and white, "put their bodies on the line"to focus the world's attention on the condition of blacks in the AmericanSouth. He compared the struggle of his people to the sufferingand martyrdom of the early Christians. King proved to be equally eloquent as a speaker. Charging that local authorities hadexceeded their lawful power in arresting the protesters, the U.S. His sense of moment, hisrhetorical technique, and his credibility with both blacks and whitesensured that these two brief communications would become enduring featuresof the civil rights mythology. Black leaders continued to struggle quietly in thestatecapitals and in Washington for blacks to be accorded all the rights andprivileges of citizenship. The Montgomery bus boycott spawned a number of other actsof nonviolent protest, and gave new life to civil rightsorganizations that had been struggling in vain for progress. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the civil rightsmovement as to the types of persuasive communication used to further thecause, and the contribution of these methods to the movement's success orfailure. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),created in 1943, had been founded to achieve gains for blacks throughnonviolent protest and became the spearhead for one of the most dramaticconfrontations between the activists and the entrenched segregationists ofthe South: the Freedom Riders. The catalyst for the civil rights movement of the 195 s and 196 s wasnot a speech or pamphlet, not a powerful polemic by an acknowledged blackleader, but a quiet yet eloquent gesture by a black woman in Montgomery,Alabama. When Mrs. Parks was arrested for refusal to give up her seat to awhite man, the Rev. Martin Luther King organized a bus boycott to protestsegregation. Professor HarryKalven affirmed this view, noting that "the sit-in gesture gives a powerfulresource to the Negro community, which does not have great communicationresources" (Bosmagian and Bosmagian 9). The 195 s saw a new generation of blacks, angry, frustrated anddemanding that America fulfill the promise of "liberty and justice forall." Black men had borne arms for their country in Europe and the Pacific,returning home to confront the same in-justices that their fathers andgrandfathers had endured. to lift ournational policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock ofhuman dignity" (King 86). The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement. He reminded his readers of thepromises held out by the Declaration of Independence and the AmericanConstitution. It is difficult to assign a precise date to the beginning of thecivil rights movement. . Its readers moved by King's challenge to "make realthe promise of democracy and transform our pendingnational elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood . But by its very simplicity and spontaneity it had agalvanizing effect on ordinary black people and their leadership, inspiringacts of "creative dissent" on a massive scale and involving blacks andwhites in the same struggle for freedom. The very title -"Letter from Birmingham Jail" - was an eloquent testament to the strengthof King's commitment, and to the insidious nature of the prejudice he wasfighting. Emancipation of the slaves, while it represented asignificant step forward for blacks, also created aspirations for justiceand equality that were to be denied to blacks in both the North and Southfor over a century. As demonstrators against segregation, Justice Harlan afforded theprotesters the protection of the First Amendment, in that sit-ins are partof the "free trade of ideas" appealing to "the power of reason as appliedthrough public discussion" (Bosmagian and Bosmagian 9). The protest did not result in theimmediate recession of segregation laws, but it did focus nationalattention both on the blacks' quest for justice and on the virulence ofwhite resistance to this cause. The civil rights movement in the United States involved a number ofdifferent types of persuasive communication, beginning with soft-spokenappeals for justice and equality and evolving into acts of "creativedissent" on a mass scale. The Negro in Twentieth Century America. The sit-ins and boycotts served as powerful forms of non-verbal communication, propaganda deeds on behalf of the civil rightsmovement. Many of the nonviolent protest activities were coordinated by theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a direct out-growth of theMontgomery bus boycott. Why We Can't Wait. They drew attention to the injustices and in-equalities sufferedby black America, engaging the sympathy of moderate whites and arousing theattention of political leaders. The struggle for franchise, due pro-cess, and otherconstitutional rights for blacks dates back to the Civil War and theantebellum period. Were King and his followersable to persuade members of Congress, and white America as a whole, of theneed for significant change and reform? Led by Dr. King, SCLC acted as the coordinatingagency for nonviolent protest. . King understood, even if others did not, theimportance of symbols in persuading the white establishment of thelegitimacy of the black cause. The name "Rosa Parks" today is a celebrated one in civil rightsmythology, but in 1955 it be-longed to a black seamstress who refused toyield her seat on a bus to a white man. "I have a dream," King told the assembledprotesters, 4 , to 5 , thousand of whom were white (Bosnagian 17). This resulted, a year later, in the Supreme Court confirming alower-court judgment that segregation on local public transportationviolated the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendmentof the Constitution. Jurists and scholars have also acknowledged the rhetorical functionof boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. AttorneyGeneral interceded to halt the arrests. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. There are two particularly salient examples of his use of verbaltechnique on behalf of the movement: his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" andhis speech before the marchers on Washington. King invoked St. But their in efforts were frustrated by deep-seated prejudice against blacks that continued to deny them decent housing,employment, education, and even the right to vote. REFERENCESBosmagian Haig A., and Humida Bosmagian. Civil Rights and the American Negro. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. His appeal to reason, to the finer and nobler instincts ofhis fellow humans could not be dismissed as the rantings of an extremist ora hate-monger. Perhaps no single individual was more responsible for mobilizingblack dissent and setting an example of dignity and resolve than MartinLuther King. . As a result, blacks for the first time enjoyed a sense ofsolidarity and unity, discovering a new-found power to influence events andeffect change. As King wrote in 1958,"That night [December 5, 1955] we were starting a movement that would gainnational recognition; whose echoes would ring in the ears of people ofevery nation; a movement that would astound the oppressor, and bring newhope to the oppressed" (King 7 ). This type of passivecommunication - petition, discussion writings, appeals to reason and law -was largely futile, with no significant gains achieved for blacks. King urged Stokely Carmichael to use anotherslogan, such as "black consciousness" or "black equality" that would carryless threatening connotations. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? The old stereotype of the passive, smiling Negro was foreverlaid to rest by the images of blacks asserting their demands for justiceand equality. At the same time, he declared that "nonviolentdirect action had proved to be the most effective generator of change thatthe movement had seen, and by 1965 allcivil rights organizations had embraced it as theirs" (King 18).Certainly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which King terms the firstsubstantive piece of civil rights legislation, can be said to be a directoutcome of the movements nonviolent but dramatic communica-tion. Indeed, the movement derived much of its vigorand forcefulness from the in-genuity of leaders. A group organized to travel through theSouth, testing segregation laws, the Freedom Riders encountered a mob inMontgomery that required the intervention of federal marshals to restoreorder. New York: The New American Library, 1964. They were refused service and remained seatedat the lunch counter until closing.The lunch-counter protest became the first in a series of "sit-ins"throughout the South, at libraries, hotels, beaches, whereverdiscrimination against blacks was to be found. King himself acknowledged the danger of demonstrations be-coming ends in themselves, creating a false sense of accomplish-ment in the participants. The letter itself appeals to the humanity and reason of the clergymen(and the wider audience for whom this document wasobviously was intended). No one could have anticipated the far-reaching effectsof the boy-cott. The slogans and symbols of the Black Power movement may haveundermined the objectives of justice and equality, communicating hatred andanger to an alreadyskitterish white America. Martin Luther King, inparticular, helped dramatize the plight of blacks in the United States,especially in the Deep South. 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