Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement
Historian Ralph argues that when Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided in the mid-1960s to mobilize nonviolent street protests against Chicago's long-standing and pervasive housing discrimination, he did not sufficiently appreciate the differences between the targets of SCLC's successful protests in the South ("public-impact" voting rights, education opportunities, and public accommodations) and the target of the Chicago campaign ("private-impact" legal rights to housing). In addition, King had to contend with local organizations whose leaders were vying for power and trying to protect their own turf. Though Ralph claims that King's protests helped empower the city's black community, his analysis painstakingly documents and conclusively shows that King's campaign was counterproductive and severely cut into the broad-based support and momentum of the Civil Rights Movement. For academic collections.- Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego, Cal.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.