Title: Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr
Abstract: Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. By David L. Chappell. (New York: Random House, 2014. Pp. xvi, 249. $27.00, ISBN 978-1-4000-6546-2.) What happened to the civil rights movement after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968? The usual answer, according to David L. Chappell, is that the movement appeared to lurch aimlessly ... directionless, if not entirely stagnant (p. xii). This fine book attempts to correct that answer and to examine the various ways, some successful and others failures, that subsequent activists tried to expand the movement--desegregating the housing market, expanding black voting and economic opportunity, and honoring King's legacy with a national holiday in his name. King's last real victory, Chappell proclaims in chapter 1, was the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (p. 3). The assassination propelled passage of the act, for even die-hard segregationists in Congress usually kept their mouths decorously shut (p. 18). But the author concludes that it was a toss-up whether Congress was honoring King's memory directly or was responding to the violence and destruction that greeted his death (p. 23). Chappell then addresses the National Black Political Conventions of 1972 and 1974, which he correctly notes have been largely forgotten (p. 30). Over seven thousand activists attended the first convention in Gary, Indiana, a city that had just elected one of the country's first black mayors, Richard Hatcher. Delegates discussed issues and made calls for unity, and the conventions marked a crucial, formative stage in the consolidation of the civil rights movement's victories (p. 31). Yet the first convention, and then the second in Little Rock, Arkansas, demonstrated that King's movement was falling apart into various factions; the African American population could be an electoral force, but it was already too diverse to remain a unified interest group after the civil rights gains of the 1960s. Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. then examines the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment law, which President Jimmy Carter signed in 1978. During the so-called stagflation of the 1970s, the original aim was to put people to work, especially African Americans, but the author admits that the eventual legislation had little impact on black unemployment, which continued to be more than double that for whites (p. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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