By 1965, the Civil Rights Movement had achieved many convincing victories: Brown v. Board, integration of public transportation and restaurants, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite their gains, the movement still struggled with the continual racism of the South. No matter how many Supreme Court decisions, the South refused to give in, especially in voter registration. This is not surprising, in that, the real fear for the white community was the control of the ballot box by the black community. Eventually, this would lead to the election of black officials, which appalled most social circles of the South. Therefore, there was considerable resistance to blacks registering to vote throughout Mississippi and Alabama. Ultimately, Martin Luther King would lead the charge for additional voter registration campaigns, and he picked the city of Selma as the battleground. Over the course of several months, the black community, inspired by the SNCC, SCLC, and CORE, registered to vote under extreme intimidation and violence. After the death of a black participant in Selma, the idea of a march from Selma to Montgomery was agreed upon. Ultimately, this march would shock the public to the racist violence that continued to persist in Alabama, but, almost as important, the march created divisions between the black activist groups. This division would be highlighted with the rise of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, and the Meredith March in 1966. Although in the past, black organizations had worked together towards a common goal, the stress of a lack of progress in the South caused fracture within the movement. At the conclusion of Freedom Summer, some SNCC members, including Bob Moses, John Lewis, And Fannie Lou Hamer, took a goodwill trip to Africa. In Africa, the SNCC members experienced countries run by Africans, who had recently gained independence from the imperialist nations. Overall, the trip made a massive impact on the participants, and this is not understandable, in that, the participants had emerged from Freedom Summer’s terrorism, which targeted SNCC and its members for registering blacks to vote and providing schools to educate black children, into countries whose leadership comprised of blacks. More importantly, however, the trip to Africa presented an alternative view of America for the participants. As Julian Bond explains, “There were all test pictures of Negroes doing things...If you didn't know anything about America, you would think these were commonplace things." Apparently, even the United States government was involved in covering up the plight of blacks in America. Gradually, SNCC evolved into a student organization that did not advocate for peace disobedience, but demanded equality that was deservingly theirs. Once they participants of the African trip returned to the United States, there was a real uncertainty about the direction of SNCC for the future. Should the organization be comprised only of blacks? These were difficult questions for Moses, Lewis, and ultimately, Carmichael to answer. All the while, the divisions between the groups grew. Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, on January 6, 1965, openly quoted to Life magazine that "Chinese communist elements" had infiltrated the SNCC. In this moment, Martin Luther King and the SCLC set their sights on voter registration drives, in part because of the success of Freedom Summer in exposing the continual racism of the South in voting practices. Ultimately, King would settle on a smaller Alabama town, with a high tempered Sheriff: Selma. Selma had the right ingredients for success: a majority black population unable to vote, a harden governor, George Wallace, and a quick-tempered Sheriff, Jim Clark. During the first weeks of King’s participation, dramatic scenes played out in front of the courthouse: protestors were beaten, and verbal abuse. The footage from Bridge to Freedom illustrates the violence of Selma with actual video footage of the event. Unlike the protests of the past, Selma, in 1965, was in the middle of a new digital revolution in America. Video cameras were everywhere, and the popularity of the television had exploded. Thus, when national news networks heard of the civil rights plans in Selma, they departed for Alabama with haste. In Bridge to Freedom, the assault on black participants on the courthouse steps is clear, and supplemented by the scenes of terrorism on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Undoubtedly, this video footage had a great effect on the nation, as a whole, with even President Johnson, in front of a special session of Congress for support of a new Civil Rights bill, closing with, “And we shall overcome.” Jimmie Lee Jackson, a participant in the Selma demonstrations, was murdered during a protest on February 18, 1965, and to this, his grandfather remarked, "I've got nothing to lose now. We've got to keep going." The idea was made to take the body of Jackson to the governor's mansion in Montgomery. Although John Lewis, the chairman of the SNCC, tried to get the SNCC to be involved, they would not relent because they believed, particularly Stokely Carmichael, that it was nothing more than a publicity stunt. It was well known at this time, that many of the students in SNCC did not have a favorable opinion of King. Lewis, however, marched on his own, saying, “I never imagined that my own organization, SNCC, would ever step aside and tell me to walk alone.” Lewis’s independence in the march only proves that cooperation was beginning to unravel either within or between black organizations.
The march was to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was higher in the middle than on either end. Thus, when Lewis, and about 2500 protestors crossed the bridge they had no idea state troopers were waiting for them. What ensued was a tragedy: the troopers attacked the protest violently with cattle prods, and even chains. All the while, national news networks were filming the event. Martin Luther King would gather together another group of marchers, and included some white clergy and other elected officials, and marched over the bridge again. They prayed and turned back, afraid of violating a court order. This only reinstated for the SNCC that the SCLC was out of touch. A SNCC activist, Willie Ricks, staged a series of protests over the course of the next few days to get a response from King, in which King responded: You are not Martin Luther King! I’m Martin Luther King. No matter what you do, you’ll never be Martin Luther King!” This type of statement only reinforced what many in the SNCC thought about King: glory was more important to him than justice. Eventually, the court order against the march was lifted and the marchers continued on to Montgomery. Along the way, they collected more and more participants in the march, and by the time it was over, over fifty thousand people had participated. The division between the SNCC and the SCLC, however, continued to grow. Spurred on by the widely popular and out-spoken Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC evolved. The change occurred when the Selma March passed into Lowndes County.
"We have a problem----the guys here are not nonviolent anymore. They're ready to fight." This quote represents the stance of the Black Panther Party, founded by Carmichael in Lowndes County, Alabama. Gradually, the Black Panther Party in Mississippi garnered enough support from the county to participate in the November, 1966 election. Upon his upset election to become the chairman of the SNCC, Carmichael represented a new direction for the SNCC: no more nonviolence initiatives; instead, forcing themselves on the white communities through collective action and 'Black Power'. As Carmichael, the new chairman of the SNCC after John Lewis, pointed out integration had often been a one-way street. Affluent blacks would take their talents and moved into white, suburban neighborhoods; leaving behind their birthplace in the urban setting. Carmichael's plea was simple: We are black and beautiful. Carmichael was extravagant in his appeals for black pride---examining the differences in the death of Reeb and Jackson, or his comparisons of the Miss America pageant with the Negro in Mississippi. It is easy to see the influence of Malcolm X on the language used by Carmichael. With flamboyance and illustrative analogies, both were equally captivating public speakers. As one observer stated in Our Time has Come when attending a rally of Malcolm X, "I could not look away when he was speaking. I found myself nodding my head and agreeing with his points. Afterwards, I stopped him and told him that I liked the speech but didn't agree with everything he said. X responded by saying, "Sister, one day you will." Consider this quote made by Malcolm X in 1964:“The year [1964] when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer. In comparison, Stokely Carmichael said the following in 1966 after his arrest in Greenwood during the Meredith March: “This is the twenty-seventh time I’ve been arrested, and I ain’t going to jail no more. The only was we stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nuthin’. What we gonna start saying now is black power.”
The media, however, largely viewed the movement with hesitation, as Mike Wallace did in his coverage of the Nation of Islam in 1964. It seemed that America had finally angered the black community enough to cause militancy. Further, many of the core members of the SNCC, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Bob Zellner left the organization. Zellner, regardless of his heroic efforts in the earlier years of the SNCC, was actually excluded because he was white. By the time the Meredith march occurred in the summer of 1966, Carmichael was openly at odds with the SCLC and NAACP. After the shooting of Meredith, civil rights activists decended on Memphis, Tennessee determined to fulfill the march to Jackson, Mississippi. Along the way, they hoped to convert sharecroppers to their march, and register them to vote. The most inspiring of which, was a 104 year old man named El Fondren from Batesville. The differences in the SNCC and Carmichael, however, could not have been greater. The Deacons of Defense, an armed group that watched over the protest, was encouraged. All the while, King emphasized the 'nonviolence' of the march. When Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood, the differences between the two leaders are obvious: "Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt." Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, defined 'black power' as "the reverse of Mississippi, reverse of Hitler, and a reverse of the Ku Klux Klan."
After the conclusion of the Meredith March in Jackson, the black organizations officially went their own ways. The Black Panther Party continued its course after the Meredith March: pro-nationalist agenda, intent on creating equal opportunity for the black community, by the black community. Dr. King and the SCLC, however, continued to advocate for nonviolent demonstration, and increased its attacks on the issues that particularly affected the black community, specifically Vietnam and poverty. After the Meredith March, the civil rights groups would never come together over a demonstration or a cause again. In many ways, Meredith represented the last true cause large enough to unite the groups, in that, James Meredith and his walk represented an ideal all groups could unite behind. Unfortunately, this attitude did not apply to the future of civil rights for the black community.