Bearing The Cross Analysis

Bearing the Cross does two things extremely well: it provides an in-depth, honest account of MLK, Jr.’s life, and it chronicles the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s role in the 1960’s civil rights movement. The latter is what I found most interesting, and relevant to current events.

The SCLC, with Martin as its leader, formed, in a sense, as a response to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown represented a huge legal victory for the NAACP, but many black people weren’t experiencing any tangible changes in its wake. SCLC’s goal was to use protests and other non-violent tactics to pressure local governments to actually enforce the rights that the Supreme Court had announced: in other words, while the Court said separate-but-equal was illegal, communities ruled by white people (i.e. most everywhere in the U.S.) needed a visceral push to actually enforce the ban on legal segregation.

In providing this push, SCLC utilized the national press, and the pressure it could exert on local businesses. By setting up dramatic confrontations with white police and white mobs, SCLC would draw the country’s attention to the brutal repression of a particular city. This pressure cleaved the white leadership in two: while the elected politicians remained stubborn in their racism and often persisted in refusing to negotiate, often the

The inter-organizational struggles were fascinating, and sometimes almost made-for-TV, like the last-minute wrangling over John Lewis’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington--which could have scuttled the all-together image the leaders