Kindly add this to the perspective of the time when Dr. King was growing up and becoming a great leader. The Civil War ended by proclamation on April 9, 1865. Dr. King's father would be born in 1899 and his mother in 1904. The USA had lost a beloved President through violence and racism in 1865. The deaths of President by violent means lasts with the USA people. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Now more than fifty years since his death the country still remembers where they were when the news came.
...The Auburn Avenue (click here) community developed against a
backdrop of increasingly rigid, legally enforced racial segregation and
the effective disfranchisement of blacks throughout the American South
in the 1 890s and 1900s. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877,
inconsistency and flux characterized southern race relations. Before
1900, few southern states required segregation in public places.
Separation in public activities was common, but local racial protocol
varied considerably. In urban areas, limited racial mixing on public
carriers, in common areas, and even in work places testified to the
fragile foothold that blacks had established in municipalities. The
political participation of southern blacks also varied considerably in
this period. Beginning in the 1890s, however, southern whites fashioned
a strictly segregated public realm and eliminated blacks' civil and
political rights. In Atlanta, a 1906 race
riot accelerated the development of separate spheres for blacks and
whites in the city.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited
the denial of the franchise "by any State on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude." However, when the protection of federal troops was withdrawn, blacks'
voting rights increasingly were restricted through intimidation,
restrictive legislation, and discriminatory practices. Whites employed
numerous devices to disfranchise blacks without openly flouting the
Fifteenth Amendment. Southern governments created all-white primaries,
poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated voting procedures to exclude
black voters. Many of these measures also limited the franchise of less
affluent whites, in spite of mitigating efforts like "grandfather
clauses." Grandfather clauses sheltered illiterate whites by exempting
from literacy requirements individuals whose ancestors had voted prior
to emancipation. By 1910, nearly all southern states had enacted
suffrage laws that prevented blacks from voting....
