A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 413Detroit, shot to death by Klansmen on her way out of Selma– again shocked
the nation. Johnson thus went on television just days later to denounce the
mobs at Selma and announce plans to secure voting rights for southern
Blacks. The resulting legislation, the Voting Rights Act, would mark the high
point and, in many ways, climax of the movement. Passed in August 1965, the
Act barred literacy tests as a requirement for blacks to vote, and sent federal
officials to register African Americans wherever they were being denied the
right to vote. After a decade of struggle, the legal barriers to segregation had
been eliminated. Court decisions and federal initiatives such as the Civil and
Voting Rights Acts now ensured Blacks rights and opportunities they had not
enjoyed before, that they should have possessed simply by being born in
America. The resistance and sacrifice of King and so many others had paid
off. But the movement was now at a crossroads as well. King and others were
not content to rest on their success and wanted the struggle to continue, not
just in the South but throughout the United States and not just for Blacks but
for all poor people. They would soon discover the limits of reform as they
took the movement to the North, and, more critically, began to address the
issue of class, not just race.
BuRn, BaBy, BuRn! noRtheRn RaGe
While the Civil Rights Movement was focused on the legal system of apart-
heid in the south, now taken apart by the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, many
blacks were looking elsewhere, especially northward, and were concerned
with issues beyond riding on buses and voting, such as jobs, wages, health-
care, and housing. Many in fact criticized King for working so closely with
white liberals and President Johnson, none more so that the followers of
Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Black Americans commit-
ted to the Islamic faith. Malcolm’s background was quite different from
King’s. He was an ex- convict who had lived on the streets and represented
northern blacks who needed good jobs with good wages, better neighbor-
hoods, and crime prevention and sanitation. Indeed, Malcolm was fond of
saying that the U.S. South was “everything below Canada.” Malcolm rejected
cooperation with White America and dismissed claims of improvement in
black life —“you don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches,” he
explained, “and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.”