#CivilRights
8 entries tagged CivilRights.
People (4)
- Martin Luther King Jr Martin Luther King Jr. was the preeminent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham Campaign, and the 1963 March on Washington, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was subjected to an extraordinary FBI surveillance and harassment campaign under COINTELPRO, and was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
- Rosa Parks Rosa Parks was an NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, whose December 1, 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott and launched the organized civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s - though her action was a strategic NAACP decision rather than a spontaneous individual act.
- Stanley Levison Stanley Levison was a New York attorney and businessman who was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest advisors and who had Communist Party USA ties in the early 1950s - providing the FBI's legal justification for wiretapping King and the SCLC beginning in 1962, despite the FBI's own evidence that Levison had severed his Communist Party ties before he became associated with King.
- William Sullivan William C. Sullivan was the FBI's Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence who architected COINTELPRO, drafted the 1964 anonymous 'suicide letter' to Martin Luther King Jr., was fired by Hoover in 1971, and was shot in a ruled hunting accident on November 9, 1977, the day before he was to testify to congressional investigators.
Organizations (1)
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was the civil rights organization founded in 1957 with Martin Luther King Jr. as president that coordinated the major nonviolent direct action campaigns of the 1960s - the Birmingham Campaign, the March on Washington, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches - while being subjected to systematic FBI surveillance and COINTELPRO disruption operations.
Programs (2)
- COINTELPRO COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a covert FBI domestic operations program (1956-1971) targeting political organizations through infiltration, psychological warfare, fabricated mail, wrongful prosecution, and coordination with local law enforcement, exposed by the 1971 Media FBI office break-in.
- Project MERRIMAC Project MERRIMAC was a CIA Office of Security program (approximately 1967-1974) that infiltrated antiwar and civil rights organizations in Washington D.C., feeding intelligence to Operation CHAOS through the CACTUS pipeline before exposure by Seymour Hersh and the Church Committee.
Events (1)
- Montgomery Bus Boycott The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the 381-day campaign (December 5, 1955 - December 21, 1956) in which the Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted the city's segregated bus system following Rosa Parks' arrest, launched Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence, and ended when the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.