Our pop history memory of the civil rights movement makes it seem as if most decent people were in favor of the movement, but the reality was that they were not. Many of the criticisms lobbed at Black Lives Matter today were also leveled against civil rights activists five decades ago.
Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and scores of their fellow activists were criticized by fellow citizens and targeted as “un-American,” not just by Southern politicians but by the federal government.
Civil rights activists were reviled, red-baited, and called extremists in their own time.
On the Selma-to-Montgomery march, in 1965, White Citizens’ Councils had plastered huge billboards along the route in which King and Parks were pictured attending a “Communist training school” (actually Highlander Folk School).
The civil rights movement was deeply unpopular at the time. Most Americans thought it was going too far and movement activists were being too extreme. Most white Americans were happy with the status quo as it was. And so they criticized, monitored, demonized and at times criminalized those who challenged the way things were, making dissent very costly.
A half-century plus later, in our popular celebration of Dr. King, the relentless nationwide opposition to the civil rights movement is usually left out.
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