Magnolia, atlanta and dr. Martin luther king jr. a ... - Goodman Theatre

The Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968
May, 1954 In Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas, The Supreme Court
unanimously rules public school segregation
unconstitutional.
August, 1954 In Mississippi, 14-yearold
Emmett Till is murdered for allegedly
whistling at a white woman.
December, 1955 In Montgomery,
Alabama, Rosa Parks is arrested for
refusing to give up her seat on the bus
to a white passenger. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. leads a bus boycott that lasts
for more than a year.
February, 1957 In Greensboro, North
Carolina, four black students stage a
sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in
Woolworth’s.
September, 1957 In Little Rock,
Arkansas, President Eisenhower sends
federal troops and the National Guard
to escort the “Little Rock Nine” into
Central High School.
November, 1960 John F. Kennedy is
elected President of the United States.
1961 Students volunteer for bus trips
(“freedom rides”) through the South to
test the new laws prohibiting segregation
in interstate travel facilities.
October, 1962 President Kennedy sends
federal troops to the University of
Mississippi when riots break out over
the enrollment of the first black student,
James Meredith.
December, 1962 Atlanta mayor Ivan
Allen Jr. orders the erection of Peyton
Wall to separate a white neighborhood
from an adjacent black neighborhood.
1963 Regina Taylor’s play Magnolia
takes place.
April, 1963 While protesting in
Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. is imprisoned and writes the
famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
June, 1963 Mississippi’s NAACP field
secretary, Medgar Evers, is murdered.
August, 1963 In Washington, D.C.,
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his
famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
November, 1963 President John F.
Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
January, 1964 The 24th Amendment
abolishes the poll tax.
March, 1964 In Selma, Alabama, in
an incident the media dubs “Bloody
Sunday,” police use clubs, whips and
tear gas on black protestors.
July, 1964 President Johnson signs the
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
August, 1964 The Ku Klux Klan murders
three civil-rights workers in Neshoba
County, Mississippi.
December, 1964 Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
February, 1965 Malcolm X is assassinated
in Harlem, New York.
August, 1965 Congress passes the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
September, 1965 President Johnson
issues Executive Order 11246, enforcing
affirmative action.
April, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
Chamber of Commerce, negotiated a
peaceful desegregation of the city’s
lunch counters. That same year, Allen
ran for mayor and won, defeating Lester
Maddox, an Atlanta restaurant owner
who ran on a strong segregationist platform.
Despite his own segregationist
past, Allen had courted—and won—
the endorsement of The Atlanta Negro
Voters League, key to securing the support
of the city’s black community.
Like Mayor Hartsfield before him, Allen
saw the “race issue” in largely pragmatic
terms. During the summer of 1962, however,
less than a year into his first term as
mayor, Allen’s approach was sorely tested.
Although the city was in the midst of
an economic boom, the median income
of black families was less than half that
of white families. And although blacks
represented 40 percent of the city’s population,
they lived on only 24 percent of
the residential land. That summer, black
realtors had started to drive through the
Utoy-Peyton Forest subdivision of Cascade
Heights, a white upper-middle-class
enclave of Atlanta. The interest of black
realtors stirred the apprehension of white
residents determined to prevent blacks
from buying into their community. The
Cascade Heights residents turned to Ivan
Allen Jr. for help, asking that he close
the two roads that connected Cascade
Heights to an adjacent black neighborhood.
On December 19, with the support
of 13 members of the Atlanta Board of
Aldermen, Allen obliged.
There’s a story—perhaps apocryphal—
that as Mayor Hartsfield was handing
over the keys to the mayor’s office, he
advised his young successor “never [to]
make a mistake you can take a picture
of.” In erecting two wood and steel barriers,
each affixed with the sign “Road
Closed,” Atlanta’s new mayor had made
the city’s racial lines visible to the world.
Likened to the Berlin Wall, Atlanta’s
Peyton Wall generated unwanted attention.
It stood as Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham,
Alabama, for his part in a non-violent
protest conducted against segregation.
There he penned the famous “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” decrying the evils of
segregation and making an impassioned
argument for the need to resist injustice
now—and in the weeks and months following
the events in Birmingham, there
was an explosion of black protest on an
unprecedented scale.
Surprised by the force of the protests, the
Kennedy administration moved to pass
a sweeping Civil Rights Bill. Sensing an
opportunity to influence the federal government,
King and his fellow civil rights lead-
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