Know more about Dr King's visit
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We are lucky to have the work of Professor Brian Ward, author of Martin Luther King in Newcastle Upon Tyne, who has researched this event, placed it within a history of Black presence and activism in the region and was an important part of the Freedom City work in 2017. Professor Ward also discusses why this visit is not as permanently etched on the region’s memory as other VIP visits have been.
Project North Star is indebted to him for his work in this area and support of PNS.
On 13th November 1967 Martin Luther King spent 11 hours in Newcastle. While there he received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in Civil Law.[1] As you will have seen, to have one of the most important statesmen in our region for only a short time is hugely important and inspiring. Students will have enough knowledge about Dr King to know that he was a huge part of the Civil Rights movement and an inspiration to the British Civil Rights Movement.
What may strike even the proudest of northeasterners is why did Dr King come all that way to receive an honour from a university he may not have been aware of prior to 1967. This is what we will look at here as it reveals another side to Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement at that time that many will be unaware of.
Martin Luther King had forged through the turmoil of the 1950’s, through physical threats, imprisonment, government spying and the heat of the racism in American society and been able to claim a number of victories. He had become the Civil Rights leader. He came to prominence in 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, working after the arrest of Rosa Parks to boycott public busses in Montgomery, which led to in 1956 a Supreme Court decision banning segregation on busses in Alabama.[2] He changed the world with the ‘I have a Dream’ speech in Washington in 1963. He had become an important person to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. This enabled him to take some credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Bill. Despite setbacks and violence the narrative of King coming out on top is there to inspire us. His winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 showed how he had become a world figure. Bringing about these victories amidst ferocious opposition, always maintaining the path of non-violence rightly elevates Dr King to the pantheon of Civil Rights and world leaders for all times. It is right that his life is known to students. His assassination in 1968 cruelly took King but failed in its aims as forever now his message will be heard.
So, why in 1967 did Dr King choose to travel on planes and trains to spend a little time in a place he had no connection with?
The Civil Rights movement under King’s leadership had become even more complicated. By 1967 many Black people had become tired of continuing racism despite the work of Dr King and promises of presidents. Since the steps forward in 1965 King notes in Where do We Go From Here that those who had been present at the signing of the bill had been attacked in Selma Alabama and in Chicago. Many leaders had been replaced by more militant Black leaders. A white backlash had brought to office ‘political clowns’. White and Black leaders had been killed and justice had failed again. King noted that riots had failed to get the Civil Rights message across.[3] Riots in Watts, California was one of the first of a series of unrest and riots in 239 in America between 1964 and 1968.[4]
This led many in the Civil Rights Movement to move away from King’s non-violence doctrine and towards a confrontational stance. People were drawn towards Malcolm X’s message of direct action. The movement was splitting and King was starting to be seen as outdated and soft.
In June 1966, the split came to a head when Dr King took over a ‘March Against Fear’ started in Mississippi by James Meridith. Meredith had come to national attention in 1962 for becoming the first Black student in the University of Mississippi, despite huge opposition. President Kenndey had to send in the National Guard to protect Meredith. By 1966, the well known Meredith continued his fight for Civil Rights. He began the March Against Fear to encourage voter registration which was still, despite the Voting Rights Act, a dangerous thing for many Black people to exercise their right to vote. On the second day of the march Meredith was shot on the road.[5]
Dr King, in supporting Meredith, continued the march. He joined Stokely Carmichael. During the march, which lasted days, the two men disagreed over the ‘Black Power’ slogan. Carmichael, a younger, more militant leader had witnessed violence against himself and other Black people and wanted to fight back. Dr King, while having sympathy for the new voices, could not condone anything that went against non-violence. Saying the slogan and the movement behind it, ‘Black Power is a cry of disappointment . . . It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment.’[6]
Stokely Carmichael, believed that Black people needed to be ‘cleansed of their fear of whites.[7]
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Dr. King’s pacifist message was becoming out of touch with many Black people in America. In Carmichael’s ‘What We Want’ article are echoes of the Pan-African Movement. Let down by America and talk of integration while the terror of racism was still ever present and poverty biting, Carmichael said, ‘Black people must do things for themselves; they must get poverty money they will control and spend themselves, they must conduct tutorial programs themselves so that black children can identify with black people. This is one reason Africa has such importance. The reality of black men ruling their own nations gives blacks elsewhere a sense of possibility, of power, which they do not now have.[8]
April 4th 1967 in Riverside Church Dr King spoke out against the Vietnam war in a speech that many think was his finest. ‘If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.’[9] His opposition to the Vietnam war lost him the influence he had in the White House. President Johnson wanted King monitored even more by the FBI. The Civil Rights movement had seen in the war that Black Americans were suffering without being given the respect of the country they were fighting for (a recurring theme we have seen in the First and Second World War). The disastrous consequences of the war on Vietnamese people was also felt by Dr. King and others in the movement. This stance, we may now see as absolutely reasonable and maybe ahead of its time, knowing how Vietnam was even by 1967 a lost cause, however Dr King lost support from those who thought he should keep separate the war and Civil Rights, those who thought he was far too left wing.
The violence and hatred remained. But as King spoke about in his speech to Newcastle University he had widened his targets to include opposition to the Vietnam War and poverty. King’s war on poverty was not a particularly new move, but it did lose him support from those who saw this stance as too left wing. In this he wanted to join people from different ethnicities in America into this fight. Again, this was seen by the Black Power movement as too soft, and by many on the right in America as too left.
Dr King stuck to his message throughout. When his and his family's life was threatened he maintained non-violence. His message expanded to the war and poverty, but its central core remained. Other leaders at this time would not court controversy, would not knowingly have doors to power shut on him.
So we end with why did he come to Newcastle? He was tired and battered by the events 1960’s America threw at him. Maybe the break, although a tiring travel gave him some time to breathe and think. It is telling that the man who had a dream, a vision of what America could be entitled his last book, ‘Where do we go from here: Chaos of Community?
Dr King wrote a letter thanking Vice Chancellor CIC Bosanquet for the reception and degree. In it we may see King alluding to why he came in person to accept it.
This is a belated note to say that one is always humbled on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from such an outstanding university as Newcastle Upon Tyne, and yet, in the course of constant criticism and malalignment of one’s best efforts, the recognition of by an institution of higher learning of the historic significance of one’s work in the ministry is a tremendous encouragement, far overshadowing the barbs and arrows from the daily press.[1 0]
This short trip has been so often overlooked on both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe one reason is that it shows a hero at a low point and one in which we would sooner not concentrate on. His assassination denied us the chance to see a resurgent King.
What does it say about Newcastle?
The university wanted to be seen as progressive, relevant to young people and able to attract major players. The university, unlike others at that time had a quite conservative student body. By getting Dr. King to attend it offered a counter to that conservatism and indeed tried to get more ‘political engagement and social activism.’[11]
Notes
It is astounding that Dr King’s visit to Newcastle is so unknown. Hopefully, this and signposting to the great work of Professor Brian Ward of Northumbria University will renew this significant event. The work done, and lots is still online on Newcastle’s Freedom City project in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary, is very much worth a look. King’s statue in Newcastle University grounds is a lasting mark of this significant event.
More than just showing students this visit, we can use this as it reveals the the state of the Civil Rights movement in the later half of the 1960’s. We can show that history is not a march towards success, but has peaks and troughs. It advances and regresses, just like today. GCSE students of America in Conflict are often confused by this period. This can be a way into it that makes sense.
Resources.
https://speccollstories.ncl.ac.uk/Martin-Luther-King-at-Newcastle-University/
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36442370
[1] Ward, B. (2017) Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne: The African American Freedom Struggle and race relations in the North East of England. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Tyne Bridge Publishing. P 13.
[2] Verney, K. (2004) Black Civil Rights in America. London: Routledge. P 52.
[3] King, M.L. (2010) Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? Boston: Beacon Press. P. 2
[4] Verney, K. (2004) Black Civil Rights in America. London: Routledge. P63.
[5] Berger, M.A. (2013) Freedom now!: Forgotten photographs of the civil rights struggle. Santa Barbara: Art, Design et Architecture Museum, Univ. of California. P8.
[6] King, M.L. and Carson, C. (2004) The autobiography of Martin Luther King. London: Abacus. P 323.
[7] G., O.J.O. (2019) Black Power: Radical Politics and African American identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. P 67.
[8] Levy, P.B. (1992) Let freedom ring: A documentary history of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger. p183
[9] King in the Wilderness. (2018) Dir. Peter W. Kunhardt.
[10] Letter to CIC Bosanquet 30 January 1968 Newcastle University archives - NUA/00-7621/3/41 as seen in Collections, N.U.L.S. (no date) Martin Luther King at Newcastle University, To Honour a Great and Good Man. Available at: https://speccollstories.ncl.ac.uk/Martin-Luther-King-at-Newcastle-University/ (Accessed: April 13, 2023).
[11] Ward, B. (2017) Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne: The African American Freedom Struggle and race relations in the North East of England. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Tyne Bridge Publishing. pg. 25