ABSTRACT
Most scholars of the modern civil rights movement date its existence from the Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955, started by Ms. Rosa Parks, to the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. King was selected to direct the boycott that followed Ms. Parks's action, and subsequently a nationwide antisegregationist movement developed in which King played a prominent role until his death. After King's assassination, the movement declined. There is much debate as to why this is so, but most analysts see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “creating the Equal Opportunity Commission and ending discrimination in public accommodation,” and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ensured the protection of Black voting rights, as fulfilling two fundamental goals of the movement and as such contributing to its demise. 1 In any case, even before King's assassination, it was clear that the movement had lost much of its momentum. Another reason advanced for the decline of the civil rights movement was the realization by many Blacks by the late 1960s that their ability to participate fully in the political process did not translate into earthshaking social and economic gains. Despite a decade and a half of vigorous protest, in 1965 the problems of inferior schooling, unequal criminal justice application, bad housing, and de facto segregation, especially in the northern urban centers, had intensified. 2 The frustrations in the North resulted in a series of urban riots that started in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965, continued sporadically over the next few years, and reached their height in the wake of Dr. King's murder on April 4,1968. King's assassination set off disturbances in more than 100 cities throughout the United States. It was in the context of the deteriorating urban centers of the mid-1960s that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in the fall of 1966 by two black youths, Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale, in Oakland, California. Newton and Seale were named Chairman and Minister of Defense of the Party, respectively.
