Summary
Shortly after the meeting, Dr. King was queried about the matter during an appearance on "Meet ihe Press," and he said he was at the meeting in Raleigh but had not heard [James Lawson] make such comments. King said the only criticism he heard regarding a snail-like pace was of the Supreme Court. "This isn't a criticism of the NAACP," King told a reporter. "It's a criticism of the agencies and the courts that will use the law to delay and get it bogged down in complex litigation processes."
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, was not satisfied with this response and fired off a letter to King. After Wilkins cited ways in which the NAACP was aggrieved by Lawson's remarks, perceiving them as being shared by the leadership of SCLC, he said, "I am hopeful that you can help clarify the situation. I know you will want to."[Louis Lomax] was already on record for blasting the NAACP in an article for Harper's magazine. In a letter to the editor of Coronet, King respectfully declined to work with Lomax. "While I privately agreed with many things that Mr. Lomax said in the article," King wrote, "I feel a moral obligation to preserve a public image of unity in our organizational work." He believed that to work with Lomax would be construed as endorsing his views.While the NAACP placed much of its action on the fight in the nation's courts, the nascent movement, particularly SCLC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality were more confrontational in the streets with boycotts, sit-ins and freedom rides, all vitally connected with the drive to register voters in the South.See the full content of this document
Extract
Dr. King and the Naacp
One of the first things that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did after being installed as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in the fall of 1954 was to insist that members of bis congregation become registered voters an...
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