Image Provided This slide illustrates a presentation on the civil rights movement offered by Kristina Estle, director of the Underground Railroad Museum in Flushing.

FLUSHING – Kristina Estle, director of the Underground Railroad Museum, wants area residents to remember and understand the cause that Martin Luther King Jr. fought to advance.

As the nation honors the fallen leader by observing Martin Luther King Jr. today, Estle is reminding people that he wasn’t just an inspiring leader; instead, he dedicated his adult life to helping to secure equal rights and freedoms for all people.

The civil rights movement that was the central focus for King was born out of the aftermath of slavery in the United States. For well over a century, Black people were captured and removed from their homes in Africa, transported to the Americas and enslaved – often to work as laborers on plantations where crops such as cotton and sugar cane were raised. People of European descent also enslaved Native Americans during the early days of American settlement.

During the Civil War of the 1860s, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved people in the nation to be free. But that didn’t mean that Black people had the same rights as others. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery. It was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which aimed to integrate Black people into American Society by defining citizenship, the rights of citizens and making it illegal to deprive any person of those rights “on the basis of race, color, or prior condition of slavery or servitude.

The 14th Amendment reiterated many provisions of that law, and the 15th Amendment established that it was unlawful to deny anyone the right to vote based on race. Additional civil rights acts were passed in 1870, 1871 and 1875, but progress toward true equality remained slow. Some states simply ignored the Civil Rights Act, and the federal government did very little to enforce the law.

At the same time, organized resistance to advancing the cause of equality arose with formation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee.

“(F)ormer Confederate veterans … began to wage underground campaigns of intimidation and violence against newly freed African Americans and any whites who would help them attain political and economic equality, especially through the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies,” Estle wrote in a presentation on the topic of civil rights.

Segregation and Jim Crow laws became common from the post-Civil War era until the 1960s. Their purpose was to marginalize African Americans by forcing Black individuals to ride in separate train cars, attend separate schools and use separate facilities such as restrooms and drinking fountains.

In 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson established the constitutionality of racial segregation under the concept of “separate but equal” provisions for Black people.

Efforts to prevent Blacks from voting in the South included poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather clauses, fraud and intimidation

“Focused on retaining white supremacy in the electoral process, legislators used loopholes in the 15th Amendment to implement a range of measures to disenfranchise Black voters without explicitly characterizing them on the basis of race,” Estle wrote. “In 1890, 76% of the Southern Black population was illiterate. By 1900, still only 50% were illiterate. Those working the polls would do anything they could to remove the Black voter and their vote.”

It wasn’t until 1954 that some progress was made toward equality for Black children. In the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the NAACP successfully sued on behalf of a Black third-grader and won a decision that ordered desegregation of schools.

Despite small steps to increase their equality, violence against Black Americans was common from the days following the Civil War through the 1960s.

“From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S.,” Estle noted. “Many historians believe the true number is underreported. The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493.”

Even in Ohio, where soldiers fought for the Union Army and many residents assisted escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad, 28 lynchings occurred.

As change began to take hold in the 1950s, high-profile incidents and protests began to unfold. Individuals such as Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, who was known as the mother of the civil rights movement, were arrested for not giving up their seats on buses so white people could take them. That paved the way for the Montgomery Bus Boycott – a 13-month protest against racial segregation on public transit in Montgomery, Alabama and a key event in the American civil rights movement. African Americans refused to ride the city buses and local Black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association.

Martin Luther King Jr. elected president of the MIA and became a prominent civil rights leader. The MIA filed a federal lawsuit against bus segregation, and the Supreme Court upheld a district court’s decision that segregated seating on buses was unconstitutional.

As the 1960s arrived, The Freedom Riders organized civil rights activists who rode interstate buses in the segregated South to protest the non-enforcement of Supreme Court rulings that made segregated public buses unconstitutional.

“The Freedom Riders faced violence from white segregationists, including firebombings, beatings, and attacks with baseball bats, iron pipes, and bicycle chains,” Estle pointed out. “The attacks received widespread media attention, which shocked the American public and led to the federal government issuing regulations banning segregation in interstate travel.

Additional protest movements of the ’60s included sit-ins and the Black Power Movement, which promoted racial pride, economic empowerment and the creation of cultural and political institutions. During this time there was an increased demand for Black History courses, a greater embrace of African culture and artistic expressions that emphasized the realities of African Americans. The term Black Power stems from the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Stokey Carmicheal who chanted ‘We want Black Power’ during rallies.

Retaliation against Black people continued. In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed while 400 worshippers were gathered there, injuring 20 people and killing four teenage girls. In 1965, 600 people gathered to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in protest of the violence and discrimination. At the opposite end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, sheriff’s deputies, Alabama state troopers and a group of horse riding vigilanties awaited the marchers and attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.

King played pivotal roles in many of these events and efforts, prior to being gunned down by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis. Nearly 20 years later, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a law making Martin Luther King Jr. day a federal holiday.

To learn more about Black history in American, visit the Underground Railroad Museum at 121 High St. in Flushing. Regular hours are noon to 3 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Visits can be scheduled by appointment by calling 740-963-3036 or emailing director@ugrrm.org.