A hot summer day... The glittering mirror images of hopeful faces in the Reflecting Pool... The massive crowd... The heavenly voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. that conveyed hope, anger,  and power all at the same time.

And the tears that blended in with the sweat from said hot summer day.

And, uh, our tears, too.

Yeah, if you can listen to this speech with a dry eye, do you even have a soul? 

The impressive March on Washington in the summer of 1963 has been remembered as one of the great successes of the Civil Rights Movement, a glorious high point in which a quarter of a million people—Black and white—gathered at the nation's capital to demonstrate for "freedom now."

MLK may be the most influential African American in terms of fighting segregation, and putting himself on the line for it. That's right, MLK was thrown in the slammer. And rather than fight it, he even wrote another famous civil rights piece, "Letter from Birmingham Jail." 

NBD.

But for many African Americans, especially those living in inner-city ghettos, they discovered that nonviolent boycotts, sit-ins, and provoking mass arrests for publicity did little to alter their daily lives. The great march of 1963 marked only the first stage of a new, more radical phase of the Civil Rights Movement.

Others felt that being on the offense may be the best way to defend their rights.

Just because you were advocating for a peaceful protest didn't mean the police would agree to the terms. Skulls were cracked, fire hoses were aimed, and protestors were murdered. In return, a new wave of civil rights activists didn't necessarily advocate violence, but they certainly weren't going to sit back and watch their brothers and sisters be killed. 

Along with their amped-up self-defense, "Black Power" leaders wanted change other than integration. Malcolm X,  Stokely Carmichael, and other "Black Power" era big names didn't believe that whites and Blacks could, or should, coexist. Maybe Blacks should work toward separation instead of segregation, with the goal of organizing their own institutions.

At the end of the day, all of these leaders had the same general message: "Can you just not be a racist, already?"

But, where there's a will, there's a way. And, uh, there was more than one way to skin this cat. 

Or, let's just use a good Malcolm X quote instead. 

"We've got to fight until we overcome."

Oh, the Civil Rights Movement was a beautiful thing. 

Isn't it incredible how much had been accomplished by civil rights activists from World War II to the 1963 March on Washington? Isn't it staggering just how much had been sacrificed, how high the stakes had been raised, and how widespread the movement had become?

Let's review some highlights. By the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had achieved several major goals.

• Under the direction of captivating leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Ella Baker, nonviolent protest demonstrations had forced many Southern officials, white proprietors, and citizens to accept integration.
• Legal battles in favor of desegregation in schools and in public transportation had been won. And national media coverage of violence—even murder—directed toward Blacks had outraged the American public.
• A nation that had long turned a blind eye toward the racial injustices crippling the Black community in the South grew to support the self-sacrificing civil rights agitators.
• The nonviolent protest movement and the support it galvanized helped usher in a wave of revolutionary federal reforms, including two major acts. The Civil Rights Act, signed July 2nd, 1964, outlawed segregation and required equal employment opportunity for people of all races, and the Voting Rights Act, signed on August 6th, 1965, prohibited all forms of discrimination at the polls.

But do you know what happened just five days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law? The Watts Riots, a six-day uprising in the largely Black Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Yep, a major riot in a California city that left at least 34 people dead, 1,000 people injured, and more than 4,000 citizens arrested.

Wait, what? Weren't things going peachy? Didn't the March on Washington mean everything was hunky dory? Wasn't the nation—white and Black—coming together, holding hands, and singing kumbaya? Hadn't Johnson's reforms proved that, after over two decades of persistent organized protest, equality had been won?

Well, not exactly. Actually, not at all.

At first glance, the Watts Riots appear to have been one big, violent contradiction, perhaps one of the greatest ironies in American history. At the very height of the Civil Rights Movement, when so much had begun to give way, Black communities rebelled, violently and en masse, against white authority. In 1965, many Americans, particularly whites, were shocked and dismayed by what appeared to be random acts of civil disobedience, destruction, and looting by Blacks in poor neighborhoods.

But the Watts Riots were surprising, not because they happened, but because they hadn't happened much, much sooner. The violence in Watts revealed frustrations brewing in Black communities, especially in inner-city communities in the North and the West where housing and employment discrimination, white flight, and racial bigotry kept people living in poverty.

So, no, equality hadn't been won. In fact, for many African Americans, equality—especially economic equality—seemed increasingly unattainable.

From this perspective, the second phase of the Civil Rights Movement, a period marked by militancy, calls for "Black power," and, at times, chaos and confusion, can be better understood. It's not always a clear-cut story, and certainly not a tale with good guys and bad guys—at least not in the way the first chapter of the Civil Rights Movement seems to be. But that's why we think this is such an important topic to dig into. (So dig, already.)