Test Chronology: 02 The Long Civil Rights Movement

Willie B. Phillips' Self-Immolation

27-year-old Vietnam War veteran and organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Georgia, Willie B. Phillips self-immolated in Atlanta on October 7th, 1972. The Black Panther (October 14, 1972, p.3) reported that "after suffering the long train of abuses that all Black people suffer," Phillips "felt he could no longer endure the hardships of struggling to live. He chose to die." Civil rights leader Hosea Williams described Phillips as a martyr and organized a Mule Train funeral in his honour. 

Phillips' death by self-immolation challenges notions that the civil rights movement had moved beyond direct action protest when the 60s came to a close and therefore distorts "the master narrative" of the movement depicting its end in 1968.

Boston Busing Crisis

From Wikipedia: The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to a decline of public-school enrollment and white flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.

1985 MOVE Bombing

Philadelphia PD bombing of MOVE, 1985