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and his organization then took a leading role in the Freedom Rides challenging segregation on buses and other public accommodations and in the Freedom Summer program to register rural Mississippi blacks to vote. The group also planned and conducted demonstrations in southern cities to fight discrimination and to keep attention focused on southern racism. In Birmingham, the violence inflicted on civil rights activists by Sheriff Eugene ("Bull") Connor's policemen and dogs angered all who saw the events unfold on television. President John F. Kennedy was forced to take more active steps on behalf of civil rights, including supporting the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his I Have a Dream speech. And the Selma, Alabama, demonstrations SCLC set up helped induce Congress to approve the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although SCLC played a major role in organizing the civil rights demonstrations, it lost influence as the movement continued. Many blacks, especially younger ones, rejected the nonviolent tactics King and SCLC preached and resented what they perceived as King's willingness to compromise with whites. King added to the controversy by opposing the escalating war in Vietnam, angering President Lyndon B. Johnson. After King's assassination in 1968, the SCLC leadership was deeply divided over the organization's future. Nevertheless, led by King's family and friends  most recently, the Reverend Joseph Lowery  SCLC has continued fighting segregation and discrimination.
See also Civil Rights Movement; King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Southern Colonies
Colonization of the North American coast might have evolved differently if the English expedition sent to Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1580s had established a lasting foothold on the Outer Banks. When that colony was "lost," English attention turned to better harbors farther north, postponing colonization between Chesapeake Bay and Spanish Florida. Since nothing came of Charles I's grant of "Carolana" to Sir Robert Heath in 1629, Charles II bestowed the same region on some of his loyal supporters soon after the English Restoration of 1660.
On paper, the eight lords proprietors claimed the coast from the Outer Banks to the vicinity of St. Augustine, plus the whole interior as far as the Pacific. But in fact English settlement was confined to the coastal low country for another generation. From 1670 onward, a trickle of colonists, mostly from Barbados, staked out claims, establishing Charles Town at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers in 1680. South of this port, small groups of Dissenters from New England settled; to the northeast, Huguenot refugees from France took up residence near the Santee River.
Labor was scarce among these early immigrants, and they lacked an immediate staple crop. But hogs and cattle multiplied rapidly on the coastal savannahs, and their meat could be sent to West Indian planters in exchange for enslaved Africans. The colony's headright system allowed a planter to claim more land for each person imported, slave or free, and these workers could cut trees and make barrel staves until land was cleared for agriculture. Some of these first black arrivals understood the cultivation of rice, a grain well known in West Africa but unfamiliar to northern Europe. Ironically, this crop was quickly adopted by their white owners, who used the profits to buy more African workers. By 1708 there was a black majority in the colony, and plantation agriculture was beginning to expand.
All along the coast, expansion met Indian resistance. More than a century of contact with Spanish explorers and missionaries had spread European diseases among Native Americans. The devastation had already been enormous, obliterating small coastal tribes and continuing to reach farther inland. In the 1690s, smallpox decimated the Cherokees in southern Appalachia, cutting in half a nation of more than thirty thousand persons. After 1670 English slaving raids compounded Indian loss to disease. As their numbers declined, Piedmont inhabitants elected to fight, beginning with the Iroquoian tribe known as the Tuscaroras.
Along Carolina's northern border, Virginia
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