Both the march from Selma to Montgomery and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 proved to be victories for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Activists within the movement felt it advantageous to relocate their focus to the North, specifically Chicago. However, the objective shifted from battling more blatant political discriminations, like segregation, to more social and economic inequalities, like housing discrimination and equal employment. Now that the Civil Rights Movement was making progress, Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that the Chicago Freedom Movement would do the same. Media framing is one key in determining the success or failure of a social movement. King, aware of this attempted to use media frames to help the Civil Rights Movement succeed. This is shown in a summary by Steven Kasher, where he writes, "King had in mind the already famous photographs of the Birmingham struggles-images of protesters attacked by police dogs and battered by high pressure water cannons. His (King's) metaphor is apt: the media as a spotlight that exposes and thereby halts secret actions"(www.aberville.com). It is clear that King was aware of media frames, and used them as a strategy to reach the government and the public. For the first part of the Chicago Freedom Movement, King's strategy seemed to work. Both alternative and mainstream media frames depicted images and stories of violence. This period of the movement also included articles containing polarization, disparagement by numbers and focusing on King as the celebrity-both in a negative and positive light. However, the ultimate decision of how The Chicago Freedom Movement would be framed belonged to the media. During the course of the movement things began to change, thus resulting in a shift of frames. As Gitlin writes, "The media needed stories, preferring the dramatic the movement needed publicity for recruitment, for support and for political effect.
