King’s loss left much of his work unfinished
A ‘different vision’ was never realized
The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. on a motel balcony in Memphis silenced the civil rights movement’s most persuasive, gifted and foresighted leader and lit tinderboxes across the country.
Riots exploded in 125 cities, and nationally, 43 people died, 3,500 were injured and 27,000 arrested in the 10 days after his assassination on April 4, 1968, says Peter B. Levy’s new book about race riots in the 1960s, The Great Uprising.
“His earlier life is remembered. The last three years of his life and what he was working on are forgotten,” said Clayborne Carson, 73, a Stanford University history professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which edits and publishes King’s papers.
By 1968, King had run up against backlash both from the civil rights movement and the larger society. As younger leaders like Stokely Carmichael adopted a more militant tone, King pushed back against the Black Power movement’s goals of self-sufficiency and self-segregation, saying true racial equality would not be achieved without a non-violent philosophy and alliances with sympathetic whites.
After the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King looked to build on his successes by focusing on what he considered society’s three main evils: war, poverty and racial injustice. In addition to denouncing the Vietnam War, he broadened his civil rights agenda to include people of all races who had been left behind economically, a move that drew controversy and perhaps even ire.
“King was asking for a major redistribution of wealth,” Carson said. “Most people looked upon that voting (rights) was sufficient. Much of white America looked at the civil rights gains and said, ‘We’re not going to give you any more.’
“But King had a different vision, a vision of where we should have been going for the last 50 years. That’s the unfinished business of the 1960s.”
King understood the dangers and farreaching consequences of racial segregation, said Beverly Daniel Tatum, 63, president emerita of Spelman College in Atlanta.
“Racism in the U.S. is a problem that can’t be solved without the active participation of white people,” said Tatum, a clinical psychologist and author of 1997’s best-selling Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race.
In it, Tatum lists the ground lost since the ’60s in terms of increased mass incarceration of African-Americans, the staggering loss of wealth among African-Americans caused by the mortgage crisis of 2008, the resegregation of schools, and the misinformation that shapes racial attitudes of whites who have no significant personal contact with people who are different.
“Racially in this country, for every two steps forward it’s one step back,” she said.
King also understood the need to work through legislatures and the courts to enforce civil rights. Resources needed to be used to litigate, not just march in the streets, said Nathaniel Jones, 91, a retired federal appeals court judge in Cincinnati who in 1967 and 1968 was assistant general counsel to President Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, otherwise known as the Kerner Commission.
After King’s death, Jones said, “his opponents worked like beavers on the local level, on city councils, school boards, in state legislatures. Most pro-
nounced were their efforts against the implementation of federal orders to end school segregation.”
“If Dr. King had lived, he would have been able to define his philosophy with precision, and he would have presented a path toward solutions,” Jones said.
King provided a blueprint in 1967 in the pages of his last book, Where Do We
Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In it, he called for legal protections for those living in public housing and on public assistance. He wrote that “arbitrary lines of government should not balkanize America into white and black schools and communities.” He promoted government subsidy for businesses to employ people of limited education and expansion of workplace training.
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. … We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.”