In one of his last essays, entitled “The Negro Minority and Its Fate in a Self-Righteous Nation,” Niebuhr, reflecting on the 1967 summer riots and the Kerner report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, begins to sound surprisingly like Malcolm X: “For our Negro minority the American ‘Dream’ of justice has become a ‘Nightmare.’ ” He challenged the white church to be the conscience of the nation, reminding it of its responsibilities—“its sins of omission and commission.”[55]
