The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

While many civil rights leaders pleaded for peace in the streets, insisting that any form of violent rebellion would dishonor King’s memory and legacy, others refused to condemn the violence. Floyd McKissick, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), told The New York Times on the night of King’s murder that his death meant the end of nonviolence as a political strategy. “Nonviolence is a dead philosophy, and it was not the black people that killed it. It was the white people that killed nonviolence and white racists at that.”82 That sentiment was echoed by other Black activists and leaders, such as Julius Hobson, who headed a civil rights group called ACT: “The next black man who comes into the Black community preaching nonviolence should be violently dealt with by the Black people who hear him. The Martin Luther King concept of nonviolence died with him. It was a foreign ideology anyway—as foreign to this violent country as speaking Russian.”83