This was a time for scorn, a time for distrust, a time when faith seemed old-fashioned, or even naïve. The shifting attitudes had enormous consequences for the civil rights movement, warned one of the SCLC’s biggest supporters, Leslie Dunbar, director of the nonprofit Field Foundation. Ongoing cynicism might lead many white people in the North to conclude that the problems of the American Negro were best handled by the police. “That way,” Dunbar said, “whites would be able to sleep peacefully in the suburbs and let Negroes riot among themselves.”
