King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

I contend that the cry of “Black power” is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro has worsened over the last few years.

Even if he avoided the words “Black power,” King spoke more affirmatively and more often on the same subjects that Malcolm X had emphasized during his life, and Carmichael invoked now.

he also knew, as the theologian James H. Cone wrote, that much of his power derived from the Black church, which had been an independent Black institution since the eighteenth century.

When King left, someone removed his list of demands and replaced it with a sign that read: “Support your local police.”

After the session, Daley told reporters he was frustrated. Every city had slums. Every city had unemployment. Chicago was trying to solve its problems, he said, but it would take time. “We asked them, ‘What would you do that we haven’t done?’” Daley said. “They had no answers. I asked for their help and suggestions, and they frankly said the answers were difficult.”

They learned that six youths had been arrested in a scuffle after police had shut off a fire hydrant people had been using for relief from the summer heat. Prior to the incident, Black people in the neighborhood had already been upset that white Chicagoans had access to more swimming pools than Black Chicagoans.

He had been teargassed and threatened with death in Mississippi just a few weeks earlier; he had been manhandled by police in Alabama; and he had been stabbed years ago in Harlem; but nothing, he said, prepared him for Chicago’s violent racism. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said. “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”

But if King didn’t change Chicago, or Los Angeles for that matter, Chicago and Los Angeles changed King. He began to strike more anti-capitalist themes, saying that America, despite its great wealth, still struggled with poverty and still muddled through endless wars. He sounded more like Malcolm X, in some ways, calling America a morally sick society.

Conservative politicians, including Ronald Reagan, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, sought to politicize the white backlash, the Times reported, making “riots-in-the-streets” a fear-inducing catchphrase in their campaigns. Conservative politicians accused protesters like King of disrespecting law and order, contributing to waves of crime.

Most Americans had not been asked to sacrifice for equality. They had not been asked to make reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. They had not addressed or attempted to cure the nation’s vast inequalities of wealth and opportunity. The new federal laws had cost most Americans nothing. That would have to change,

King pressed on, preparing for his speech at Riverside Church. King often relied on friends and colleagues to compose first drafts of his speeches. For this one, he turned to Vincent Harding, a history professor working at Spelman College.

Harding had heard King ask the question many times: “Children of God, where do you stand? Where do you stand in relation to your own country? Where do you stand in relation to sufferings and oppressions of the world? And where do you stand in relationship to our country’s contribution to those sufferings?”

King also said his view of white Americans had changed. After his experience in Chicago, after seeing how white people in the North resisted appeals to integrate their schools and neighborhoods, he had concluded that only a small part of white America supported racial justice. “Most Americans,” he said, “are unconscious racists.”

A congressional investigation reported that there had been seventy-six riots in the first nine months of the year. Between 1965 and 1967, the report said, 118 civilians and 12 law enforcement officers had been killed in the unrest, while almost 29,000 people, the vast majority of them Black men, had been arrested.

every day I live under the threat of death, and I had to come to the conclusion that something could happen, but I couldn’t allow this possibility to immobilize me. And I think ultimately freedom does mean fearlessness.”

On March 4, the FBI sent the “messiah” directive to all its field offices, naming King as a “primary target” and ordering all agents to move into action within thirty days. In northern cities, bureau operators recruited “ghetto informants” to penetrate the SCLC and disrupt plans for the Poor People’s Campaign.

The prime suspect in King’s assassination, James Earl Ray, was arrested in London three days later as he attempted to board a flight to Brussels, Belgium. Though Ray confessed to the crime, Coretta Scott King and other friends and family members never accepted the government’s conclusion that the killer had acted alone.

in hallowing King we have hollowed him.