No one represented the prophetic tradition, in the American context, better than Martin Luther King Jr. Fusing ideas of salvation with concepts like liberty and equality, King called on America to repent from the sins of segregation and Jim Crow, and, as he famously told a crowd in Washington, D.C.: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice . . . Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”2
His efforts, combined with sacrifices and grassroots political activity from thousands of others, helped push forth the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing legal discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, tearing down most conventional barriers to the franchise for black Americans. The country inched its way toward King’s dream of an egalitarian nation and King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and a place among Gallup’s most admired Americans.3
But by 1967, King’s optimism for America’s future began to temper. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act represented major blows to legal racism, but the impact was limited largely to the American South. Since World War I, millions of blacks had migrated out of the South to America’s urban areas in the North and on the West Coast. Jim Crow and poll taxes did not limit their opportunities. Simple but profound prejudice, manifested in limited social mobility, economic and housing discrimination, concentrated poverty, and police brutality, posed the biggest obstacles to blacks outside Dixie. King did not rest on his laurels as of 1965; he simply shifted his priorities to issues of social and economic justice that had always animated part of his mission. And he began to shift his geographic attention as well, to northern cities. In 1966 he uprooted his family from their middle-class Atlanta existence to live, for six months, in a Chicago ghetto, to highlight patterns of housing discrimination and poverty.4
But northern racial prejudice proved to be a daunting challenge for King, and the people he championed became increasingly frustrated, throughout the country, with the lack of justice and opportunity in their everyday lives. The beginnings of capital flight and deindustrialization only exasperated people of color even more. Higher-paying jobs in unskilled factory labor, often the best and only chance for a middle-class lifestyle for blacks denied widespread access to higher education, slowly began to disappear. As the black community’s hope for King’s vision began to waver, so too did its faith in his approach of nonviolent resistance.
King viewed nonviolent resistance as a philosophical idea informed by Jesus Christ as much as Mahatma Gandhi. “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it,” King argued in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.5 But to others, nonviolence was simply a means to an end: at best a strategy, and otherwise simply a tactic to be used for black liberation. So long as it helped publicize the civil rights conflict to indifferent audiences in Montana and North Dakota, and even to the unaligned world in the midst of a cold war, many activists could turn the other cheek. But as many contemporary historians pointed out, even at the peak of King’s influence not everyone embraced nonviolence. In 1963, Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam, comparing his religion’s ideas of violence to King’s, said, “Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”6
Malcolm X referred specifically to acts of violent unrest earlier that year as signs of growing frustration within the black community. The murder of Medgar Evers in June 1963 and the bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in September of the same year, ignited riots in Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, respectively. That said, each of these uprisings occurred in response to acts of outrageous violence. The May 1963 riots followed a failed attempt to kill King and his brother, A.D.
Another act of racial violence triggered a major urban riot in Harlem in July 1964, after a controversial police shooting resulted in the death of fifteen-year-old James Powell. “Bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails rained down from tenement rooftops and smashed in the littered streets,” the International Herald Tribune reported.7 It went on to note 116 civilian injuries (revised by historians to 118) and at least forty-five stores “broken into . . . looted or damaged.” The Harlem riot triggered a wave of similar uprisings in American cities over the next few weeks: first in Brooklyn, New York, then Rochester, New York, then several cities in New Jersey, and finally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That these events occurred after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in northern cities, foreshadowed the dynamic that would plague the country in the years that followed: incidents of police or even suspected police abuse sparking powder kegs of socioeconomic frustrations, first in one city, then in adjacent cities. Rev. King, commenting on the Harlem riots, spoke of the need to eliminate “conditions of injustice that still pervade our nation and all of the other things which can only deepen the racial crisis.”8
Yet another wave of riots struck in 1965, the most notable coming after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Another incident of police misconduct unleashed literal and figurative fires in one of the worst urban riots in American history. Over six days of violence, thirty-four people died, more than one thousand people were injured, and over six hundred buildings were damaged. “People said that we burned down our community,” Tommy Jacquette, then a twenty-one-year-old resident of South Central Los Angeles, recalled. “No, we didn’t. We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us.”9 King faced a difficult audience in young men like Jacquette when the reverend visited Watts, hoping to negotiate a “peace” between the residents and local leaders. At one point he addressed a crowd:
However much we don’t like to hear it, and I must tell the truth. I’m known to tell the truth. While we have legitimate gripes, while we have legitimate discontent, we must not hate all white people, because I know white people now . . . Don’t forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a white woman who died on that highway 80, Viola Liuzzo. We want to know what we can do to create right here in Los Angeles a better city, and a beloved community. So speak out of your hearts and speak frankly.10
The response Dr. King received symbolized what would become a growing schism within the civil rights movement. An unidentified attendee from the crowd insisted:
The only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot. We got sense enough to know that this is not the final answer, but it’s a beginning. We know it has to stop, we know it’s going to stop. We don’t want any more of our people killed, but how many have been killed for nothing? At least those who died died doing something. No, I’m not for a riot. But who wants to lay down while somebody kicks em to death? As long as we lay down we know we’re gonna get kicked. It’s a beginning; it may be the wrong beginning but at least we got em listening. And they know that if they start killing us off, it’s not gonna be a riot it’s gonna be a war.11
Dr. King did not see this warning as hyperbole. Having received a less-than-warm response in his Watts visit, and having failed to negotiate a truce between local black leaders and the white political establishment in Los Angeles, King briefed his political ally President Lyndon B. Johnson about the situation on the ground. In a private conversation, the Reverend King worried, “Now what is frightening is to hear all of these tones of violence from people in the Watts area and the minute that happens, there will be retaliation from the white community.” He added, ominously, “People have bought up guns so that I am fearful that if something isn’t done to give a new sense of hope to people in that area, that a full-scale race war can develop.”12
King said this in 1965, a year that saw only eleven urban riots. The Watts eruption accounted for the vast majority of the injuries, deaths, and arrests that year. In 1966, the number of riots shot up to fifty-three. None came close to matching the intensity of Watts, but Americans spent five times as many days rebelling against oppressive conditions.13 By 1966,