Killing King. Larry Hancock

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      Louisville, Ky., April 20—Police fired tear gas into a crowd of more than 1,000 whites taunting open housing demonstrators; the mob threw bricks and bottles.21

      On May 8, in a public and honest moment, Dr. King told the journalist Sander Vanocur:

      I must confess that that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months.

      I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments. And I’ve come to see that we have many more difficulties ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism. And I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go . . .

      But King would not abandon the cause of nonviolence. He ended by telling Vanocur:

      I feel that nonviolence is really the only way that we can follow, cause violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the Negro community than it solves. You can through violence burn down a building, but you can’t establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. And what we’re trying to get rid of is hate and injustice and all of these other things that continue the long night of man’s inhumanity to man.22

      King’s deepest convictions could not contain the unrest and discord.

      Jackson, Miss., May 12–14—About 1,000 Negroes at Jackson State College protested the arrest of a Negro student; the National Guard quelled the disturbance in which one Negro was killed; Willie Ricks of SNCC told the crowd: “An eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, a head for a head, and a life for a life.”

      Houston, Texas, May 16–17—Hundreds of students at predominantly Negro Texas Southern University rioted after clashing with police while protesting the arrests of student demonstrators; 487 were arrested; one policeman was killed and two others were shot . . .

      Boston, Mass., June 2–4—More than 1,000 persons in a predominantly Negro neighborhood rioted after a group of mothers staged a sit-in to urge reforms in welfare and contended they were beaten by police; at least 60 were injured, 90 were arrested and property damage was estimated at $1 million . . .

      Tampa, Fla., June 11–13—Negroes rioted in a 60-block area after a white policeman shot and killed a Negro burglary suspect who refused to halt; 16 persons were injured and more than 100 arrested; property damage was estimated at $95,000.

      Cincinnati, Ohio, June 12–18—Negroes rioted in three predominantly Negro sections, hurling Molotov cocktails, smashing store windows and looting; one person was killed, 63 were injured and 276 were arrested; property damage was estimated at $2 million; on June 15, the third night of rioting, [SNCC leader] H. Rap Brown arrived and said that the city “will be in flames until the honkie cops (National Guardsmen) get out.” In another speech that day he said that “SNCC has declared war.”

      Dayton, Ohio, June 14–15—Negro youths threw rocks and smashed store windows; four persons reported injured and 23 arrested; on the night of June 14, Brown urged a crowd to “take the pressure off Cincinnati.” The same day, he had told a crowd in Dayton: “How can you be nonviolent in America, the most violent country in the world. You better shoot the man to death; that’s what he’s doing to you.”

      Atlanta, Ga., June 18–21—Rioting in the predominantly Negro Dixie Hills section followed a speech by Stokely Carmichael at a rally held to protest the shooting of a Negro by a Negro policeman; Carmichael and SNCC aides were active throughout the riot; Carmichael said: “The only way these hunkies and hunky-lovers can understand is when they’re met by resistance” and he told a rally: “We need to be beating heads.” One person was killed, three were injured and at least five were arrested.23

      As violent as some of these incidents were, they would be eclipsed by two of the worst urban riots in American history in the middle of July. In Newark, false rumors that a black cab driver had died in police custody sparked four days of rioting from July 12 to July 17, requiring massive intervention by local and state police as well by the National Guard. The urban combat that commenced resulted in 23 dead and 750 injured. Follow-up studies indicated that law enforcement, including the National Guard, had expended 13,319 rounds of ammunition in pursuit of snipers who may not have existed.24 A week later, Detroit, Michigan, experienced the single worst urban riot in the history of the nation: after five days of rioting, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, and over 7,000 were arrested. Sandra West, a UPI reporter who lived her whole life in Detroit, described the chaos:

      Sunday I saw sights I never dreamed possible . . . Raging fires burned out of control for blocks and blocks. Thick black smoke and cinders rained down at times so heavily they blocked out homes as close as 20 feet away.

      Looters drove pickup trucks loaded with everything from floor mops to new furniture. Price tags still dangled from the merchandise.25

      Riots also struck Birmingham, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among other major cities. In sum, during the “long hot summer” of 1967, the United States experienced 158 different riots, resulting in 83 deaths, 2,801 injuries, and 4,627 incidents of arson.26

      With national press reports that “guns—hand guns, rifles, shotguns—are selling as though they were about to close down the gun factories,”27 King continued to insist on nonviolence. But in August of 1967, he told a crowd of frustrated young civil rights activists that blacks “still live in the basement of the Great Society” and observed, some months later, that a “riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”28

      The urban violence and King’s dissatisfaction with the “plight” of not just the “Negro poor” but America’s lowest economic strata as a whole would, by December of 1967, become the basis for the Poor People’s Campaign, a planned mass march from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., to call for a massive expansion in social spending. It became King’s last mission, but one that, in continuing to cling to nonviolence as a principle, would struggle for grassroots support. It was King’s murder on the eve of the march, unfortunately, that galvanized support for the effort in ways that King could not by moral suasion and charisma.

      Civil unrest came from more than just disaffected, poor urban youth. Increasingly, Americans became more and more disturbed by America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. Most of the protests in 1967 dealt with the quagmire in Southeast Asia. King saw the war as perhaps the chief contributing factor in the social upheaval plaguing the nation. It not only diverted resources away from President Lyndon Johnson’s social uplift programs under the Great Society, it “poisoned the soul” of America with violence, in King’s mind. He did not find it surprising that domestic America could be so violent when, as the minister famously announced in his landmark antiwar speech in April 1967, the American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the world.

      But his outspokenness against both the Vietnam War and the lackluster government commitment to social spending alienated King from Lyndon Johnson. This had implications not only for King’s political influence but also for his life. Johnson, at times, insisted that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover provide additional protection for King, something Hoover chose not to do, on his own initiative, after 1965. As was detailed СКАЧАТЬ