(7 of 14)
King's principles of Gandhian nonviolence had already begun losing their constituency among blacks by early 1968. Watts, Detroit, Newark and other cities had erupted in riots. As the atmosphere of violence and apocalypse deepened, King's moral style came to seem to many blacks to be irrelevantly noble, archaic, out of touch with the sharper realities. Nonviolence was perhaps a principle too spiritual and forbearing for the age. Blacks sometimes satirically referred to King as "de Lawd." The Nobel Peace Prize that he won in 1964 may have been an ultimate achievement in the international (white) world, but it subtly distanced him from American blacks.
In any case, a new generation of black leaders was feeling its power -- H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, for example, men with incendiary strategies. The Black Panthers had taken up the gun and within two days of King's death were shooting it out with police in Oakland. King was a genius of persuasion, of conscience and rhetoric. The preacher's moment seemed to have passed. King represented America's better self, but now it seemed that the deeper drive, the murderous urge, was taking over the soul. At the time of his death, King, short of money, beleaguered as always by the FBI, was trying to regain his traction as the pre-eminent American black leader.
His murder sent black America into paroxysms. James Baldwin said later that white Americans would never understand the depth of the grief that blacks felt at that moment. America was swept for a week by riots. Forty-six people died, all but five of them black. Washington, the city where King led his triumphant, nonviolent march in the summer of 1963, was overtaken by arson and looting. The rioting was almost as bad in Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City. In all, there was violence in 125 cities. The authorities called out 20,000 regular Army troops and 34,000 National Guardsmen. On April 15 Chicago's Mayor Daley ordered his police to shoot to kill arsonists and to shoot to maim looters.
Todd Gitlin, a onetime activist in the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, writes in his superb new history, The Sixties, that "rage was becoming the common coin of American culture." Two months before King's death, black students in Orangeburg, S.C., were demonstrating outside a bowling alley that would not permit them to enter. After several days the confrontation turned violent. Police fired on a group of students. Thirty-four were wounded, and three died.
King has his place in the American pantheon now, and a national holiday in his honor. One of his lieutenants, Jesse Jackson, who was at the Lorraine Motel that evening in Memphis, is now in the front rank of Democratic presidential candidates, a development inconceivable at the time of King's death.