Final Years
Five days after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law,
the black neighborhood of Watts in south central Los Angeles, California, erupted
in riots. Police brutality and poor living conditions provoked
the uprising, which ultimately took 34 lives, destroyed 209 buildings,
and led to over 4000 arrests. King visited the city on 17 August,
condemning the violence, but emphasizing the validity of its causes.
After Selma, and encouraged by Watts, King turned his attention
to Northern and Western cities, which suffered a kind of racial
tension that his victories in the South had not relieved.
Late in 1965, he and the SCLC chose Chicago as the site
for a Northern urban campaign. In February 1966, King rented an apartment
in Chicago slums for his family and himself, and began organizing
protests against poverty and discrimination in housing and employment.
Increasingly his focus was economic: for the Johnson Administration
would go no further with federal legislation, and only by securing
decent jobs and homes could African Americans escape the kind of
conditions that had proven so explosive in Watts.
King planned a massive rally in Chicago for 10 July, 1966,
a day he named "Freedom Sunday." Developments in the South, however,
took him away from Chicago shortly before the event: in June, a
man named James Meredith, who had been the first black student at
the University of Mississippi, was shot by whites and seriously wounded
while working on a voter-registration drive. The major civil rights
organizations–CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC– descended on Mississippi
and coordinated a march, called the Meredith March, from the site
of the shooting to Jackson, Mississippi.
In Mississippi, however, King sensed divisions within
the movement that he had sensed before–indeed, they now seemed
to be deepening: members of SNCC considered King's strategies to
be decreasingly effective as racial violence increased. This attitude
was embodied by Stokely Carmichael, the newly elected head of SNCC, who,
during the Meredith March, suggested "Black Power" as a rallying
cry for the movement. King and the SCLC refused to endorse the
slogan, fearing it would alienate white sympathy. For the time
being, King and Carmichael smoothed over their differences, but,
in the fall, Carmichael, along with Bobby Seale, founded the Black
Panther Party, an overtly militant organization. Schisms widened
over a disagreement regarding who would speak at the march's concluding
rally.
King returned to Chicago in time for Freedom Sunday, at
which he addressed a crowd of 45,000 and nailed a list of grievances
to the door of City Hall. King urged the city, specifically Chicago's
Mayor Daley, to spend more money on public schools, to integrate
them, to build low-rent housing, and to support African-American-run banks.
Shortly after Freedom Sunday, black youths rioted on Chicago's
West Side, leading to the deployment of the National Guard, and
suggesting just how limited was King's influence over events in that
city; in general, his Chicago campaign was characterized by meager
returns on great investments. Chicago's Operation Breadbasket,
led by Jesse Jackson and supported by King, met with only limited
success in creating new job opportunities for Chicago blacks.
This metropolis of the North resisted tactics that had succeeded
in the cities of the South.
In addition to urban economic questions, King turned his
attention to the Vietnam War. He had spoken out against the war
as early as 1965, but, as it escalated, as it taken an increasingly
disproportionate number of young black lives, and as it appeared
more and more a war of capitalists against peasants, King became
bitterly vocal. On 4 April 1967 at New York's Riverside Church,
King delivered his first sermon devoted entirely to the issue of
Vietnam. On 15 April he participated in the Spring Mobilization
for Peace in New York, an anti-war protest unrelated to the Civil
Rights Movement.
King believed the war exported the same spirit of racism
and economic exploitation under which African Americans suffered
at home. His attack on the Johnson Administration's policies was unequivocal,
and angered Johnson, who felt that he had been loyal to King.
King's anti-war stance also met with criticism from fellow civil
rights leaders, who questioned the wisdom of diverting much-needed
attention away from the immediate concerns of African Americans.
The Vietnam War, as well as the conditions in the cities,
led King to adopt a belief in a kind of Christian socialism, and
to concern himself with campaigns aimed at a redistribution of
American wealth. Late in 1967, King announce his plan to organize
a Poor People's March on Washington for 22 April 1968. He envisioned
a massive rally of the poor of all races, intended to shut down
the capital and not desist until adequate reforms were made. Although
a version of the event would in fact take place, King would not
live to see it.
