Thousands of supporters attended King’s funeral in Atlanta. President Johnson, who had recently ordered the FBI to investigate King for ties with Communist organizations, did not attend. King’s assassination inflamed racial tensions and led to scores of riots throughout the country. When the violence finally subsided, more than 30,000 people had been arrested.

The End of the Movement

King’s death in 1968 stripped the civil rights movement of its greatest leader and visionary. Ideological rifts and feuds among the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE also led to the collapse of the movement, as did Black Panther violence and revolutionary rhetoric. As a result, the movement quickly lost momentum in 1968 and 1969 as Americans shifted their focus to the worsening Vietnam War.

Despite the movement’s unfortunate decline, these formative years of the 1950s and 1960s gave African Americans two important things: effective government backing and legislation. Landmark Supreme Court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education, along with legislative landmarks, such as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally provided the solid legal framework for protecting blacks’ rights in the face of decades of discrimination.

Popular pages: The Civil Rights Era (1865–1970)