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the target

More than just basic racism and money motivated the people trying to kill Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime.1 Prophecy also played an important role—prophecy in both senses of the term. Laymen hear the word prophecy and imagine a religious visionary channeling a higher power to predict the future. King’s antagonists, a network of racial terrorists, were convinced they could accelerate God’s final days of judgment on Earth as predicted in the Book of Revelation. Inciting a holy race war became their chief objective, and murdering Martin Luther King Jr. became the linchpin in that strategy. This is because of the unique role King played in American society in the changing social contours of the 1960s. King exemplified a different, far less supernatural, understanding of the concept of prophecy. Some biblical prophets are tasked by God to warn a wayward community of believers that they are deviating from God’s expectations, to remind them of the noble calling from which they strayed, lest they receive God’s wrath. But as Jesus told his congregants at Nazareth, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” If he did not realize this before 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. certainly came to understand it firsthand as his mission began to evolve in the years immediately preceding his death.

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, King’s one-time supporters increasingly began to support Black Nationalist and militant groups, such as the Black Panthers. Dedicating a good deal of their activities to community uplift programs, such as free breakfasts, the Panthers’ ten-point platform appropriated the language of the late Malcolm X (assassinated in 1965), saying, “We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.” They asserted their constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights and urged “all Black people . . . [to] arm themselves for self-defense.”14 One-time pacifist groups such as the SNCC, who previously enjoyed close if sometimes rocky relationships with King, placed violent resistance into their charters. Rejecting the practice of civil disobedience King popularized, SNCC spokesperson Stokely Carmichael asserted, in June 1966: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power.”15 Carmichael clarified his position later: “When you talk about black power you talk about bringing this country to its knees any time it messes with the black man . . . any white man in this country knows about power. He knows what white power is and he ought to know what black power is.”16 H. Rap Brown, the leader of SNCC, famously asserted that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”17

Martin Luther King Jr. increasingly had to gear his prophetic mission toward calling his own community back to nonviolence. Black power, as defined by activists like Carmichael, he argued, implied something too exclusionary and too threatening. “Black supremacy or aggressive black violence is as invested with evil as white supremacy or white violence,” Rev. King asserted in October 1966. But he ultimately placed the blame for the growing stridency among his flock on a “new mood” rooted in “real, not imaginary causes.” He added:

The mood expresses angry frustration which is not limited to the few who use it to justify violence. Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made less than a year ago are a shattered mockery today . . . In the northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination and slum schools constituted a towering torture chamber to mock the Negro who tries to hope . . . Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because “white power” with total control has left them empty handed.18

King’s willingness to speak truth to power, and to challenge a national, rather than strictly Southern, audience, hurt his esteem among white audiences. He fell off Gallup’s list of America’s most admired people, and a poll showed his disapproval ratings among white Americans increasing from 46 percent in 1963 to 68 percent by 1966. He remained enormously popular with black Americans, but polls also began to highlight the schism among black Americans about how to best achieve social justice. Fifteen percent of black Americans told pollsters in 1966 that they would be willing to join a riot. Another poll reported that twice as many blacks said the recent riots improved their political position as said the riots undermined it.19

The factionalism and violence grew much deeper in 1967. It started that April in North Omaha, Nebraska. “Police in Omaha, Nebraska, said they could not pinpoint what started the trouble. But bottles and rocks were flying once again in the same part of town, mainly Negro, where 2 riots broke out last summer,” one Omaha newspaper reported. “An estimated 200 people took part—pelting cars, smashing windows, and looting stores.”20 The paper wondered “whether we’re facing another ‘long hot summer’ of racial violence—the 4th one in a row.” Many cities would, indeed, experience another year of social upheaval, and many more would experience it for the first time. The Congressional Quarterly composed a list of instances of civil unrest for 1967:

Nashville, Tenn., April 8–10—Several hundred Negro students from Fisk University and Tennessee A. and I. State University rioted on three nights after a Negro student at Fisk was arrested by a white policeman; at least 17 persons were injured and 94 arrested; the disturbance started a few hours after Stokely Carmichael spoke to Vanderbilt University students; two of his aides were arrested.

Cleveland, Ohio, April 16—Violence erupted in the predominantly Negro Hough area, with rock throwing, window breaking and looting.

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 earlier, Hoover resented King for, among other things, publicly criticizing the FBI’s efforts at solving civil rights–related murders. King’s opposition to the war certainly did nothing to encourage Hoover to reverse his policy of keeping threats on King’s life from reaching the ears of King’s entourage. (Hoover, instead, told his agents to inform local police agencies.) Government attention did increasingly turn to issues of civil unrest, but not with the aim of providing social programs to pacify the urban poor. The FBI, CIA, and military increasingly—and covertly—pushed back against the black power and antiwar movements that they feared could inspire a domestic revolution; a homegrown

“Tet Offensive,” as historian Gerald McKnight put it.

Developed in response to the 1967 riots, the army’s “Civil Disturbance Plan,” known as Operation Garden Plot, allowed for “Federal forces to assist local authorities in the restoration and maintenance of law and order in the 50 states,” and, until 1971, as many as two army brigades remained on call specifically for this purpose.29 The official plans observe that:

Civil Disturbances which are beyond the control of the municipal or state authorities may occur at any time. Dissatisfaction with the environmental conditions contributing to racial unrest and civil disturbances and dissatisfaction with national policy as manifested in the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam demonstrations are recognized factors within the political and social structure. As such, they might provide a preconditioned base for a steadily deteriorating situation leading to demonstrations and violent attacks upon the social order. The consistency and intensity of these preconditions could lead in time to a situation of insurgency should external subversive forces develop successful control of the situation. Federal military intervention may be required to preserve life and property and maintain normal processes of government.30

The prospect of an American insurgency was not limited to planners in the Pentagon. By the end of 1967, the fear found a voice in the mainstream media. U.S. News & World Report ran an interview with Richard Stanger, a career State Department officer who specialized in studying foreign insurrections. Asked if an “open insurrection [in the United States] is within the realm of possibility,” Stanger answered:

Yes, it is well within the realm of possibility. The evidence is that we are now in a transition. We are passing from mere nuisance demonstrations over civil rights and the Vietnam War to something much more violent and dangerous . . . I fear we have witnessed only a beginning. The demonstrations may well become more violent and the rioting [may] get worse, unless something drastic is done. Invariably violence feeds on itself—and it is habit-forming.”31

Like the biblical prophets he quoted so often in his sermons, King occupied a unique position in a country that seemed on the brink of some kind of sectarian civil war in 1967. His country increasingly turned its back on him the more he called on it to repent of its ways. Appeals to “law and order,” from the likes of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, resonated more with white America than King’s calls for equality and justice. He called on black Americans to remember the philosophy and tactics that won them hard-earned gains in the first half of the decade, even as frustration boiled into violence in their hometowns.

But even as King’s message of nonviolence lost its appeal, and even as white Americans condemned King as an agitator, he retained his esteem as a person within the black community. He remained, by a large margin, the most revered figure in the black community, according to polls. As such he became an almost perfect target of opportunity. The assassination of Dr. King—in as public and dramatic a fashion as possible—could well represent what we now refer to as a tipping point, a single act that could move the nation into widespread rioting and a full-scale white-on-black, black-on-white race war.