Martin Luther King's Assassination & Black Power

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, was a tragic blow, not only for the Civil Rights Movement, but for the rights movement of all lower class citizens in America. Dr. King, perhaps along with Bobby Kennedy, represented one of the few voices in 1968 America able to form any type of consensus among increasingly polarized groups in society. His death inaugurated a period of some of the worst race riots in American history. However, Dr. King's death did not signal the end of the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement had been splitting into factions several years before he was assassinated. The politics of confrontation, direct action, and Black Power had been gaining credence among many blacks as early as 1963. Dr. King recognized this shift in the Movement's dynamics, as well as a decline in his influence over the Movement, when he opted to take his nonviolent, integrationist message to Chicago in 1966.

Dr. King's death did accelerate the polarization of American society. In part because Black power became the leading force behind the transforming Civil Rights Movement. However, to a far greater degree, King's death signaled an alienation among white supporters of the Movement who saw in King their opportunity to participate (and many said control) the Movement, while whites opposed to the Movement hardened their stance in the face of the emerging drive for black self-determination.

The late 1950s and early 1960s represented the heyday of Dr.

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the Washington March rang hollow in the ashes of the firebombed Birmingham Church where four black children died (Franklin & Moss, 1988, 447). Less than a year after the March, Malcolm X expressed eloquently the transforming nature of the Movement: "This so-called Democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro. So where do we go from here? To those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, the only way you can get involved in the civil-rights struggle is to give it a new interpretation" (Malcolm X, 1964, 31). He goes on to say that blacks are "giving a new interpretation to the civil-rights struggle, an interpretation that will enable us to come into it, take part in it. And these handkerchief-heads who have been dilly-dallying and pussyfooting and compromising-we don't intend to let them pussyfoot and dilly-dally and compromise any longer" (Malcolm X, 1964, 31). The new interpretation which Malcolm X spoke of appeared in 1965 when the term "Black Power" emerged. The phrase Black Power was first widely used by Stokely Carmichael and other members of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson and an attack on marchers by de

Category: History - M