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destruction that began on August  in the Watts district of Los Angeles precipitated his intervention, despite the hostile reception he experienced when he visited Watts six days later.Unsurprisingly,Roy Wilkins recounts King’s difficulties with alacrity. “Those folks in the ghetto,” he observes,“didn’t need his dream—they wanted jobs, a decent place to live.”In Wilkins’s view, the entire movement was ill prepared for the opening up of another front in the fight for racial justice.20 Many of the NAACP’s largest branches—such as Chicago,Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia—were located in metropolitan communities that might serve as King’s northern beachhead.Each of these cities had NAACP branches that had restive relationships with the national office, but at the same time, they all shared a predisposition to resent an“outsider”like King coming into their city and claiming a leadership role. In NewYork and Philadelphia in particular, local black leaders let King know in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome. Philadelphia branch president Cecil Moore had already responded to ghetto discontent following a three-day racial disturbance in late August . Realizing that what would become known as Black Power elements threatened the NAACP’s community leadership position, Moore became more assertive of black independence through his campaign against employment discrimination and segregated and inadequate welfare provision.Moore ran against incumbent black congressman Robert Nix in  and drew Black Power support to his mayoral campaign of . He represented a type of local black leader who strengthened his local status by outflanking King and other civil rights groups.21 When King selected Chicago for his northern protest campaign,he was primarily attracted by the emergence of a mass movement among black Chicagoans around a classic NAACP issue: inequality of schools. The NAACP had been one of several local organizations that had called for the dismissal of Chicago school superintendent Benjamin Willis for his failure to provide equally forAfricanAmerican children in his management of the city school system.However,the branch’s ability to challenge local conditions was limited by its ties to local African American congressman William Dawson, who in turn had ties to Mayor Richard Daley Sr.’s formidable political machine.Consequently,the schools’fight was primarily led by a consortium known as the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations under Al Raby.22  PETER J. LING By the time King launched his Chicago campaign, Daley’s political influence had blocked efforts to remove Willis, and when King raised a number of other issues related to deprivation in ghetto districts, Daley proved similarly adept at defusing the issue through token actions. King’s lack of success undoubtedly confirmed doubts about his political judgment in NAACP circles. Only when the movement began its marches into white neighborhoods to protest housing discrimination did the campaign gather momentum.By that stage (August ),King’s position had been damaged by the emergence of a new battle cry for African American liberation: “Black Power.” First popularized by the new chairman of the SNCC,Stokely Carmichael,at a rally in Mississippi on June , , the slogan confirmed the schism between the directaction groups, SNCC and CORE, on the one hand, and the more moderate NAACP and the National Urban League on the other.This further complicated King’s position as he strove to appeal to both sides and to resist demands that he condemn both“Black Power”and the ghetto disturbances that so colored its media reception.Beginning July ,Chicago witnessed three days of widespread violence, which Mayor Daley was able to portray as a byproduct of King’s protest campaign. A visibly shaken King told a press conference that he needed victories if he was to continue to provide an alternative to violence. Judging by the remarks of its executive director Roy Wilkins, the NAACP was unequivocal in its condemnation of Black Power. He told the Association’s annual convention on July  that no matter how its advocates tried to explain it, Black Power was“a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler,a reverse Ku Klux Klan.”It was a go-it-alone strategy that set race against race and as such it would prove “the father of hatred and the mother of violence.” Yet as the historian Simon Hall has recently reminded us, Wilkins did not speak for all , members of the NAACP.Addressing the convention’s Los Angeles audience after Wilkins, Watts preacher James E. Jones urged the NAACP...

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