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5. Growth and Transformation
- University of Arkansas Press
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159 CHAPTER 5 Growth and Transformation DESPERATELY TRYING TO GIVE THE NATION, and perhaps himself, a better understanding of the new black militancy that captured the hearts and souls of so many blacks, particularly the young, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I should have known that in an atmosphere where false promises are daily realities, where acts of unpunished violence towards Negroes are a way of life, nonviolence would eventually be questioned.” Though King’s conclusion conveys a sincere element of regret, he too had given more than just tacit approval of an individual’s right to self-protection and self-preservation. At about the same time that pacifist/activist Bayard Rustin explained that “King’s view of nonviolent tactics was almost non-existent when the [Montgomery bus] boycott began,” fellow pacifist and one-time King advisor Glenn Smiley wrote that “King’s home is an arsenal.” As late as 1967, a year after the founding of the BPP, this movement icon commented that questioning “self-defense” falsifies the issue since common law had always guaranteed “the right to defend one’s home and one’s person when attacked.” King also believed early on that if whites lost blood, change would come a lot faster.1 Indeed, without the insistence on this right, and guns to back it up, the black population would have been dramatically reduced, particularly as a result of the daily white attacks on them throughout the country during this period and in the hundreds of years prior to the modern civil rights movement. By 1967, King had long been aware that some of his constituents questioned the tactic of nonviolence from the very beginning. Indeed, some had flatly rejected it. This situation created a serious problem because whites, liberal or not, had proven they were unwilling to finance a movement that possessed the potential to effect significant political change and/or a major redistribution of wealth. Movement leaders, therefore, wanted to keep this seething resentment and more than occasional violence to a minimum and certainly out of the news. Not able to do this, they began to lose credibility with their white benefactors and to inadvertently divert new recruits into the more radical Black Power organizations. Despite this major problem , nonviolence as a tactic remained the preference for most participants in the movement. As a result, King continued to stress the idea’s merits, regardless of the visible shift in sentiments among many of those he led and desired to lead. His attempt to graft nonviolent direct action onto working-class issues demonstrated King’s belief that for the black struggle to be successful , leaders had to address economics in addition to human rights. This foray into issues outside of civil rights was his last, however. King’s spring 1968 visit to Memphis to support and publicize the plight of striking black sanitation employees attempted to show that the dispossessed had the power to determine their own destinies. It did not help that he had recently fallen into disfavor with his allies by speaking in opposition to the Vietnam War. Most of his black allies, like those in the NAACP and the Urban League, castigated him for taking what they called an unpopular and ill-advised position. King countered that silence could be too easily taken for cowardice, or worse, complicity in the murder of millions of nonwhite people. Embattled, however, this itinerant preacher/activist began to think his days were numbered as a result of the additional enemies he had created by becoming more vocal and by trying to unite those groups who had, up to that point, been struggling separately for the same things. His idea of a poor people’s march on Washington made him a foe of all those who wished to maintain the status quo, including the president and all his men. His trip to Memphis dictated that changes be made to his plan. King sought to make the black garbage collectors’ cause a national issue. That they were doing the same job as their white coworkers and being paid one-third their salary was an issue King wanted to use to dramatize the plight of blacks everywhere. The problem had been the same in the North and West as it had been in the South and East. Blacks had been deliberately prevented from controlling the politics and economy of their communities because they were denied the funds that would have allowed them to take the appropriate actions to fix many...