What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement?
Being in this conversation is like being a kid in a candy store. As I said at the outset, Rick, Tom, Todd, and Peniel are all writers I look up to and draw from. Now I get to ask them questions! So here’s one, building off the current conversation: What was the impact of King’s death for the civil rights movement? It’s a question I touch on but don’t grapple with sufficiently in my book. But I see two possibilities. On the one hand, his death, and the riots that followed, spurred a new era of community activism; while black local activism was certainly nothing new in 1968, the loss of the national community’s de facto leader let (to use a perhaps inapt analogy) a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t want to imply that King was in any way preventing them from action; rather, it seems like his death convinced many at the local level to take up his mantle, even though the results were not necessarily extensions of King’s philosophy per se. Likewise, the evisceration of so many communities by r
