Killing King. Larry Hancock

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.