BLACK POWER

By the mid-1960s, Martin Luther King's role as the unchallenged leader of the Civil Rights Movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists such as Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers.

In addition, many SNCC organizers resented Martin Luther King, feeling that often they put in the hard work of planning and organizing protests, only to have charismatic Martin Luther King arrive later and receive much of the credit. In 1966 the Black Power movement, advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the nation's attention and suggested that Martin Luther King's influence among blacks was waning. Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselves against violent attacks had been embraced by many African Americans.

With internal divisions beginning to divide the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King shifted his focus to racial injustice in the North. Realizing that the economic difficulties of blacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, the SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. Martin Luther King established a headquarters in a Chicago, Illinois, apartment in 1966, using it as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city.

Black Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of the SCLC's tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed Martin Luther King's efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counterdemonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret terrorist organization that was opposed to integration.

Throughout 1966 and 1967, Martin Luther King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the nation's economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning the Poor People’s Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the issue of economic justice.