It is still commonplace for scholars and pundits to talk about the period after King's assassination as the "post civil rights era," a period when "the marching stopped." For many, especially whites, the post-1968 story was one of optimism. "The movement" (almost always in the singular) reached its goals with the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. The need for organized activism waned because we had overcome. Any remaining racial inequality was residual. Because the barriers to opportunity had been lifted, it was now up to African Americans to clean house, to address the problems that were the result of dysfunctional family structures or crime or a too generous welfare state. For others, especially those who searched for another King, the post-1968 period was a tragic denouement to the movement, a fragmented struggle in search of leadership. Many tell the post-King story in the form of a declension narrative: namely integrationism gave way to identity politics and civil rights to black power.

Both views are incomplete. Activists in the North, whom I write about extensively in my new book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, turned their attention to improving life in the inner city, most notably through community economic development, a effort that led to unlikely alliances between advocates of black self-determination and community control with liberals, corporate leaders, major foundations, and especially the federal government--which was in the first stages of a long shift away from large-scale urban spending to devolution.

For better and often for worse, post-60s civil rights and black power politics was shaped by its profoundly local orientation--one manifest in community control experiments and shoe-string efforts to revitalize black urban neighborhoods and business districts. These experiments--which continue up to the present day--often took patterns of metropolitan segregation for granted. And they left the solution of increasingly macroeconomic problems (deindustriallization, disinvestment, and capital flight) to groups with the will but not the capacity to address them.

Especially important--and unexpected--was the alliance between black radicals and the Nixon administration, which supported black capitalism, dramatically expanded small business grantmaking to minority communities, launched affirmative action nationwide through the Philadelphia Plan and its successors, and created the Community Development Block Grant Program. This is a story that I have explored at some length. It confounds both the conventional wisdom about black power and about the Republican Party in the 1970s.

But the late 1960s and early 1970s also witnessed the high point of racial integrationism. It's important to remember that the vast majority of blacks continued to support housing and educational integration, even in the heyday of black power. The open housing movement--frustrated at the limited successes of its efforts in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s to change the "hearts and minds" of white Americans (attitudes changed but housing patterns did not)--began to push local and state governments to change zoning laws to desegregate housing markets. They met with intense pushback from suburban whites, local governments, and the Nixon administration (which rolled back HUD efforts to desegregate suburban housing and federal support for school desegregation). Still, integrationists--black and white--continued to litigate for school desegregation and succeeded (ironically more so in Southern metropolitan areas like Nashville, Louisville, and Charlotte, much less so in Northern metros like Boston and Detroit).

And most consequentially, blacks used the power of the vote--resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of black elected officials. Black political leaders--many of whom cut their teeth in the civil rights, welfare rights, and black power movements--used the power of patronage to expand access to public jobs. Black municipal workers and their white and Latino allies (inspired by King and his collaboration with Local 1199 and the Memphis Sanitation Workers) led the way in the dramatic expansion of public sector unionism at a time when union membership was falling sharply in the private sector. And, although many black leftists and black power advocates had initially been suspicious of affirmative action, they began using it as a tool, especially to open up government-contracted and public sector jobs to black workers. (Not surprisingly, public sector and publicly-contracted employment remains crucial to black advancement--nearly 40 percent of the black middle class is employed in government or government-related employment today).

Above all in the 1970s and 1980s, black politics was, as it had been in the 1960s, improvisational. Although historians and pundits often expect consistency from historical actors, black activists and politicians often shifted fluidly from one political position to another. Many civil rights and black power leaders flirted with the Republican Party (including Jesse Jackson, James Farmer, Roy Innis, and James Meredith). Others, like Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, and Harold Washingon in Chicago, appealed to black voters on grounds of racial pride, while forging interracial coalitions to get elected to office. Peniel Joseph's comment that "activists straddled the politics of civil rights and black power after King's death," is an accurate description of the syncretic politics that shaped black urban life in the last three decades of the twentieth century. That syncretic politics explains, among other things, how Barack Obama could work as an Alinskyite organizer on Chicago's South Side, practice antidiscrimination law, and attend a church whose pastor preached black liberation theology.