I'm late to this party, but will jump in as best I can with a response to Clay's question: "What was the impact of King's death for the civil rights movement?"

For those of us who understand the crucial role of movements, it's something of an embarrassment to acknowledge how central individuals can be. It's especially irritating to have to do so when a celebrity-soaked culture is obsessed from the get-go, and stupidly so, with personifications, treating the civil rights movement, say, as if it were the personal project of Martin Luther King. But the truth is that individuals are not just themselves--their biographies, their bundles of talent and character--but also, in a way, the energy-collecting and -distributing nodes of the force-fields they strike up with their partisans (and enemies). This is how history works. Sidney Hook made the point long ago, in a smart book called The Hero in History.

In this light, individuals really can be indispensable. King was. I certainly agree with Clay and others who note that King had worn out a lot of his welcomes before April 4, 1968. Still, if you want to know how important he remained even at low ebb, look, as Clay does in his book, at what happened in this country on April 5 et seq. How many of us remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when he heard the awful news of what had happened in Memphis? Who can forget?

There's a thought experiment I've toyed with over the years. (Credentialed historians are not supposed to indulge in counterfactuals, but I don't have the credential, so here goes.) Imagine that King had not been assassinated. There were more hard years coming for him. The thin line he was walking (increasingly against economic inequality, as in Memphis; radical on the war, probably increasingly militant too--nonviolently) would only have thinned further. The Panthers and white radical allies would have condescended to him, local militants would have alternately genuflected and scoffed. He would have spent years in the wilderness. He would have struggled to avoid becoming a toothless hero of the (largely white) cocktail circuit.

To continue with this chain of surmises: Isn't it seriously possible that when the Panthers and SNCC remnants had imploded (for that strikes me as inevitable, what with assassinations, shootouts, jailings, irresponsible leadership, delusional strategems), and SDS' shards had fallen or jumped off their respective precipices, King and SCLC loyalists would have been left standing? They might well have made a transition into an era of local politics (as launched--see Eyes on the Prize--with the mayoral campaign of Carl Stokes in Cleveland). They might have figured out a way to devise militant nonviolent tactics for the '70s, keeping a large multiracial base. Or they might have tried to work out a synthesis between civil disobedience and community organizing. It wouldn't have been inevitable that they would get results in the northern cities--the failed Chicago open housing campaign of 1966 surely made that plain. But their stature would have been immense. If anyone could have increased the odds on helping the left survive the Southern Strategy, they could have.

Mind you, I still think the odds of political potent backlash were strong. In any event, this what-if gets hazier as you peer further ahead. But I do see a nonzero chance of a scenario for a soft landing out of the '60s without the long trek through the wilderness that arrived with Ronald Reagan in 1980.