I very much doubt Stokely Carmichael would have been a candidate for post-King general civil rights leadership. In 1967-68, he was at high revolutionary tide, at least rhetorically--take a look at his Oakland speech of fall 1967, full of blustery threats about "offing" not only "the pig" but black bourgeois types who didn't get with the program. I don't know what his tactical maneuvers were like in Washington in early '68 but my guess is that he was reeling between Third World revolutionary bombast and practical politics at this point. Of course we don't know what he would have evolved into had he not left the country, but when he did become a pan-Africanist, that was no surprise, given the way other SNCC militants had been going after Watts. The surprise (to me, for sure, who knew Stokely starting in high school) was that this intelligent man at some point in the '70s started ranting against "Zionism" as if it were responsible for all the horrors of neocolonialism. That kind of junk doesn't come out of the blue. When defeat masquerades as blustery victory, you have taken leave of reality. So soon it came to pass that he would answer the phone, "Ready for the revolution").

As for the great Bayard Rustin, he was already anathema to the New Left before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as a coalitionist. (His old comrade Staughton Lynd denounced him in 1965, publicly, for proposing "coalition with the Marines.")

Only King had the nonviolent credentials to hold at least some white liberals and most radicals once the pseudo-revolutionary tide went out and a lot of people started returning to their senses.

I have a few thoughts in response to Todd and Rick's insightful posts.

The counterfactual scenario Todd lays out is certainly possible. At the same time, I'll return to my earlier comment--namely, that King's ideas about American society and inequality were changing rapidly at the end of his life, and that as he turned against the war and became increasingly critical of American capitalism, he was losing the support of many American liberals, both black and white. In his April 4, 1967 Riverside Church address, King said,

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

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Let me join in on Clay Risen's haunting question, "What was the impact of King's death for the civil rights movement?" As Peniel Joseph notes, King was unpopular in many quarters by 1968. It is possible that had he lived, King's influence over the direction of the civil rights movement - his emphasis on integration, nonviolence, nondiscrimination in any direction, an alliance with organized labor, and placing economic inequality at the center of a broader human rights agenda - would have diminished over time and been eclipsed by the Black Power movement. More hopeful is Todd Gitlin's suggestion that King and his allies might have helped the left "survive the Southern Strategy."

We do know what subsequently happened to King's intellectual soulmate, Bayard Rustin. Rustin, who first introduced King to nonviolence and organized the 1963 March on Washington, was in the months and years after King's assassination essentially written out of the civil rights movement.

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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?

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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.

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The aftermath of MLK's assassination, in most conventional accounts of the Civil Rights Movement signaled its deathknell as a national movement. In this interpretation, King's call for multi-racial democracy was replaced by the angry polemics of gun-toting Black Power era militants who practiced politics without portfolio and successfully inspired an electoral realignment in the form of white backlash.

But such a perspective diminishes the complexity of both King and the Civil Rights-Black Power Movements. Michael Honey's definitive account of King's Poor People's Campaign, Going Down Jericho Road, poignantly illustrates the depth of criticism levied against King by liberals, conservatives, and some radicals during his final days. Put more bluntly, King was not considered a popular civil rights leader in many quarters by 1968.

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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 riots caused helped catalyze "self-help" organizing nationwide.

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Without disagreeing with Tom or Rick directly, I'll start off where both of them left off: King's life was cut short, and at a moment when he was just beginning a new segment in his lifelong struggle against injustice. It's no slap at his grand intellect to suggest that he was still working through a lot of the policy implications his principles evoked.

He very clearly believed that the nation owed African Americans something for their suffering. He said so throughout his life, but perhaps nowhere more forcefully than his March 31, 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral, the last Sunday address of his life. It is worth quoting at length:

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Tom Sugrue is right to note in his post, "Remembering and Misremembering King," that Martin Luther King Jr. supported "compensatory treatment" for this nation's history of discrimination against blacks, but the record is very clear that King wanted the compensatory remedy to be color-blind and to include poor whites.

In chapter 8 of Why We Can't Wait, King began with the sensible observation that passage of Civil Rights legislation would not wipe the slate clean of the historical legacy of discrimination. King says "compensatory or preferential treatment" is justified, making an analogy to a foot race. "For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." King goes on to say, "America must seek its own ways of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens."

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Clay Risen's book on the King riots of 1968 has much to commend it, including his clear-eyed portrait of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in his last, difficult years. As Clay writes, "the public, the media, and the political establishment increasingly saw him in a negative light..." When King turned his attention northward, he faced bitter opposition from whites who professed their racial innocence and resented his intrusion into their communities. Black power advocates denounced him (quite wrongly) as a conservative and a sell-out. To top it off, King became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, earning the enmity of Lyndon Johnson and hawkish liberals. By the spring of 1968, King was at his nadir of popularity, in part because of the media's belated discovery that he was not at all "moderate." King was ultimately far more radical than the plaster saint, the saccharine "dreamer," who dominates our images of him today.

King was particularly unpopular among working-class and middle-class whites, both South and North, who were by 1966 already abandoning the Democratic Party and who never cared much for racial equality. Indeed, as Clay notes (drawing from book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis), the New Deal coalition was fragile well before the 1960s because of the charged issue of civil rights and racial equality. Even modest efforts to desegregate housing and schools in the North met with fierce white resistance. That's a reality that King discovered when he joined the open housing movement in Chicago in 1966.

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First off, congratulations to Clay Risen for a terrific book which brilliantly captures one of the most important single weeks of the Twentieth Century. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 and the rioting that followed in city after city helped shape the fate of American liberalism for a generation, and Clay's book helps us understand that period much better.

I'm struck by Clay's use of the phrase "the King riots," because, as Clay himself points out, rioting was the ultimate repudiation of King's nonviolent approach to civil rights. The riots were on one level perfectly understandable expressions of justifiable rage and despair. But, as Clay notes, they played right into the hands of conservative Republicans, like Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, who capitalized on white fear of black militancy. Nonviolence, in King's view, was not a weak or timid strategy; it was the only pragmatic route to victory in America, where black violence would surely yield white backlash.

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First off, I want to thank Rick, Tom, Peniel, and Todd for joining me in this discussion. Throughout the course of writing my book I looked to all four of them as inspirations, and I am lucky enough to have worked with each of them as managing editor at Democracy (well, Tom will be in our next issue). So it is a distinct honor to be joined by them this week.

The bulk of A Nation on Fire is a detailed account of the week following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968. There are a lot of moving parts to the story-the first days of the manhunt for James Earl Ray, the reaction among the civil rights movement-but I decided to focus on two elements. First, I wanted to give a chronology of the riots that broke out in more than 100 cities nationwide and led to 39 deaths and over $650 million in damage (in 2009 dollars), and second, I wanted to tell the story of what was going on inside the White House, as President Lyndon Johnson, who had just withdrawn from the 1968 campaign, dealt with the latest in a long list of national crises to beset his presidency. I found the force of these twinned narratives compelling, particularly as elements of a story that has too often been overlooked in accounts of the 1960s.

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Clay Risen joins us this week to blog on his book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, an account of the riots that raged across the country in April 1968. The narrative delves into each individual riot and explores the broader impact of violence on the American public. Risen also details the efforts of President Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael to curb the simmering rage.

From Risen's first post:

Why the King riots were so important in American history: Namely, they were a signal moment for so many white Americans that postwar liberalism had failed to ensure domestic order, even as it had pushed further on racial integration than many whites-in and outside the South-were comfortable with.

Risen is currently the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Previously, he was assistant editor at The New Republic and has written for The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Slate, and the Atlantic.

Joining the conversation are Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation; Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; Peniel Joseph, Professor of African-American Studies at Brandeis University; and Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University and regular TPMCafe contributor.