Violence seemed to reign supreme,
and idealists, both black and white, were paralyzed by a feeling of
futility.
Black Power
Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights
Movement was disintegrating. Many believed that it was being killed by
the riots. In fact, the Civil Rights Movement had already come under
sharp attack both from within and from without. The urban riots of the
sixties, instead of being the cause of its demise, were symptoms of
the disease in the urban, Afro-American communities--a disease for
which the Civil Rights Movement had not been able to effect a cure. In
retrospect, it appears that there had always been voices from within
the Afro-American community which had maintained that the Civil Rights
Movement was not the panacea that many believed it to be. To the
contrary, militant blacks maintained that the Civil Rights Movement
itself was one of the primary causes of the urban riots. Stokeley
Carmichael pointed out:
"Each time the people . . . saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they
became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death,
they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming.
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