Martin Luther King Jr.: Remembering a Committed Life By 1967 King had become isolated, at odds with the Black Power advocates who now controlled both SNCC and CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality (“Don’t be trying to love that honky to death,” said SNCC Chairman H. Rap Brown, “Shoot him to death.”) — as well as alienated from a president waging a far-off war that King openly opposed passionately. The media also now turned against King. Life magazine, whose photographs of the struggle for integration and suffrage had accelerated the passage of the two greatest civil rights acts of the 1960s, now called King a spokesman for “Radio Hanoi,” and The Washington Post dismissed him as relic of the past who had lost the respect and confidence of both white and black Americans. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which had tried to destroy King since 1963, was still watching his every move, its reports calling him “a traitor to his country and to his race.” King’s denunciations of the war so distressed even King’s black allies — the UN’s Ralph Bunche, the National Urban League’s Whitney Young and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins — that they urged him to renounce his leadership of the civil rights movement before he destroyed it. Read the whole article, here: billmoyers/2014/01/20/martin-luther-king-jr-remembering-a-committed-life/
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 02:31:56 +0000
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