Assimilationists responded to King as harshly as they did segregationists

Evidence

The road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion, King maintained. He bravely critiqued the all-powerful Moynihan Report, warning about the danger that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Moynihan assimilationists responded to King as firmly as they responded to segregationists, classifying the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign and King as extremist. King, they said, had become an anarchist. His own critique of antiracists as extremists and anarchists in his Birmingham Letter four years earlier had boomeranged back to hit him. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1009

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect case study for the reader’s goal of placing arguments into the segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist scheme — here assimilationists police a true antiracist with the same Extremist label used against segregationists.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘When progressives call radicals extremists’ — how the assimilationist center polices the antiracist left with the same slurs it hurls at the far right.