Black Power activists underestimated King’s Poor People’s Campaign as a systemic threat

Evidence

ANGELA DAVIS SPENT the morning of April 4, 1968, at the new office of the SNCC in Los Angeles. The newly organized SNCC chapter was her new activist home as she shuffled back and forth between Los Angeles and her doctoral studies at UC San Diego. In the afternoon of April 4, she made a printing run. That evening, she heard someone scream, “Martin Luther King has been shot!” In disbelief at first, she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt when she confirmed the news. Like other Black Power activists, she had cast King aside as a harmless leader—harmless in his religious philosophy of nonviolence. “I don’t think we had realized that his new notion of struggle—involving poor people of all colors, involving oppressed people throughout the world—could potentially present a greater threat to our enemy,” Davis remembered. “Never would any of us have predicted that he would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1021

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the assassination of MLK as the moment Black Power radicals realized their underestimation of his cross-racial poor people’s strategy — a case where King’s late-life radicalism was actually feared more than his nonviolence.