King’s assassination triggered both urban rebellions and a law-and-order political backlash

Evidence

As Davis saw it, “Racism was Martin Luther King’s assassin, and it was racism that had to be attacked.” She and her fellow rally organizers were intent on channeling the anger in Los Angeles away from physical confrontations with the well-equipped Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which had many officers who had been recruited from the Deep South. They succeeded. But the fire this time was elsewhere. In the week following King’s assassination, more than 125 cities experienced another wave of urban rebellions, which led to another backlash of law and order from racist Americans. Aspiring presidents, including George Wallace and Richard Nixon, rode the backlash. Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew quipped to Black leaders, “I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have been unwilling to do.” Agnew became such a celebrity that Nixon named him his running mate. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1022

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘law and order’ backlash and Agnew’s repudiation of ‘black racists’ directly feeds the reader’s goal of placing arguments into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist — Agnew drawing an equivalence between Black radicalism and white racism is a clean segregationist move.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘law and order’ backlash to the 1968 rebellions as a textbook demonstration of Kendi’s thesis that racist policy follows self-interested reaction to Black progress, not ignorance.