King held the white moderate to be a worse obstacle than the segregationist

Evidence

On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a spate of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Conner. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti-segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease and be “pressed in the courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Incited, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” published far and wide that summer. King attacked not only those Alabama preachers, but also the applauding audience of Beyond the Melting Pot. He confessed that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the white moderate … who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 953

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s stated discomfort: assimilationists (the white moderates who agree on goals but reject methods) are the harder enemy. This is Kendi’s assimilationist-as-racist thesis voiced by King himself.
• DEFINE: King’s description of the white moderate — agreeing on the goal but rejecting methods and setting the timetable — is a nearly perfect definition of the assimilationist position Kendi places at the center of his three-way scheme.