ed of a friend as well as
of their only hope for a better future.

Robert Kennedy took to the campaign trail for the 1968 Presidential
election in order to bring justice to the poor, both black and white, and
in order to reunite America behind a new sense of purpose and idealism.
In June, after a rally in Los Angeles, he too was shot and killed. The
nation was filled with horror and disbelief. Robert Kennedy had gained
the trust of Afro-Americans more than almost any other white man of his
generation. Violence seemed to reign supreme, and idealists, both black
and white, were paralyzed by a feeling of futility.

Black Power

Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights
Movement was disintegrating. Many believed that it was being killed by
the riots. In fact, the Civil Rights Movement had already come under
sharp attack both from within and from without. The urban riots of the
sixties, instead of being the cause of its demise, were symptoms of the
disease in the urban, Afro-American communities--a disease for which the
Civil Rights Movement had not been able to effect a cure. In retrospect,
it appears that there had always been voices from within the
Afro-American community which had maintained that the Civil Rights
Movement was not the panacea that many believed it to be. To the
contrary, militant blacks maintained that the Civil Rights Movement
itself was one of the primary causes of the urban riots. Stokeley
Carmichael pointed out:

"Each time the people ... saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became
angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were
angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to
offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We
helped to build their frustration."

As early as 1957, Robert F. Williams, then the N.A.A.C.P. leader in
Monroe, North Carolina, concluded that nonviolence could not be looked
upon as a cure-all for all the problems of the Afro-American community.
In his opinion the right for an Afro-American to sit in the front of the
bus in Montgomery was not so spectacular a victory:

"The Montgomery bus boycott was a victory--but it was limited. It did not
raise the Negro standard of living; it did not mean better education for
Negro children, it did not mean economic advances."

Williams compared the Montgomery boycott to an incident in Monroe:

"It's just like our own experience in