Dr. King's Assassination: A Rift Widening Between White & Black Americans - Research Paper

Introduction

Although in the United States, black and white people equally mourned the assassination of Dr. King, the murder of this influential figure played a significant role in widening the rift between the white and black Americans. Most African Americans perceived the death of Dr. King as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through nonviolent resistance, as championed by Martin Luther King. Dr. King's assassination, similar to other killings of black leaders at the time, such as Malcolm X, served in radicalizing most of the moderate African American activists, consequently leading to the growth of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power Movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Furthermore, since his death, Dr. King has remained the most widely recognized African American leader of this time, as well as the public face and eloquent voice of the civil rights movement. Consequently, the assassination of Dr. King had various impacts on the society in that it changed the black communities' perception and effectiveness of nonviolence. Thus prompting the adoption of a more active role, led to economic decline due to the unrest that followed his death and affecting the fragile relationship between the police and the African American community.

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Unlike other activists at the time, such as Malcolm X, who viewed white America as lacking in moral conscious, Dr. King believed in the redemption of white America. He continuously advocated for loving the white people despite their treatment of the black population of America, through his dream that all Americans, regardless of race, could live in goodwill and peace (Kevin). Although not all people agreed with his nonviolence belief, black and white people alike admired him for his courage and commitment. His belief afforded him great influence in facilitating political and social change. Before Dr. King's death, a lot of African Americans were politically naive and significantly relied on white leadership with the belief in assimilation integration. Consequently, such individuals were not actively involved in the civil rights movement.

However, upon the assassination of Dr. King, this event shattered the African American's feelings about self and their interpretation of the condition of the black man in white America. The murder of an influential black leader pushed the black community into being more politically involved by searching for a deeper understanding of the black power movement. The actualization for most African Americans that white America could assassinate a righteous and prominent person as Dr. King was a wakeup call. Black people realized trust and patience that America would eventually do right by the black population was a goal at risk of being permanently destroyed (Bruyneel 82). As a result, African Americans did not have the luxury of waiting by the sidelines in their pursuit of equality and civil rights. For the majority in the black community, the assassination awakened the muted but simmering anger for African Americans.

A lifelong advocate for nonviolence the assassination of Dr. King cast doubts in many minds on the effectiveness of nonviolence in fighting for the civil rights of African Americans. Consequently, his murder was characterized by a series of riots that rocked hundreds of cities in the United States. These riots did not make any sense to the majority of the white population. White America could not understand why blacks were destroying their own neighborhoods. However, one of the significant impacts of Dr. King's assassination was the awakening of the anger black people had on the deplorable conditions they lived in and worked (Jeffries).

In most mining and major cities in the United States, African American workers had grown tired of peacefully complaining about the conditions they faced from the government, landlords, and employers; thus, upon Dr. King's death, they sought to destroy the symbols of their oppression. As had been characteristic of these riots, the targets of destruction were not random; rather, the black society targeted businesses that refused to employ African Americans and rental buildings belonging to slum lords that continually abused black tenants (Nimtz 9). On the other hand, black-owned businesses were spared, especially those that played a role in promoting the wellbeing of the African American.

The uproars following Dr. King's demise are frequently dismissed as turbulent upheavals of violence from emotionally troubled African American crowds, with a significant number of criminal opportunists among them. However, the disturbances were substantially more than that. They were uprisings against the racially oppressive norm, endeavors by a particularly estranged portion of the black populace, which comprised of devastated and jobless young people, to make white America pay heed to their predicament, of their profound disappointment, and of their assurance to take care of their circumstance. These were dissents about housing segregation, police harassment, failing schools, nonexistent job, and inadequate municipal services (Cook 52). The looting that occurred during these uprisings mirrored these assumptions, as the individuals who every day did without basic necessities took advantage of the opportunity to throw away normative desires for African American purchasers in that the African American community paid more for less, to obtain essentials they always found challenging to afford and luxuries they could never afford. For a few, it was a reprisal, while for others, it was reparations.

The effect of the uprisings was enduring. Whites had been escaping the united state's major cities for recently created, affluent suburbs; yet, the riots hastened the procedure in certain areas, while finishing it in other cities. The urban-rural migration of whites disintegrated a tax base that was at that point decreasing significantly, fueling the issue of poor civil administration and inadequate social services. Similarly, at the time, most organizations were also looking for tax breaks that had been designed to entice them to rural areas. The uprisings increased the determination of numerous companies to leave while also speeding up the departure of many other businesses. The withdrawal of large organizations was particularly harmful as the absence of capital investors made recovery in the short term, from the destruction caused by the many riots, extremely challenging, while the permanent loss of jobs made sustaining recovery in the long-term an impossible task. The damage and disappearance of small and medium-sized retail businesses, a large number of which did not revive in the wake of being burned down and destroyed, was also harmful as it restricted purchasing options for consumers (Trowbridge 370).

The continued conflicts with the police during the numerous riots across the United States had extensive consequences as well. They drastically aggravated the tense relationship that already existed between the African American community and the police, which kept on decaying in ensuing years as the police officers and metropolitan police divisions' structure of command remained significantly white regardless of fast-changing racial socioeconomics (Kevin). King's murder and the revolts that pursued accomplished something other than reshaping the American urban scenes. They additionally decided how Dr. King is remembered, or all the more precisely, misremembered.

Today the United States and the world celebrate Dr. King for his comments at the nineteen sixty-three March on Washington. Yet at the time he was condemned in the South as a socialist sympathizer, and completely censured all through the North for pushing for social equality too fast and extremely hard. Also, in nineteen sixty-seven, when he at long last stood in opposition to the war in Vietnam, he was publicly ridiculed by liberals for not knowing his place, by declaring that Dr. King should stick to civil rights. At the same time, northern law and order conservatives and southern segregationists were attacking Dr. King for being an extreme fanatic (Cook 108). However, upon the assassination of Dr. King, how the various factions perceived him began to change.

The day preceding his assassination, he was persona non grata at the White House in light of his resistance to the Vietnam War. The following day, President Lyndon B. Johnson applauded him in a presidential decree as a teacher to all people whose dream of brotherhood offered purpose to his work and life. Indeed, even before his memorial service and funeral had occurred, the public procedure of restructuring and rethinking Dr. King as a partially blind crusader resolved to end racial separation without utilizing race-cognizant ways to deal with change had started. Furthermore, by nineteen eighty-three, when President Ronald Reagan signed into law the bill making his birthday a national holiday, the American prophet of peacefulness had been decreased to a handful of sound bites from the March on Washington and anecdotal pieces from his Letter from Birmingham Jail (Nimtz 13).

King's political issues had not changed. Instead, Individuals just decided to disregard his critiques of racism, militarism, and capitalism in light of a legitimate concern of making him increasingly acceptable to white Americans. From multiple points of view, the man praised today is not the man who lost his life fifty years ago. With the changing perceptions of Dr. King's political issues, there were also changes in the general understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. The individuals who had recognized Dr. King as the sole leader of the Civil Rights Movement while he was alive proclaimed the movement over when he passed away (Nimtz 15).

However, the movement that Dr. King helped shepherd higher than ever during the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties did not abruptly end in nineteen sixty-eight. Activists near the drum major for equity and justice, from his better half Coretta Scott King, to his successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, proceeded with the walk for freedom. So too did the individuals who did not have any acquaintance with him at all or did not know him well (Jeffries). They kept advocating for nondiscrimination in housing and work, equal protection under the law, community control, and desegregation of schools. In addition, they did it with much more enthusiasm and determination than previously.

These activists won prominent triumphs in Dr. King's name following his demise, including a resolution of the Memphis sanitation laborers' strike and passage of the nineteen sixty-eight Fair Housing Act. However, they additionally met constant opposition. The members in the Poor People's Campaign, Dr. King's last campaign to get the country to address its shocking degrees of poverty, were put out of Washington, D.C. in June nineteen sixty-eight, having not succeeded in convincing government authorities to act (Bruyneel 93). The death of Dr. King neither finished the movement nor made it any simpler.

Subsequently, the psychological impact of Dr. King's murder endures to the present day. Dr. King taught the society that in the ongoing struggle for freedom, one should be willing to give his life for the cause as the cause is more significant than one man. Dr. King died fighting for the black man as well as in trying to redeem the soul of the United States for the many injustices against the African Americans. Additionally, in the current society, the movement for black lives is the most direct continuation of his work as activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have continued to fight for the Africa American civil rights. Furthermore, although in the current political climate, the American dream se...