The effect of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the civil rights movement was profound because Dr. King was the most visible and most politically "acceptable" of the leaders of the movement to white Americans. There were a variety of consequences to his assassination, which were both immediate and more remote. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King's assassination, there were riots in the inner cities across the country, as simmering anger at continuing conditions of racial oppression exploded in rage at the assassination. President Lyndon Johnson mobilized the National Guard the day after the assassination and largely suppressed further rioting, although sporadic violence continued into the following month.
A more remote effect was a shift in the tactics of the remaining leaders in the civil rights movement. Although Dr. King's widow Coretta Scott King and his closest associates urged a non-violent response to the assassination, younger leaders in the movement saw in King's murder the end of civil disobedience and the beginning of armed struggle. The ascendance of the Black Panther Party, which had existed before King's assassination, into a leading role in the struggle for black liberation is a clear effect of the assassination, and the willingness of the Black Panthers to use violence in self-defense arguably caused a dramatic shift in the civil rights movement from that point forward.
Although it is unclear whether there would have been this evolution in the civil rights movement without Dr. King's murder, it is fairly clear that it would have happened more slowly, if at all. As noted, the Black Panthers were already in operation in 1968, and they had been preceded by more militant and separatist organizations willing to use violence, including the Nation of Islam. King himself had warned in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" in 1964 that the failure of white Americans to embrace a moderate such as himself might result in the ascent of black radicals and nationalists, and he mentioned the Nation of Islam specifically in this context.
Moreover, it is often forgotten that Dr. King was assassinated the night before he intended to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. It is therefore often forgotten that the civil rights movement under King's leadership might have moved in a direction of social justice more aligned with a struggle for economic justice. Although this theme was always present in Dr. King's work and in his rhetoric, it is possible that the movement-wing tack after April 1968. Although many in the more militant black nationalist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s embraced Marxism, they failed to achieve recognition among the older generation of activists who rejected violence even in self-defense.
Finally, I would argue that the rejection of non-violence by the civil rights movement following Dr. King's assassination was a necessary factor in its ultimate successes. Although most of the work had been done in securing voting rights for Southern African-American voters by the time of King's murder, and the Fair Housing Act was signed by President Johnson merely a week after the former's death, the issues of police brutality in the inner cities across the country and particularly in Los Angeles might have remained issues unknown to many Americans without the visible responses of the Black Panthers. Although these are issues that obviously still pertain to the African-American experience in the United States to some extent, the days of military-style assault on black neighborhoods by police are largely a thing of the past, thanks in no small part to the armed resistance of the Black Panthers.
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