2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: If MLK Were Alive, He'd Make White Folks Just as Uncomfortable as Black Lives Matter [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)1968 was way too after-the-fact for it simply to be about race(which Dr. King DID cause a paradigm shift over).
And it wasn't just segregationist whackjobs.
He was killed after he started speaking out against the war in Vietnam(he was the first major "mainstream" AA leader to do so), and after he announced plans for Resurrection City.
Both of which were also integral parts of the larger fight against racism and oppression.
Either way, Dr. King helped lead PoC to something close to freedom.
It's just that he saw that doing so meant speaking out on other issues and not exclusively race. If he had stuck solely to race, he would have been protected by the power structure. By 1968, opposing segregation and supporting voting rights, in and of themselves, were no longer all that threatening. Hubert Humphrey was doing that in 1968, and he was the most innocuous and "safe" person the Democratic Party could possibly have chosen that year.