The City of Hope

Abstract

After the shocking events of the long, hot summer of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr, was ready to contemplate drastic action. Hope was receding, he argued, in a paper he would more or less repeat in person before the Kerner Commission in October. It had been increasingly apparent to him that the White House had fallen out of love with the Great Society. Congressional conservatives, in the ascendancy, seemed resolved to stonewall the war on poverty. The riots were a “display [of] the utter desperation that has engulfed many Negroes” as a result. Yet, the answer to America’s predicament could not be armed insurrection, he insisted: that was “doomed to failure”; it was an idea that was “mere posturing and recklessness” and, he thought, even if it could ever be justified, it lacked broad support. But the way out of the impasse King favored seemed hardly less militant. In desperate times, what was needed was a massive campaign of civil disobedience, a nonviolent version of a long, hot summer riot, something that would “have earthquake proportions.” He envisaged a chain of “aggressive but non-violent” demonstrations in 1968. The ambition of this plan was to “dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it.” The epicenter of that earthquake was to be Washington, DC.¹