After integration became the law of the land and the voting rights act was passed came Watts. King discovered that plenty of the inner city inhabitants has never heard of him, but they had heard of Malcolm. What was left of the neighborhood was in ruins and with more than thirty dead and thousands in jail the traditional civil rights movement looked like a tragic joke.
Inner city blacks could vote. It didn't get them much. They could eat wherever they wanted. If they had the money. Schools were not legally segregated, but that didn't count for much when you lived in a defacto segregated slum. They could even go to the library. If they could find one.
"formal equality did not change the material conditions of black people, especially those packed in the ghettos in the North. In fact their poverty continued to get worse, partly because of the progressive displacement of unskilled labor, further eroding their sense of somebodyness. After Watts, King concluded that without economic justice, the right to a job or income, talk about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' was nothing but a figment of one's political imagination."
"Martin did not take long to realize that poverty was no accident but was a consequence of a calculated decision of the wielders of economic power. Using Malcolm's language, Malcolm began to speak of the ghetto as a 'system of internal colonialism'. 'The purpose of the slumslum,' he did in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, 'is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness ... The slum is little more a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, segregated and humiliated at every turn..'"
From Martin and Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare
Wendell Berry in his essay What Are People For quoted a psychologist friend that the local police had told him that a "major occupation was to keep the permanently unemployable confined to their own part of town."
Are minorities in this country being policed or occupied? Some of these shootings look less like holding your ground and more like the tactics used in the Central American civil wars.
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