Research Catalog

Title

The last crusade : Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People's Campaign / Gerald D. McKnight.

Author

McKnight, Gerald

Publication

Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

v, 192 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

• In The Last Crusade, Gerald McKnight examines the Poor People's Campaign, the last large-scale demonstration of civil rights-era America, and the systematic efforts of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his executive officers to subvert King's ambitious effort to force the federal government to live up to its promises of a Great Society. The book also looks at King's last days as he helped Memphis sanitation workers in their labor-cum-civil rights struggle with a recalcitrant and racist city government. Although there is no persuasive evidence that the FBI and the Memphis police conspired to assassinate King, McKnight marshals evidence to show that neither agency was blameless.
• The conventional view of the Poor People's Campaign is that it was a self-inflicted failure. The blame rested squarely on the shoulders of the second raters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who failed to fill the leadership vacuum after King's assassination. But, as McKnight shows, there was a hidden, dark counterpoint to the accepted version - namely, the triumph of the 1960s American surveillance state and its repressive power and flagrant violation of protected freedoms. In fact, whatever the FBI wanted to do to disrupt the Campaign, it did, aided and abetted by local police agencies and elements of the federal government, including military intelligence.

Subject

• King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968
• Hoover, J. Edgar 1895-1972
• United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation
• 1900-1999
• Poor People's Campaign
• Internal security > United States > History > 20th century
• United States > Race relations

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-180) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

King, Vietnam, and the transformation of the civil rights movement -- The road to Washington goes through Memphis -- Memphis: days of rage, days of sorrow -- "The poor people are coming!" "The poor people are coming!" -- Resurrection City -- shantytown among the cherry trees.

ISBN

0813333849 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^97036992^

OCLC

• 37546744
• SCSB-10131096

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library