NYT - critical reading "White America's Age-Old, Misguided Obsession With Civility"

[kwassa]

4. For those of us alive and participating in those protests ...

It was the real threat of violence that made King effective. The other protestors included Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers. Neither pledged non-violence. White America was aware of the alternative.

and violence against non-violent protestors was perpetrated in the South in the murders of civil rights workers.

edit to add the best takeaway from this post:

King aimed some of his harshest words toward advocates of civility, whose concerns aligned with the hand-wringing of many of today’s politicians and pundits. From his Birmingham jail cell, King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’.” King knew that whites’ insistence on civility usually stymied civil rights.