Anyone sentient at the time knew what was going to happen immediately the news Dr. KIng was shot came over on the radio. Riots verging on insurrection were common in large cities through the mid-sixties. Any attempts at fomenting 'race war' by the Soviets would have had no particular effect save perhaps to pad the budgets and expense accounts of operatives.
A more salient line of Soviet influence, both actual and perceived, relates to the Civil Rights movement itself. Segregationists in Dr. King's time frequently charged 'integration' was a Communist plot, and that Communists were behind, and controlled, the Civil Rights movement. There is no need to go into florid details of just what this 'commie plot' aimed for, but at the South, and in some quarters elsewhere, they were widely believed. As with many such delusions on the right, there was a grain of truth to the claim, though hardly one sufficient to support the outlandish structure reared up upon it.
First, before the Second World War, 'equality for the Negro' was a part of the CPUSA platform, and the lawyers aiding blacks who were the objects of unjust frame-ups in Southern courts were often members of the Lawyers Guild, an organization that was associated with the CPUSA.
Second, in the early going of the Cold War, as European colonial powers were facing independence movements in Africa, segregation laws and the history of lynchings in the United States became an effective tool for the Soviets in courting independence movements in Africa, to turn them to a pro-Soviet course, or at least to opposing the West. One of the reasons Mr. Kennedy, an ardent Cold Warrior, supported the Civil Rights movement to the degree he did, was to draw the teeth of this line of Soviet agitation in Africa.
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