Williams replied, "We can bring the press in with us and they can't."

But the "dramatization" of injustice proved moving and therefore politically effective only because the SCLC managed to school its members in the discipline of nonviolence, because it could convincingly claim to speak for the best in the regional heritage of the South, and because, finally, it also stood for "what is best in the American dream." King did not disclaim the African elements in black culture, but he ruled out a "mass return to Africa," advocated by some separatists, as an escapist solution of the race problem. "We are American citizens," he argued, "and we deserve our rights in this nation." "Abused and scorned though we may be," he declared in the Birmingham letter, "our destiny is tied up with America's destiny." Even in his harshest indictments of the United States, he invoked the Constitution and the Bible, embodiments of its shared political and religious traditions. "Our beloved nation," he said in I967, when he finally began to show signs of running out of patience, "is still a racist country"; but it was beloved nevertheless.

After ten years of successful agitation in the South, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the movement rapidly disintegrated when it ventured into the North. The usual explanation of its failure in the North—that the struggle against legal discrimination in the South raised "clear and simple moral issues," in President Johnson's words, whereas de facto discrimination could not so easily be dramatized as a contest between good and evil— misses a good deal of the truth. No doubt the difficulty of staging the kind of confrontations that stirred up public opinion against Bull Connor, Sheriff Clark, and other symbols of Southern racism diminished the chances of attracting favorable attention from the media. The plight of the Northern ghettos, moreover, did not lend itself to simple legislative solutions. But a more important difference between the North and the South lay in the demoralized, impoverished condition of the black com

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