munity in cities like Chicago, which could not support a movement that relied so heavily on a self-sustaining network of black institutions, a solidly rooted petty-bourgeois culture, and the pervasive influence of the church. The movement sought to give black people a new dignity by making them active participants in the struggle against injustice, but it could not succeed unless the materials of self-respect had already been to some extent achieved.

As he toured the Northern ghettos after the first wave of riots, in 1965, King was staggered by the desperate poverty he found, but he was even more discouraged by the absence of institutions that would sustain the black community's morale. He did not join in the criticism directed by black militants and newly radicalized white liberals against the Moynihan Report, accused of shifting attention from poverty to the collapse of the family and thus of "blaming the victim" for the sins of white oppression. "The shattering blows on the Negro family," he argued, "have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic.... Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty and backwardness." Institutional breakdown was a cause as well as a consequence of poverty, according to King. Whereas some observers tried to picture the ghetto as a workable subculture, he took the position that "jammed up, neurotic, psychotic Negroes" in Northern cities were "forced into violent ways of life." These conditions led him to demand the abolition of the ghetto through open-housing ordinances and massive federal action against poverty. His advocacy of such programs constituted a tacit admission that the North lacked the stable black communities on which the civil rights movement rested in the South. Hosea Williams made the same point more openly. "I have never seen such hopelessness," he said after a month in Chicago. "The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than any I ever saw. They don't participate in the governmental process because they're beaten down psychologically. We're used to working with people who want to be freed." This last remark summed up the contrast between the North and the South.

Even before SCLC made its fateful decision to launch a civil rights campaign in Chicago, King faced mounting criticism from SNCC, still officially committed to nonviolence but increasingly impatient not only with King's moderation but with the cult of his charismatic leadership.

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