"We don't believe in leadership," said James Forman. "We think the people should lead, but SCLC thinks there should be one leader." It was only when the civil rights movement bogged down in Chicago, however, that Forman, Stokely Carmichael, and other militants successfully challenged King's preeminence in the movement, renounced nonviolence, and took up the cry of "black power." King could easily identify the moral and strategic objections to the new slogan, but he could not persuade the angry young militants to give him a hearing. They disrupted his meetings with boos and heckling, denounced him as an Uncle Tom, and cheered when former supporters like Adam Clayton Powell referred to him as "Martin Loser King." Once the scene of his activities shifted to the North, he no longer addressed a constituency that cared to hear about self-help, the dignity of labor, the importance of strong families, and the healing power of agape. According to black militants, honkies would listen only to gunfire and the sound of breaking glass. Faced with the boundless rage of the ghetto and the growing influence of leaders like H. Rap Brown, who urged blacks to arm themselves against a white war of extermination, King became increasingly discouraged and depressed. Toward the end of his life, he told Ralph Abernathy that "those of us who adhere to nonviolence" might have to "step aside and let the violent forces run their course."

Temperamentally incapable of stepping aside, he drove himself more relentlessly than ever. In the last two years of his life, he struggled to keep up his spirits in a sea of troubles. Black desertions from the nonviolent movement were discouraging enough, but he also had to contend with constant threats to his life, harassment from the FBI, denunciations from the Johnson administration to the effect that his stand against the Vietnam War constituted nothing less than treason, growing criticism from white moderates, and dissension within his own organization about his efforts in the North and his plans for a second march on Washington, not to mention a crushing schedule of speaking engagements designed to shore up SCLC's depleted treasury. Exhaustion and near-despair, together with the pressure from black separatists and his own increasingly gloomy assessment of the prospects for racial harmony, pushed King farther to the left. At times he joined the militants in condemning American society as irredeemably racist, even though the catchword of "white racism" had the effect of obscuring his earlier warnings that black people

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