should not fall into the habit of blaming everything on whites. He defended nonviolence more and more narrowly on tactical grounds, suppressing the moral arguments that once made it so compelling. He promised bigger and bigger demonstrations, though he could no longer produce volunteers in large numbers or assure anybody that they would refrain from violence. In the years from 1966 to 1968, when he needed a period of rest and reflection in which to puzzle out where his movement had gone wrong and how it might recover a sense of direction, he forced himself again and again to "go for broke," to draw up plans for "massive dislocation," and to make more and more drastic demands on his own capacity for suffering and self-sacrifice. By the end of 1967, he was planning to occupy Washington until Johnson ended the war in Vietnam and launched a comprehensive attack on poverty. "This is a kind of last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence," he told his aides. "... We've gone for broke before, but not in the way we're going this time, because if necessary I'm going to stay in jail six months—they aren't going to run me out of Washington."

His exposure to heart-rending poverty in the Northern ghetto forced King to the conclusion that the only hope for American society lay in an immediate redistribution of wealth. He was never indifferent to the importance of economic equality; but the issue presented itself with greater urgency after 1965 and made him increasingly intolerant of halfway measures. As early as 1964, King urged his followers to advance from protest to politics: "We are now facing basic social and economic problems that require political reform." Unfortunately the strategy of nonviolent protest, which had worked so well in the South, was ill-suited to a campaign against poverty in the North. In Chicago, open-housing marches into white neighborhoods had no discernible connection with the political goals King now espoused; their only result was to arouse fierce hostility in the neighborhoods thus invaded. The black militants in Chicago, notwithstanding their infatuation with "guerilla warfare," had a better understanding of the situation than King. They criticized open housing as a delusion. Even if it was desirable to break up the black ghetto by encouraging migration to white neighborhoods, they pointed out, most black people could not afford the price of housing there. The migration of middle-class blacks would only drive out whites in any case, re-creating the conditions from which they hoped to escape. The only thing accom

-401-