contribution" to the cause of racial justice. "When they cheerfully became jailbirds and troublemakers, when they took off their Brooks Brothers attire and put on overalls to work in the isolated rural South, they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them." By referring to civil rights volunteers as "school dropouts," King sought to counter the sneer that his demonstrations in the South had been peopled by "pious elderly ladies." Those demonstrations, he claimed, had "totally disrupted the system," just as the poor people's march on Washington would paralyze the national government and force it to enact an "economic bill of rights."

King's assassination in April 1968 destroyed any hope that his poor people's coalition would come into being; but his own associates had already raised serious objections to another march on Washington and to the strategy behind it. Marian Logan argued that disruptive demonstrations would "harden congressional resistance" and contribute to the defeat of liberal candidates in the forthcoming elections. Bayard Rustin agreed that "any effort to disrupt transportation, government buildings, etc." could "only lead to further backlash and repression." He doubted the feasibility of an interracial alliance of the poor. The labor movement, he pointed out, had repeatedly failed to organize the kind of people on whom King now pinned his hopes, and there was no reason to think a black civil rights agitator would fare any better. "There is no way for Martin Luther King to bring white poor, Puerto Rican poor, black poor, Irish poor together," Rustin said.

By February 1968, King admitted, "We're in terrible shape with this poor people's campaign. It just isn't working. People aren't responding." The civil rights movement in the North did not transform itself, as he had hoped, into a social democratic alliance, nor did it achieve any lasting gains for the black masses. Its legacy to the North was a bitterly divided Democratic party, officially committed to busing and affirmative action

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