The SCLC traveled by invitation only. King was glad to be invited to the small city of Albany, Georgia, in 1962. In 1964, the movement was stuck again, despite the huge March on Washington the year before. Dr. King got himself arrested at a whites only restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida, a backwater town where half of the Black ministers wished King had stayed away.
But the people wanted a movement, wanted to follow King, or Malcolm, or the young men and women of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – somebody! Congregations demanded that their ministers become “relevant” – as King put it – to a changing world. The number of activist ministries increased. But most remained politically irrelevant throughout the Sixties, never part of the movement that the Black church now collectively claims as its own.
Black Elite Ascendance
“Some sectors of African Americans decided it was time to get out of the streets so that a few Blacks might occupy high political offices and corporate suites”
King believed that masses of people in motion could accomplish miracles – God’s work on Earth: “And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding – something is happening in our world,” said King on April 3. After his death on April 4, 1968, much of the elite and soon-to-be elite of Black America accepted the verdict of the rifleman, and declared the movement over. Now that Blacks had the vote, North and South, some sectors of African Americans decided it was time to get out of the streets so that a few Blacks might occupy high political offices and corporate suites. The masses would be summoned every few years at election time, or to celebrate the latest entrepreneurial acquisition or corporate promotion among the thin slice of Blacks who had, indeed, been set “free at last” by the civil rights gains of King’s unfinished movement.