The mass movement was shut down by Blacks after King’s death to allow those African Americans better equipped to take advantage of new opportunities in a more open society to do so without the clutter of protest from people whose suffering stemmed from fundament power relationships in the United States and the world. The Black strivers called a unilateral truce – which atrophied to surrender – to conduct their electoral political campaigns and business ventures. Those activists who did not honor the truce were decimated by the same white forces that killed King.
The intra-Black maneuverings-for-position at the end of the Sixties were sideshows, however. White folks had something else in mind. In the great majority, American whites were determined to contain or crush the Black social movement that had so profoundly disoriented their world. In a monstrously perverse example of “one step forward, two steps back,” local, state and federal governments embarked on a policy of mass incarceration of the Black poor, while at the same time white social arbiters reconciled themselves to some degree of Black penetration of those societal sectors most important to the Black striving classes: higher education, media, an expanding universe of accessible real estate, and other emoluments of status.
The white backlash against Black assertiveness (when was there not a white backlash?) fell like a mountain on the Black urban poor. The white consensus accepted that some African Americans might get to become mayors and congresspersons, or act in sit-coms and movies, but the mass of African Americans faced lock-down if they “stepped” to white power. Mass Black incarceration became national policy. The U.S. prison population numbered 300,000 in 1970, less than 40 percent non-white. By 2000, more than 2 million prisoners inhabited the American Gulag, about half of them African American, 66 percent people of color.