Civil rights movement

=== White segregationists ===
{{see also|Neo-Nazism#United States}}
[[File:Rc17739 03.jpg|250px|thumb|Ku Klux Klan demonstration in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964]]

King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the [[Nobel Peace Prize]]. After that point, his career was filled with frustrating challenges. The [[Liberalism|liberal]] coalition that had gained passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] began to fray.

King was becoming more estranged from the Johnson administration. In 1965 he broke with it by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the [[Operation Rolling Thunder|bombing of Vietnam]]. He moved further [[Left-wing politics|left]] in the following years, speaking about the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society. He believed that change was needed beyond the civil rights which had been gained by the movement.

However, King's attempts to broaden the scope of the civil rights movement were halting and largely unsuccessful. In 1965 King made several attempts to take the Movement north in order to address [[housing discrimination]]. The SCLC's campaign in Chicago publicly failed, because Chicago's Mayor [[Richard J. Daley]] marginalized the SCLC's campaign by promising to "study" the city's problems. In 1966, white demonstrators in notoriously racist [[Cicero, Illinois|Cicero]], a suburb of Chicago, held "white power" signs and threw stones at marchers who were demonstrating against [[housing segregation]].<ref name="Urgency 7">{{Cite book |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w835AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT128 |title=The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society |last=Zelizer |first=Julian E. |date=January 8, 2015 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=978-1-101-60549-3 |chapter=Chapter Seven}}</ref>

Politicians and journalists quickly blamed this white [[backlash (sociology)|backlash]] on the movement's shift towards Black Power in the mid-1960s; today most scholars believe the backlash was a phenomenon that was already developing in the mid-1950s, and it was embodied in the "[[massive resistance]]" movement in the South where even the few moderate white leaders (including [[George Wallace]], who had once been endorsed by the NAACP) shifted to openly racist positions.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://networks.h-net.org/node/16794/reviews/17020/gillman-klarman-jim-crow-civil-rights-supreme-court-and-struggle-racial |title=Gillman on Klarman, 'From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality' {{!}} H-Law {{!}} H-Net|website=networks.h-net.org|access-date=March 26, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180326202852/https://networks.h-net.org/node/16794/reviews/17020/gillman-klarman-jim-crow-civil-rights-supreme-court-and-struggle-racial|archive-date=March 26, 2018|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2000/marchapril/feature/racism-redemption |title=Racism to Redemption |website=National Endowment for the Humanities |access-date=March 26, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171210064143/https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2000/marchapril/feature/racism-redemption |archive-date=December 10, 2017}}</ref> Northern and Western racists opposed the southerners on a regional and cultural basis, but also held segregationist attitudes which became more pronounced as the civil rights movement headed north and west. For instance, prior to the Watts riot, California whites had already mobilized to [[California Proposition 14 (1964)|repeal the state's 1963 fair housing law]].<ref name="Urgency 7" />

Even so, the backlash which occurred at the time was not able to roll back the major civil rights victories which had been achieved or swing the country into reaction. Social historians Matthew Lassiter and [[Barbara Ehrenreich]] note that the backlash's primary constituency was [[suburban]] and middle-class, not working-class whites: "among the white electorate, one half of blue-collar voters…cast their ballot for [the liberal presidential candidate] [[38th Vice President of the United States|Hubert Humphrey]] in 1968…only in the South did [[George Wallace]] draw substantially more blue-collar than white-collar support."<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_a0EAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA6 |title=The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South |last=Lassiter |first=Matthew D. |date=October 24, 2013 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-1-4008-4942-0 |pages=6–7, 302–304}}</ref>