Because they did not believe the non-violent approach would be enough to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement. Between 1965 and 1968, there were nearly three hundred racial uprisings that shattered the peace of urban America and undermined Johnson’s much-vaunted war on poverty. At the same time, a disproportionate number of blacks were serving in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. As those military veterans returned, they enlisted in another war, this time fighting for the Black Panthers. On the head of the movement, Malcolm X, his militant candor of abandon his strident anti-white rhetoric and preach a biracial message of social change, inspired thousands of blacks who had never identified with Martin Luther King’s philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience.
