DBWI: What if James Earl Ray had successfully assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.?

TheKinkster

Banned
As anyone with any knowledge of history knows, on April 4th, 1968, James Earl Ray attempted to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. However, just as her was about to fire, he was startled by a loud noise in the vicinity, and the shot went just above Dr. King's head, giving him and his entourage time to find safety.

How do you all think history would have been different if James Earl Ray had been successful?
 
Well for one thing the liberal wing of the GOP might have died out entirely. Remember in the 1980s it was largely Dr. King who prevented Ronald Reagan from getting the nomination because he thought (quite logically) that Reagan would try to gut the social safety net and leave poor families out in the cold. Also without his endorsement Colin Powell might not have become the nation's first black president in 1996.
 
Hard to say -- King's greatest accomplishments of the 1970's seem like such inevitabilities today, whether it's the rise of the Religious Left, the grassroots support for Humphrey's Grand Civilization program,* what have you. Even the races where he got heavily involved -- Bush beating Reagan in the 80 primaries was mentioned -- had a lot of independent factors. That said, there might be little butterflies that have big consequences (I'd been reading the new Heston memoir, Path to the Presidency, that said King's letter encouragement helped seal his decision to run for Senate).

*while we're at it though, can we at least agree Hubert would still have thwarted Nixon's re-election, whatever the latter may have thought?
 
Well, the question becomes, would we still have the "Asian Summer" of 1992-1994, wherein democratic protests led to the collapse of the governments in the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Cambodia, Mynanmar, and Vietnam?

According to the Stephen King novel 1968, we would have had a conservative dystopia, wherein the Soviet Union was a major trading partner, and China collapses violently into a dozen "warring states". I seriously doubt that things would be as harsh as that. Middle Eastern terrorists even manage to launch an attack that destroys the World Trade Center in New York...
 
I doubt we would have had a black president yet if he had died.

OOC: why are people saying that he was a republican? The major support for the civil rights movement came from the democrats.
 
I doubt we would have had a black president yet if he had died.

OOC: why are people saying that he was a republican? The major support for the civil rights movement came from the democrats.
Well consider that You have Governor Douglas Wilder (D-VA) in 1976. You have Jesse Jackson in 1984. You have Clarence Thomas in 1992. You have General Colin Powell in 2000. You even have the junior senator from Illinois as a possible candidate. There certainly would have been one candidate sooner or later...
 
There's no way someone from urban Chicago or any other VRA district could be elected president. They'd necessarily be too far left for national office. The first black president would still have to be a center right or moderate guy like Colin Powell, and MLK being shot could easily butterfly Powell (or Wilder) away from national politics. So, a black president is by no means inevitable.
 
We certainly wouldn't have the Poor People's Campaign and the creation of "Freedom Towns" across America in 1968. The attention the protests brought to social issues such as poverty and homelessness can't be forgotten. Pictures of "Freedom Towns" in New York's Times Square, Washington D.C.'s Mall, and the New Orleans French Quarter are often seen during Black History Month specials every year....

OOC: I don't understand where people are getting the impression that Martin Luther King Jr. would be Republican, especially considering that many Republicans up until the Reagan administration were worried about King's "Communist sympathies"...
 
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