politics. During the 1970s blacks were winning public offices in majority-black electoral districts.Different MethodsAfter the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the focus of the civil rights movement began to change. M artin Luther King, Jr., began to focus on poverty and racial inequality in the North. At the same time, younger activists challenged his leadership of the civil rights movement, criticizing his interracial strategy and his appeals to moral idealism; they no longer believed that appeals to idealism would cause whites to renounce racism.In 1965 King joined protests against school discrimination in Chicago. The next year he led marches against housing discrimination in the same city. King's Chicago efforts resulted in little positive change and were widely criticized. After 1965 King also focused on economic issues, particularly black poverty, and advocated income redistribution. In 1967 he began planning what he called the Poor People's Campaign which included another march on Washington, D.C. It was intended to pressure national lawmakers to address the issues of black poverty and violence in cities. In 1968 King was supporting striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he was assassinated. The march on Washington for the Poor People's Campaign took place in the spring of 1968 after King's death, but it failed to achieve greater congressional commitment for addressing black poverty. It became clear that race problems in the Northern cities were serious and perhaps harder to address than segregation in the South because these problems were not the results of specific laws that could be changed.The main opponent of King's moderate policies was the SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the term the Black Power. Black Power advocates were influenced by Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam minister who had been assassinated in early 1965. They viewed Malcolm's black nationalist philosophy, which emphasi...
