war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam's destruction at the hands of "deadly Western arrogance", insisting that "we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor... taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, "The Man don't care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble." Carmichael was right.

The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. They also offered 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. A Green Beret unit was

operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store.

Within hours of King's murder, rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black, were killed. On April 6 the Oakland police cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead.

In contrast to Bobby Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion has hailed King as a man who chose to work non-violently within the system. Near the end, King himself was haunted by a sense of failure. In his last months he was booed at a mass meeting in Chicago and, as he lay sleepless that night, he knew why: "I had urged them [his fellow blacks] to have faith in America and in white society... They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises... They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a