It might be hard for younger generations of Americans in 2018, fifty years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, to fathom just how controversial a figure he was during his career, and particularly around the time of his death. The strength of the opposition to civil rights for blacks, the antagonizing and discomfiting words King used, and the aggressively disruptive tactics he and his supporters employed have been pushed into the background. King now fits so comfortably into the present-day popular understanding of American history that one might think that nearly all Americans had supported him enthusiastically from the very start, and that his murder was a tragic event unmoored from any wider opposition to his activities.