Martin Luther King, New York

All of this has been drowned out since the fall of 1967 by the increasingly louder debate about the war in Vietnam. This had provoked criticism from the start, but mostly within academic circles and marginal groups of the New Left.

While individual members of the African-American elite took one symbolic hurdle after another, this did little to change the extreme poverty of the vast majority of blacks. They often lived in inhumane “Third World” conditions in city centers.

In 1967, the liberal post-war consensus in the USA fell apart. This was based on a combination of several elements: on the one hand, on a robust foreign policy anti-communism and internationalism, on the other hand, on growing prosperity in the wake of the economic boom after the Second World War, which was accompanied by the expansion of welfare state programs, but also growing political participation of previously discriminated groups.