As sociologist Michael Eric Dyson XXXXXXXXXXputs it, “King sensed the raging of a more powerful force than he had confronted in all the years of his civil rights struggles: structural economic...

As sociologist Michael Eric Dyson (2000) puts it, “King sensed the raging of a more powerful force than he had confronted in all the years of his civil rights struggles: structural economic inequality. . . . King saw that in the struggle to free Northern blacks, race mattered, but class mattered more” (pp. 82–83). By 1980, sociologist William Julius Wilson confirmed that the life chances of individual blacks now were influenced more by their class position than by their interaction with whites.