Shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated outside his motel room in Memphis on April 4, 1968, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller issued a public statement. A true memorial to King, he said, “cannot be made of stone, it must be made of action.”
Five days later, the governor was in Atlanta to attend the civil rights leader’s funeral, and he expected to go to sleep that night having followed through on his statement.
Rockefeller had been elected governor in 1958; he’d already left his mark on the state, reinvigorating its public university system, creating the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (and taking significant planning power away from Robert Moses), and forming a State Council on the Arts, which later became the model for the National Endowment for the Arts. One particular idea, however, was a little too big. Rockefeller wanted to create a superagency that could plan and design cultural centers, stadiums, factories, parking garages, and—most controversially—tens of thousands of affordable housing units, from Niagara Falls to Montauk. And he understood that the fraught days after the King assassination would be his best hope to get enough votes to jam such legislation through.
[For more on this story by MARK BYRNES, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...ing-solution/557381/]
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