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Notes -
They all played some part of course, that’s just the sausage of history indeed. But man, the 60s were ugly. BLM and a single assassination attempt is tame by comparison. Apparently the message LBJ used to carry the portion of Southern senators needed to break the filibuster was the basic idea “better you now than someone more radical later” - so the framing of people seeing some sort of racial equality effort being law was seen as inevitable, make of that what you will. But there’s at least some mainstream thought such as some research here including citations in the intro that suggests nonviolent protests were associated with both successful campaigns and shift in vote share more often and more strongly than violent ones. Of course, a funny fact is that at least per the polls, a good chunk of people thought the March on Washington even was counter-productive. MLK wasn’t actually super cuddly and moderate, he was dedicated to making whites feel uncomfortable, but there’s a difference between that kind of “troublemaking” and the more violent kind, even if you might plausibly call both radical or even maybe extremist.
But at the end of the day it was white politicians giving more advanced civil rights to Black people.
Nonviolent protests, especially back then, ran under good cop/bad cop where the violent protests made the nonviolent ones effective.
There's also the fact that "nonviolent" and "doesn't cause harm" aren't the same thing. Protests in the 60s were absolutely meant to cause harm to members of the outgroup. Telling your employer that you tweeted in support of assassination is a nonviolent protest (and so is firing someone for that tweet).
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