"The radicalization of civil-rights politics began in the mid-1960s. On July 18, 1964, Police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, a student at Robert F. Wagner Junior High. Powell's killing touched off a riot in Harlem that ultimately led to 465 arrests and 118 injuries. In the wake of the Harlem riots, in August 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in violence. The Watts riots resulted in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and over 400 arrests. The Watts riots also galvanized change in some civil-rights organizations. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been a bi-racial, student organization best known for its Freedom Summer efforts to register black voters in the Deep South. In May 1966, SNCC elected as Chairman Stokey Carmichael, a Trinidad-born, naturalized citizen thought of as a leading intellectual in the organization. Within a month, Carmichael had begun to popularize calls for "black power" rather than civil rights. As debate about the meaning and legitimacy of the subject grew, Martin Luther King, Jr. deemed the term "unfortunate." However, Floyd McKissick, the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) defended the term. He explained its meaning as follows: "The syndrome of the powerlessness of black Americans could only be ended by their own efforts; by harnessing the tremendous economic potential of the ghetto and by developing political movements that would fulfill the needs of its people." CORE had been in operation since after World War II, attracting the most attention for its Freedom Rides, efforts to desegregate interstate bus travel. By 1966, like SNCC CORE had expelled white members, and McKissick called opponents of black power part of a "malevolent Southern tradition that seeks, even now, to divide black America into 'good niggers' and 'bad niggers.""