Even if you assume that MLK, et al *wanted* white violence rather than designing a strategy to render it counterproductive, you must still accept that rioting is the polar opposite of this approach & will fail for the same reasons Bull Connor failed.
The core problem with basically every defense of rioting is that it ignores both 1) how rioting harms innocent people & 2) how rioting harms the causes it claims to advance. If a thing is certain to cause harm w/o accomplishing its ends, why defend it?
If you're in a war, & you talk about deliberately torching & pillaging a civilian neighborhood, you need a pretty compelling argument for what that will accomplish if you intend to justify it morally. Somehow, the people who see this in that context throw it out the window here.
The bait-and-switch, however, is that the left's defenses of riots are all about "can we sympathize with the intentions"? This is a dodge, & an infantilizing one. Either you think the act is morally justifiable or not - same as if we were debating, say, voting for Trump.
Nobody who's defending riots would ever want to live in the middle of one.
