What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in the '70s?

It's a bit of a truism, but here goes: if you don't know your own story, you don't know yourself.

At lunch today with a friend, I realized that I really don't know the story of a movement that is deeply important to me--the Civil Rights Movement. Specifically, I don't know what happened to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s, after King was assassinated and after the riots. Where did the leaders go? Where did all of the people who were trained, formed, affected, shaped by the attitudes and practices of "the movement" go?

Here's what I do know: some of the leaders of the movement went on to other leadership roles as mayors, congressmen, nonprofit heads: Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis. I imagine that some worked in the Great Society welfare programs of the late 60s and 70s, perhaps getting burnt out and frustrated as the nation's commitment to those programs and the funding withered. I imagine many continued to agitate for social change, in the antiwar and women's rights movements and other places.

What is the "story" we tell of that decade, before the 80s and the rise of Reagan and the conservative national agenda? Where did the Civil Rights Movement's wisdom go? Did it dissipate when there was no longer such a clear "enemy" as there was with segregation? Did coalitions fragment and did leaders and activists struggle to find spaces and places to use their organizing knowledge? Was everyone just tired? Did the boomers go off to have families and raise kids in the burbs and leave movement work behind?

What happened to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s? How we tell that part of the story matters for how we approach the work of human liberation today.