Daddy King was a force of nature, with a booming voice and presence that could at times be overwhelming. Martin Luther King Jr.’s father might have lacked his son’s diplomatic subtleties, but his elemental strength offered protection. He foresaw such great things for his son that he named him twice: Michael, at birth, and then, after a European trip that elevated his sense of ministerial mission, he changed his own name as well as that of his five-year-old son to Martin Luther. Evoking the radical reformer who transformed Christendom, the change indicated the promise Daddy King saw in his gifted son.
Yet his great shadow was also something the young M. L. King retreated from. The younger King went to Pennsylvania to attend Crozer Theological Seminary, then to Boston University for a PhD, and finally to Montgomery, Alabama, for his first pastorate. As a brand-new twenty-six-year-old minister in Montgomery, King was unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight as one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement. Had boycott planning after Rosa Parks’s arrest not been held at his own Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he might have gone home before the meeting ended. Yet when he was asked to speak at the Holt Street Baptist Church mass meeting, a voice flowed out of him that sounded more like that of a prophet than an organizer. His impassioned words helped sustain the Montgomery bus boycott for over a year—longer than many thought possible for a campaign like that.
Near the end of the boycott, King foretold what their mission from that point on would entail: “It might even mean going to jail. If such is the case, we must be willing to fill up the jail houses of the South. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more honorable.”
Yet despite his confident oratorical skills, King had his share of doubts. He confided in Harry Belafonte when they first met, “I need your help … I have no idea where this movement is going.” King said, “I’m called upon to do things I cannot do, and yet I cannot dismiss the calling. So how do I do this?”
What sustained him then, and would for the rest of his days, was an experience he had one night sitting alone in his kitchen during the most difficult days of the boycott. After receiving a threatening phone call, he suddenly felt the presence of God, promising he would never be left alone, never. But beyond even this experience, he needed something else to justify his hope that he could help America change. He found this additional strength in the organizing tactics of Gandhi. The radical ethos of organized nonviolence, present in both the Sermon on the Mount and the Mahatma’s campaign, offered King a path forward, no matter how dangerous it might prove to be.
The Supreme Court intervened to give the bus boycott a surprising victory, but this did little to ease King’s worries. He told Coretta, “People will expect me to perform miracles for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be the kind of man who hits his peak at twenty-seven, with the rest of his life an anticlimax. Neither do I want to disappoint people by not being able to pull rabbits out of a hat.” He wondered if he had reached “the zenith of my career too early … I might be on the decline at a fairly early age.” Any hopes for a life as a quiet (however proudly intellectual) parish minister were changed forever by fame and the promise others saw in him, and there was no going back. King would later lament in a sermon to his Montgomery congregation, which ended with him in tears, that he was tired of “the general strain of being known.” He distrusted this fame that, to his perplexity, kept growing, kept seeking him out as he spoke and organized. The more renowned he became, the more he felt unmoored as he tried to do God’s will to the degree he could perceive it.
As King increasingly captured the nation’s attention, he felt he was “a pretty unprepared symbol.” Yet how could he possibly prepare himself to become a representative of the people? This was something circumstances thrust upon you—no one, from Isaiah on, trained for it; there was only the image of the prophet’s lips being singed by hot coals, the admission that “I am undone.” Not even being Daddy King’s son could prepare you for this. And yet the younger King spoke of the zeitgeist of history plucking him up, his sense that no one else could do what he was seemingly being asked to do.
He would tell Coretta, “I can’t afford to make a mistake.” Though his hold on being a public figure felt tenuous, he accepted it. Every time he was offered an escape route—and he was offered many, from illustrious pulpits to prestigious professorships—he declined and packed his bag for another road trip, another march. Other Black leaders were often jealous of his gifts, his ability to claim the spotlight, but few understood what came with the weary pursuit. It was a hard road, even harder when he could not see where it was leading.
In late 1959, he acquiesced in Daddy King’s plea for him to come home to Atlanta, thinking his father’s imposing strength might in some measure protect him from these growing pressures while he contemplated how to lead a national movement as he had led a movement in an Alabama city. There, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King’s headquarters would be just a few doors down the street from Ebenezer Baptist Church. King could now constantly fly in and out of the hub of Atlanta to fulfill dozens of speaking engagements. His scattered life made the prospect of being co-pastor at his childhood church seem like a secure home base, anchored in the supportive locale that had raised him. After all, it was here, in the middle-class, professional surrounds of Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, that he had been told he was born to do great things.
Yet five years after the boycott, he was still struggling to figure out—as he put it to increasingly larger audiences—how to save the soul of America, nothing less. There was momentum from what he had begun in Montgomery, but could America be moved, shocked, persuaded to abandon its racial caste system? Just because his twenties were more eventful than the lives of most mortals did not mean King understood where to go in his thirties. In moving his growing family back home to Atlanta in early 1960, King was hoping to avoid being a one-hit wonder, trying to translate his early, signal success into something larger.
As the 1960s loomed on the horizon, however, King was floundering in his efforts to build a mass movement for a civil rights revolution. He had talked of organizing an American version of Gandhi’s Salt March, but the conference he planned in Atlanta to bring it to fruition mustered fewer than a hundred sign-ups. He organized voter registration sit-ins around the South, expecting two thousand participants in thirteen locations. There was no response in key cities and a mere handful of protesters in others. The New York Times wrote almost mockingly about how small the turnout was. King had championed the Crusade for Citizenship, aiming to double the number of registered voters in the South by the 1960 election, but he was nowhere near this goal. It was unclear to King what his Southern Christian Leadership Conference should even be: a leadership association of ministers, a platform for King, or more of a grassroots organization? Should it focus on the vote or on direct action? How could its impact be more than regional? When describing King in 1960, The New York Times still had to remind readers that he was known for an Alabama bus boycott.
Amid these struggles, Daddy King promised city elders and fellow Black leaders that his son would not make trouble locally, that his reputation as a movement leader would be muted in his hometown. Georgia’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, a man King would never meet (but who would end up playing a consequential role in the events of October 1960), immediately denounced King’s homecoming, saying that “anyone, including King, who comes across our state lines with the avowed intention of breaking laws will be kept under surveillance at all times.” Longtime Atlanta Black leaders, Daddy King’s proud Republican allies and friends, were nearly as uneasy with the wunderkind’s return, worried that he might disrupt long-standing accommodations forged with local white politicians. Daddy King assured them that America’s challenges were vast enough that King did not need to make Atlanta his target, telling friends, “He’s not coming to cause trouble.”
And he didn’t. Trouble claimed him.
After returning home to Daddy King’s world, King retained a measure of independence by resisting the old man’s partisan loyalties. The self-confident and increasingly economically secure world of King’s Sweet Auburn was a strong redoubt of Republicanism. Nationally, surveys at the time showed that Black Americans were split on the question of which party was better for them, narrowly favoring the Republicans. Roosevelt’s New Deal had indeed swayed many formerly staunch Black Republicans through job creation, particularly in the North, but Black communities in southern cities like Atlanta remained GOP strongholds. Atlanta’s Black Republicanism was more than a residual memory of Lincoln. With a southern Democratic Party that fiercely protected its segregationist power, allegiance to the GOP was a matter of survival for families like the Kings. Yes, FDR had made the party more palatable in many Black communities, but here in the South, men like Daddy King were only being attentive to the reality they saw around them.
In December 1959, King junior told a friend how Nixon was the only candidate who would call him and invite him to his home, which made him inclined to support Nixon, as he thought increasing numbers of Black Americans would. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend, had already made clear that Nixon was his man. King voted Republican in the 1956 presidential election, as did nearly 80 percent of Atlanta’s Black voters. In addition to his father, other leaders whom King had respected all of his life such as the real estate broker John Calhoun—head of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and a wily Republican wheeler-dealer—held a modicum of political power by way of the organizations they had built with the support of Black Republican voters. But men like Calhoun did not operate in this political world on their own; they needed the power of Black preachers.
While the younger King remained publicly neutral, which both candidates took as an invitation to court him, Daddy King was not at all tempted to back Senator Kennedy. At an event held at Mount Zion Second Baptist Church on October 10, an impressive array of Black Atlanta preachers gathered to champion the Republican ticket. Daddy King was more than ready to support Georgia’s GOP. The celebratory event was vintage John Calhoun, deftly rallying Black Atlanta for his party once again. The charismatic, round-faced Calhoun told the sizable crowd that Nixon and Lodge both possessed better records than Lyndon Johnson, a Texan they most certainly did not trust, and that JFK had been vague, at best, in his previous civil rights positions. Daddy King then used this opportunity to offer a full-throated endorsement of Nixon.
Both M.L. and A.D. were spotted at the program, dutiful sons that they were, but neither made an endorsement. Onlookers could only wonder if their father’s stance was rubbing off on his uncommitted son. Yet that fall, King continued to refuse to be partisan, labeling both parties “hypocritical” on the subject of equality, saying, “The dearth of positive leadership from Washington is not confined to one political party. Each of them has been willing to follow the long pattern of using the Negro as a political football.” Ultimately, King was trying to keep both parties from co-opting him and his movement.
While Louis Martin had persuaded Kennedy to speak at Howard University, Wofford’s turn to assert himself came when he led a national, nonpartisan convocation on equal rights in New York City in mid-October, less than a month before the election. The CRS’s goal was to burnish Kennedy’s lackluster civil rights record, with a conference stuffed with NAACP and National Urban League leaders, academics, community activists, and even a few liberal Republicans. They invited Vice President Nixon to attend, but as they predicted, he declined.
Wofford’s and Martin’s years of connections gave them the credibility to put the gathering together, and in doing so, Martin felt that the CRS not only surpassed the Nixon campaign but firmly established their candidate as a credible civil rights advocate. When the CRS was later praised for helping turn the election, Martin maintained that helping King had been “the icing on the cake, but the cake was already made.” Nonetheless, the event did reveal some deference on the part of the CRS to more conservative elements in the Kennedy campaign. In Wofford’s words, some of Kennedy’s associates were “tremendously scared of losing white votes.” The vice presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson, recommended that instead of explicitly evoking “civil rights,” the convocation should be called the National Conference on Constitutional Rights. If that was what it took to talk about equality, the CRS would happily accept a change of name.
On October 11, a week before the sit-in at Rich’s in Atlanta, the National Conference on Constitutional Rights convened at the Park Sheraton, just below Central Park, with its grand awning of golden lights. The chief draw was not Kennedy but Eleanor Roosevelt, given the trust Black leaders had in her. Hence the shock when she proclaimed, in the summer, that “Kennedy can’t win the Negro vote.” (She famously quipped that JFK needed “a little less profile and more courage.”) Now, at last warming to Kennedy, she told the gathering, “It took courage to call this conference … Senator Kennedy will fight to get prompt action on civil rights.”
With the conference concluding successfully on the second day, participants boarded buses to head uptown for a Harlem campaign rally. In front of the Hotel Theresa, on a stage erected over the wide sidewalk of Seventh Avenue, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell greeted a crowd of two thousand people. When JFK joined him, Powell proclaimed, “This is the next President!”
Kennedy cried, “Are we going to vote Democratic?” and Harlem roared back. He reminded the crowd how democratic revolutions were once inspired by America: “There are children in Africa called Thomas Jefferson. There are none called Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin in the Congo, or Nixon.” After pausing, Kennedy added, “There may be a couple called Adam Powell.”
“Careful, Jack!” Powell interjected from behind, and his hometown audience roared with knowing laughter.
Kennedy accused Nixon of concealing his own civil rights record, whereas he was proud of his. He asked the crowd to stand with him in moving the country forward, “until the United States achieves this great goal of practicing what it preaches.”
Coincidentally, on the same night and in the same neighborhood, Nixon’s vice presidential nominee, Henry Cabot Lodge, wooed Black and Puerto Rican voters at a rally at 116th and Lexington, among searchlights and fireworks. The Republican set off an explosion of his own. Lodge pledged, for the first time in American history, that Nixon would appoint a Black man to the cabinet if he won. Nixon now had to deal with what most white Republicans felt was an unforced error by Lodge.
When Louis Martin heard the news, Lodge’s pledge “hit like a bomb.” This was a far more specific promise for action than Kennedy’s rhetoric on equal opportunity. Should they make a similar commitment? Then it struck him: Nixon would not back up Lodge. Martin and Wofford bet Nixon would not have the courage to support his vice presidential candidate. As they gamed it out, they decided their campaign should not make any panicked promises. It would be better to highlight the substantive policies that had been spotlighted at the New York conference.
They anxiously waited to see how Nixon would react. When the morning papers arrived, their prediction was borne out. While campaigning in his native Southern California, Nixon disowned Lodge’s pledge, saying only, “I will attempt to appoint the best man possible without regard to race, creed or color.” A Nixon aide told The New York Times, lest his statement be less than clear, “Mr. Nixon would not appoint a Negro just because he was a Negro.” The Nixon campaign was now in a terrible bind, having offered something, only to yank it away. One Virginia Republican said of Lodge, “Whoever recommended that Harlem speech should have been thrown out of an airplane at 25,000 feet.”
In truth, Lodge’s promise upset Martin on a deeper level than even Wofford knew. What Lodge proposed, ill-advisedly or not, was exactly what Martin hoped to accomplish. He vowed to ask Kennedy to “move decisively toward the integration of the Supreme Court and the Cabinet.” If Martin could bring about these groundbreaking appointments, “there was no job in the federal establishment too big for a black man,” or in any part of American life.
The competing Harlem rallies were an unusual interlude in a campaign season largely devoid of talk about civil rights. But there was something else striking about them, too: the conspicuous absence of Martin Luther King.
Back in the summer, Lonnie King—the lively, impatient Morehouse student leader—said to King, “Can I get you to go to jail with us? ’Cause if you go to jail with us, because of Montgomery, it will become an international story.” The plan, he said, was to stage a sit-in at Rich’s.
For generations, Rich’s department store had been the place where Atlanta families shopped for fashionable clothes, where kids got to ride the beloved Pink Pig monorail, and where restaurants and bathrooms were humiliatingly segregated by race. Lonnie believed that if the students could force Rich’s—the most prominent department store in Georgia, if not the whole South—to desegregate, every downtown business would follow suit.
As a test, Lonnie had visited Rich’s lunch counter over the summer with the family of Howard Zinn, a white professor at Spelman College. The staff turned off all the lights, preferring to close the restaurant rather than risk a confrontation. After perturbed white patrons had filed out and Rich’s called the police, Lonnie was brought to police headquarters for a warning, by way of a talk in Chief Herbert Jenkins’s office. The owner of Rich’s, Dick Rich, was also present. To Rich, criticism of his store felt personal, because he thought of himself as a liberal on race. He told the student leader how much he supported the Atlanta University Center and how his store was the first to give Black people charge cards—all true. So he felt justified in asking Lonnie to stop any future student protests at his store.
Lonnie responded that Rich needed to integrate his store fully, even allowing Black shoppers to eat in the elegant Magnolia Room. The meeting fell apart, and Rich’s face turned red as he shouted, “If you bring your Black ass in again, I’m telling you, Chief, put his ass under the jail.”
Lonnie shot back, “I’m coming back in October, and I’m going to bring thousands of students with me, so Chief Jenkins, get your cells together, ’cause we will be back.”
As October approached, Dr. King had encouraged Lonnie’s student leadership while keeping his own counsel as to whether he would be participating in the students’ direct action. That was fine with Lonnie; King hadn’t said no, so Lonnie assumed that meant yes. The pensive King had always been hard to read, but there was no denying his strong support for the exploding sit-in movement across the South. The movement began in February 1960, when four North Carolina A&T students ordered food at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter and refused to leave when asked. Having seen the effects of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat five years before, King knew the importance of seizing transformative moments when they unexpectedly presented themselves. Only fifteen days after the Greensboro students first began the sit-in movement, King addressed a group in Durham, North Carolina, praising the bold move. He told his audience, “Remember that both history and destiny are on your side … And one day, historians of this era might be able to say, there lived a great people, a black people who injected new meaning into civilization.” King spoke words that day that would soon have unforeseen implications for him: “Let us not fear going to jail. If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South.”
Within weeks, there were dozens, and then hundreds, of similar student sit-ins erupting all across the South. King’s success with the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks’s arrest continued to inspire students, showing what could be accomplished by citizens through nonviolent civil disobedience. Now a younger generation was propelling the movement forward, and King could catch up or be left behind. He was quick to support the student sit-ins.
The minister saw in these students a spirit that his own SCLC seemed to lack, and King wondered, as the movement exploded, if he might be able to guide it while also harnessing its power. At Spelman College’s Founders Day on April 10, he said, “You’re not merely demanding a cup of coffee and a hamburger here and there. You are demanding respect.” After watching King put the moral clarity of the sit-ins into words, a student named Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) wrote in her diary, “There’s something almost holy about him.”
In the months before the election, the energy was exhilarating. In February, Lonnie King had read in the Black-owned, Republican Atlanta Daily World about the North Carolina lunch counter sit-in, and everything about the students’ actions resonated with him. Quickly, he organized a team from the adjacent campuses of Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, Interdenominational Theological Center, Clark College, and Atlanta University to follow their example. In preparing students for sit-ins, he taught them that their method of resistance must be nonviolent, but warned them that the other side might not be. In mid-May, Lonnie led nearly three thousand students in a march up the hill to Georgia’s capitol on the sixth anniversary of the still unenforced Brown v. Board of Education decision. The students had invited Dr. King to walk with them, and as they set out that morning, they wondered if he would make an appearance.
Governor Vandiver, however, had the protesters met with armed troops and fire hoses. As the marchers approached the gold-domed statehouse, Lonnie elected to detour to avoid the capitol and the danger it posed. He would not risk lives being lost—not this time. When the students finally arrived at Wheat Street Baptist Church, King was waiting for them on the church steps, greeting them with pride and relief.
When students returned for the fall semester, planning for the big push against Rich’s segregationist policies began. The students had skirted a confrontation with the authorities in their spring march, but there was no guarantee they would be so lucky again. Lonnie understood the fears expressed by Daddy King’s generation of leaders: “They were concerned we were going to overshoot the runway; a lot of us were going to get killed—that’s understandable.”
Lonnie watched the presidential campaign with mounting anger, however. He thought both candidates seemed to talk about every problem in the world except their own country’s problem with racism. He reflected, “If you had been from Mars, you wouldn’t have known any Black folks were in this country … and thousands of young Black kids, and some white kids too, were raising heck all over the South.” The students decided the most opportune time to act would be after the third presidential debate, to put “this issue of civil and human rights on the burner and make the Kennedy Nixon people discuss it.”
With the planned sit-in at Rich’s less than a week away, emotions were running high. Student activists from around the country, including the formidable Nashville crew of John Lewis, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, and James Bevel, descended on Atlanta for a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) conference over the weekend. A message arrived from the Kennedy campaign reading, “The human rights for which you strive are the definite goal of all America.” A student leader announced a message from Nixon would be coming as well, but none arrived.
King spoke at the SNCC gathering and praised the students’ efforts, but he was upstaged by the Reverend James Lawson of Nashville, who told the students that the next time they went to jail, they all needed to refuse bail. Soon a rhythmic chant of “jail/no bail” filled the conference hall. King had been saying for years that there was “great suffering” soon to come, but many students—some starting to judge the thirty-one-year-old minister as more oratorically gifted than daring—wondered who, precisely, would bear the brunt of this suffering. John Lewis saw the Atlanta students repeatedly pulling King aside, prodding him to make a decision.
King understood how upset the students were about the prospect of his not participating in their planned act of civil disobedience. But an arrest in Montgomery years earlier, when he came close to spending a night in jail, had left him shaken, and he was personally hesitant about the movement’s radical tactic of going to jail. John Lewis believed King nonetheless recognized SNCC’s increasing influence on the civil rights movement and saw the need to act. “If he stayed on the sidelines much longer,” Lewis wrote, “he and the SCLC risked losing us. Basically he knew it was time for him to stick his neck out, as so many of us had been doing for months.”
Six students followed King to the airport later that weekend as he was leaving to deliver a series of speeches up and down the East Coast, and they walked with him through the terminal, continuing to pressure him. An onlooker thought King seemed to be on the verge of tears.
Once King was back in Atlanta, a group of students found him eating at his parents’ house and invited themselves inside. Feeling trapped, King was forced to listen as they implored him to get arrested alongside them at the upcoming sit-in. When Daddy King walked in, he said angrily, “M.L., you don’t need to go! This is the students, not you.” Then he kicked the students out of his house.
Harris Wofford heard with dismay King’s soft Georgia murmur offering conditions that he was certain the Kennedys were not going to like. The minister was laying out his reasons for why their hopes for a joint appearance with John F. Kennedy—not an endorsement, but something close to it—were misplaced. King told Wofford, “I’ve learned that Nixon is going to be at the veterans’ convention, and I have a rule to be bipartisan, and not one or another, so I have to offer that I would meet with him too.”
“Do you really feel you have to?”
“Yes,” said King, knowing he was thwarting Wofford’s efforts. King told him Nixon might not show, but that he needed to invite him and make it a joint appearance. Wofford said he understood and would plead with the Kennedys to not let Nixon’s presence in Miami force them to abandon the whole idea. But he knew his perfect event was slipping away.
Putting down the phone, a disappointed Wofford began strategizing with Louis Martin because it was clear that a daunting task lay ahead of them. Shriver was back in Illinois, preparing for the final push in that state. They would have to persuade Bobby, on their own, to accept the conditions offered by a controversial activist with whom the Kennedys were not completely comfortable—a task made even more difficult by the fact that Kennedy was increasingly allergic to getting anywhere near Nixon if he could avoid it.
Wofford got a chance to convince the candidate himself as well, but JFK exploded: “To hell with that, Nixon doesn’t have much to lose in this whole situation … I lose Southern votes.” Kennedy had the white South to hold on to; Nixon had it to gain.
Kennedy seldom lost his temper, usually opting for deft, deflective humor. But months of campaigning had worn down any hope of his showing much sympathy for Nixon—Nixon, whose Senate office was across from his and whose political career had, from the moment they both entered Congress as newly elected navy veterans from the Pacific theater, so closely tracked his own. While they were once friendly, if distant, Kennedy now routinely attacked Nixon with expletives.
Bobby, too, was curt when Wofford floated King’s proposal: “No. You can’t possibly do that.” Wofford argued the Miami event could still be worth it, given that he and Martin were virtually certain that Nixon would decline, just as he had declined invitations to Howard and the New York City conference.
Bobby dismissed this idea; there was no way they were going to risk offering Nixon a large stage to do whatever he wanted. If this young preacher wanted to make demands, then “take it off the agenda, we’re not meeting him. That’s not going to do us any good.”
Wofford’s relationship with Bobby had been fraught since the day they had met on the Hill three years earlier. Kennedy was then chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, and a mutual friend thought that they should know each other. As Wofford looked on, Bobby calmly ate the lunch that a Black attendant set out for him, until at last he picked up Wofford’s résumé and perused it. He said, before sending Wofford away, “One thing I just can’t understand is, why did you go to Howard Law School? I could understand going and teaching there, but how in the world did you go there to be a student?”
Now, three years later, Bobby dismissed the idealistic Wofford once again. It was Wofford’s turn to give King some bad news. When Wofford called King to tell him the Miami event was off, he sensed unexpected disquiet in King’s response. To Wofford’s surprise, the minister sounded even more distressed than he himself felt.
While refusing to compromise the obligation he felt toward nonpartisanship, King confided in his old friend why he really wished for the Miami event to take place: “I’m in a real jam ’cause they’re going ahead despite my urging them not to do a sit-in before the election; they’re going to go ahead and do it for Rich’s department store. I’m under great pressure to go there. I don’t really want to, I don’t think it’s the best thing, but they’re doing it and I probably am going to have to go with them.”
King had wanted a good excuse to avoid the Rich’s protest, which being in Miami would have provided, and now it had been yanked away. He felt boxed in by students whose idealism matched their determination. Without an important event to attend, King conceded, “I have to participate now.”
Wofford’s disappointment was insignificant compared with what King felt as he canceled his plans to go to Florida. There would be no packing of suitcases for Miami, only a paper bag of toiletries for a booking cell. He had endured much since Montgomery, but this was different.
The day before the sit-in, Lonnie King was at the Spelman library trying to inspire more students to join them. He asked his new co-chair Herschelle Sullivan to “call M.L. and just remind him to meet me at ten o’clock on the bridge tomorrow.” From his conversations with King dating back to August, Lonnie believed King would join the sit-in. Sullivan didn’t know Dr. King, but Lonnie said, “Just tell him that I asked you to call him and he’ll talk to you.” Though Lonnie did not doubt King’s commitment to the cause, he preferred to leave nothing to chance. He knew King was hesitant to take part, which he believed came not from King’s own fears but from his father’s. Sullivan later wondered if Lonnie chose her to make the call to King because, if the pastor was considering backing out, he might be less likely to do so speaking to a woman.
Sullivan had been studying in Europe in the spring but dove into the student movement upon her return to Atlanta. Her strengths complemented Lonnie’s, and she made a solid partner as the crucial day neared, but her call to the King residence was met with a disappointing reply. Sullivan walked back to Lonnie with a distressed look. “Lonnie, he said he can’t go.”
“Can’t go?”
A shocked Lonnie soon had King on the phone, along with Daddy King and the SCLC administrative head, Wyatt Tee Walker. A furious Daddy King replied with what Lonnie thought was a bombastic no, but Lonnie held his ground: they needed King there.
Lonnie said, “M.L., let me say something to you: you are the moral leadership of this movement, whether you like it or not, and you promised me you were going to go.”
The younger King stayed silent. Daddy King replied that it made no sense for his son to subject himself to further legal peril, especially because he was supposed to be preparing for a trip to Nigeria. King’s return to Atlanta earlier that year had nearly been thwarted when Alabama indicted him for submitting fraudulent tax returns. Though the charges were baseless, they threw King into a depression. He feared all he had worked for could be stripped from him. It took the effort of family and friends to get him back on his speaking schedule to face audiences still eager to hear him. King’s response was hardly surprising, though, given that a white Alabama jury would almost certainly find him guilty. Jail time looked like a very real possibility.
At around the same time, he faced another legal entanglement, though it seemed like a minor nuisance compared with the tax indictment. On May 4, 1960, King volunteered to drive the novelist Lillian Smith, a white ally of the movement, to her breast cancer treatment. DeKalb police spotted this Black man and white woman in a 1957 Ford near Emory University’s campus on Clifton Road and pulled King over. As he sat in the driver’s seat, the police told King his car tags were out of date, though Smith knew that her presence was the real reason why her friend had been pulled over. King explained that the car did not belong to him. The officer ticketed him for this and then, fatefully, also wrote him a ticket for not carrying a Georgia driver’s license, though he still carried a valid Alabama one. King took a day off to appear before Judge Oscar Mitchell in nearby Decatur, and in a quick and seemingly uneventful trial he was ordered to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine, which he paid.
To King’s amazement, on May 28, 1960, he was declared innocent of all tax charges by an all-white Alabama jury. Suddenly the whole wretched specter of jail evaporated. The fine for an out-of-state driver’s license seemed of no importance. Still, King’s legal travails left him skittish; he had been in enough courtrooms that May to last a lifetime.
On the phone, Lonnie reiterated the plan: “You and I are going down to Rich’s. There’s going to be hundreds of us all over downtown.” Lonnie interpreted King’s silence as a sign that he was torn between an old friend and his father. Lonnie said, “This is your hometown, and I think you need to go with us. If you get arrested with us, it’ll be in the national news, and I think that’s what the movement needs.” King understood Lonnie’s sense of urgency; he knew the indignity of not being able to get a hamburger and a coffee at a lunch counter, and would speak later of seeing tears in his daughter’s eyes when he had to tell her they were not allowed to go to the Funtown amusement park.
As the call dragged on, Daddy King’s resistance aggravated Lonnie. He decided to play a card only someone who’d been attending Ebenezer Baptist Church since 1945 could possibly hold. Every year, without fail, Daddy King preached a sermon about how you must be ready to engage and sacrifice for your cause. So Lonnie quoted the sermon’s title by saying, “M.L., you can’t lead from the back. You gotta lead from the front.”
Daddy King could say nothing to that.
His son slowly replied, “L.C., what time do you want me to meet you?”
“Ten o’clock on the bridge.” This was the sky bridge over Forsyth Street that led into Rich’s. They all knew it well.
“Okay,” King said. “I’ll be there.”
That same day, on the other side of town, the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union was staging another public endorsement of Nixon. This would be one of two big stories readers of the Atlanta Daily World would confront the next morning, October 19. The Republican endorsement appeared on the front page, along with a news item stating that hundreds of students would be heading downtown sometime that day to protest Rich’s segregationist policies. There was no mention of the fact that Daddy King’s son would be joining them.
The Nixon and Kennedy campaigns were unaware of events in Atlanta. Unusually, both men were appearing in Florida on the same day. October 19 was slated to be another long slog, with a stop for Nixon in Wilmington, Delaware, and speeches for Kennedy in New York City, culminating in their joint evening appearance at the ritual Al Smith Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.
If all went as planned the next day, Lonnie’s friend Otis Moss Jr. would be ready to telegram both Kennedy and Nixon that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had gone to jail in support of desegregation. Lonnie predicted to friends that Nixon was the presidential candidate who would respond.