Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part Two

 

When Shriver got to the hotel suite he found Kennedy surrounded by aides, all rigidly opposed to the idea. Although the senator had already expressed his concerns privately to Governor Vandiver, he worried that a public telephone call to Coretta King could be perceived as a “gimmick” to reel in black votes. His key advisor, Ken O’Donnell, saw little political upside. “I felt my job was to always focus on the political factors and implications,” O’Donnell recalled. “The moral issues would be raised by Bobby [Kennedy], Sarge [Shriver], Harris Wofford, or others.” When John Kennedy pulled O’Donnell aside to confer privately, Ken told him: “While I am sympathetic to what Mrs. King and her family must be going through, from a political point of view, all I can see is that it could backfire.” How could Kennedy, a candidate who was criticized for his lukewarm support of black issues, justify this unusual bighearted action? “There are a million ways politically it could be a mess,” he warned Kennedy.

 

Shriver hovered, waiting to make his case alone. Finally the aides began to disperse: Wordsmith Ted Sorensen left to work on a speech, and press secretary Pierre Salinger went out to speak with reporters. But O’Donnell stuck around—besides advising Kennedy, he was the man who controlled access to the candidate and later to the president, and he now stood between Jack and his brother-in-law. Ready to pull rank as brother in law, Shriver approached O’Donnell. “I never use my family connection or ask for a favor, but you are wrong, Kenny,” he said. “This is too important. I want time alone with him.”

 

In O’Donnell’s view, the issue was decided and he didn’t want it reopened. But he also knew Shriver didn’t use his family position to advantage. “Unlike others,” O’Donnell said of Shriver, “he never asked or abused that [family] relationship, and, at some level, morally I suspected he might be right, though politically I still was against it.” Out of respect, or courtesy, or simply because he was hungry, O’Donnell stepped aside, allowing Shriver a private moment with Jack.

 

In parting, O’Donnell said softly he hadn’t eaten, he was going to get a hamburger, and the two men shook hands.

 

“You know I am right,” Shriver said as O’Donnell started off.

 

“Maybe,” O’Donnell replied. Then reminding him of how things often went in the rough and tumble of politics, he observed: “If it works, you’ll get no credit for it; if it does not, you’ll get all the blame.”

 

Shriver went into Kennedy’s room and found his brother-in-law alone, folding his clothes into his suitcase. As Shriver built his case, describing King’s terrifying drive through rural Georgia and Coretta’s anguish, Kennedy didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was elsewhere. “Jack,” Shriver pressed, “you just need to convey to Mrs. King that you believe what happened to her husband was wrong and that you will do what you can to see the situation rectified and that in general you stand behind him.”

 

Kennedy was not paying attention. To engage him, Shriver appealed to his conscience. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected,” he told Jack. “But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

 

Although cool and detached, Kennedy was in a quiet way sympathetic to the suffering of others and had a reflexive dislike of unfairness. All at once, Shriver noticed a change of heart in his brother-in-law. As he remembered it, Jack zipped up his suitcase then turned to him and said: “That’s a pretty good idea. How do I get to her?”

 

When Shriver handed over Coretta’s telephone number to him, Kennedy said: “Dial it for me, will you? I’ve got to pack up my papers.” As Jack filled his briefcase, Shriver sat down on the edge of the bed and put his finger into the rotary dial.

 

When the phone rang that morning, Coretta listened as Sargent Shriver introduced himself and told her he was with Jack Kennedy in Chicago. Senator Kennedy “wanted to speak with her for a moment,” Shriver informed her. “Would that be okay?”

 

After several seconds, she heard a voice familiar to her; she had just recently watched Kennedy give a smooth performance in the televised debates. “Good morning, Mrs. King,” the voice said. “This is Senator Kennedy.” After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Kennedy offered his sympathy: “I want to express to you my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard for you.” He mentioned that he was aware she was expecting a baby. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King,” he said cordially. “If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

 

Coretta thanked him, saying: “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

 

And that was it: The call lasted no more than ninety seconds.

 

When Shriver informed Kenny O’Donnell, the campaign’s political master groused: “You just lost us the election.”

 

Inevitably, word of Kennedy’s gesture trickled out to the press, and pressure now mounted from several directions for King’s release.

 

Just as he protected his Vandiver conversation, Jack Kennedy was in no hurry to reveal that he had chatted with Coretta. He didn’t tell his press secretary Pierre Salinger until his campaign plane lifted off that afternoon from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on its way to Detroit. In the air, he nonchalantly mentioned it to Salinger who, recognizing a potential media firestorm, immediately relayed the news via the onboard radiophone to campaign manager Bobby Kennedy in Washington. Bobby was apoplectic when he learned that Shriver, Wofford, and Louis Martin had conspired and put Jack up to the call. Now the campaign had to prepare to control the damage.

 

For Sargent Shriver, it was impossible to forget Bobby’s irate phone call. “Bobby landed on me like a ton of bricks….He scorched my ass,” Shriver recalled. “Jack Kennedy was going to get defeated because of the stupid call,” Bobby fumed. He then turned his wrath on Wofford and Louis Martin, summoning the men to the campaign headquarters and berating them “with fists tight, his blue eyes cold,” as Wofford remembered it. Bobby had made the political calculations and didn’t like what it all added up to. “Do you know,” he fumed, “that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

 

The next morning, Thursday, October 27, Judge Oscar Mitchell announced the release of the prisoner on a $2,000 bond, saying his action was mandatory under Georgia law. That afternoon, after about thirty hours of confinement at Reidsville, Martin Luther King Jr. walked out of his cell for his flight home to Atlanta. About two hours later he stepped off a chartered plane at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport into the arms of his relieved wife and other supporters.

 

Speaking to reporters at the airport, King said he was indebted to Kennedy for his role. “I understand from very reliable sources that Senator Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible,” he said. “For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.” Kennedy’s participation, he said, was “morally wise.” Leaving no doubt about his appreciation, King nonetheless stopped short of endorsing the candidate. “I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem,” he said. “I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of his party’s platform.”

 

King also took the opportunity to say that he had not heard from Vice President Richard Nixon and knew of no Republican efforts on his behalf (Levingston 11-18).

 

King did not endorse Kennedy, but news of the phone call spread quickly and undoubtedly energized black voters in a close election. Among those whose minds were changed was a black Southerner who (unlike most) could vote. He was Martin Luther King Sr. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “Now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.”

 

Kennedy was amused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he said. Then: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we” (Goodman 2)?

 

According to his aide William Safire, Nixon said he had not spoken out because doing so would have been “grandstanding.”  Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy” (Frank 3).

 

“Back in 1960, there was a real battle for the black vote,” wrote author Larry Sabato.   “The GOP was still seen as the party of Lincoln in many parts of the country, while JFK’s Democrats had loads of segregationists in powerful posts.”

 

The campaign feared that these actions would hurt Kennedy with white southern voters, so they produced a pamphlet on blue paper, which became known as “the blue bomb.” Neither the candidate’s name nor the Democratic Party appeared on the pamphlet, but it still gave Kennedy credit for his sympathetic call by contrasting his actions with Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s silence on the issue.

 

Staffers distributed approximately two million copies in African American churches across the country just weeks before the election.  … So while the pamphlet became well known in many African-American communities, it could be overlooked in other areas.  … “At the same time, Kennedy’s campaign had plausible deniability for Southern whites,” Sabato said. “JFK needed plenty of electoral votes from Southern segregationist states” (Hiegel 2).

 

King’s release had an immediate and profound impact on the black community, unleashing a wave of support for Kennedy. In a single day, the senator beat back years of skepticism about his commitment to racial justice. Debates raged over whether his call to Coretta was a calculated political act or a true expression of compassion. Whatever the truth was, the act inspired a flood of raw emotion. The front page of the Chicago Defender featured a photo of King holding his young son and rubbing cheeks with him while his wife, Coretta, kissed him on his other cheek and his daughter stood at his elbow peering up at him. Above the photo was a large headline: REV. KING FREE ON BOND—HAIL SEN. KENNEDY’S ROLE IN CLERIC’S RELEASE. The New York Post sent a reporter into Harlem to gauge the reaction. “Many Harlemites were indignant at Nixon’s refusal even to comment on the case,” the reporter wrote. The Post published the comments of John Patterson, publisher of the Harlem paper Citizen-Call. “Mr. Nixon, in his refusal to comment or take a stand on the civil rights issue that Rev. King’s arrest symbolized, merely extends the say-nothing, do-nothing rule by golf-club philosophy of President Eisenhower regarding this moral issue.” By contrast, Senator Kennedy was praised in newspapers across the country. A widely distributed Associated Press dispatch reported a version of the comforting words Kennedy said to Coretta on the phone: “This must be pretty hard on you, and I want to let you both know that I’m thinking about you, and will do all I can to help.”

 

Kennedy suffered only minor fallout among Southern white voters. On the Sunday following King’s release, Claude Sitton of the New York Times reported that Kennedy appeared “to be gaining strength in Southern states once considered safe for Vice President Nixon.” In the concluding paragraphs, Sitton acknowledged that Kennedy’s role in King’s release from prison “may hurt the Democratic cause somewhat among white Southern voters” but that the repercussions “had been milder than expected.” If there was a strong reaction, it was among Southern blacks who were now more favorably disposed toward Kennedy. Despite voting restrictions that prevented Southern blacks from casting ballots in numbers that their population justified, their impact could be substantial. As Sitton reported, blacks “cast the decisive vote in close elections in some Southern states.”

 

On Election Day, if blacks hadn’t turned out for him in large numbers, Kennedy might have had to deliver a concession speech. In Illinois, for instance, where he topped Nixon by 9,000 votes, 250,000 blacks voted for Kennedy. In Michigan, he won the votes of another 250,000 blacks and carried the state by 67,000 votes. In South Carolina, he carried the state by 10,000 votes with 40,000 blacks casting ballots for him.

 

In his book The Making of the President 1960, campaign historian Theodore White assessed the impact of the call to Coretta. “One cannot identify in the narrowness of American voting of 1960 any one particular episode or decision as being more important than any other in the final tallies,” he wrote. But, he added, the “instinctive decision must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.” White observed that blacks were convinced that they had anointed Kennedy. “Some Negro political leaders claim,” White wrote, “that in no less than eleven states (Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, Texas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada), with 169 electoral votes, it was the Negro community that provided the Kennedy margin of victory.”

 

Nationwide, Kennedy got only 118,574 more votes than Nixon did out of a total 68,370,000 ballots cast. Kennedy tallied 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. In the crucial electoral votes, Kennedy amassed 303 to Nixon’s 219, enough to catapult him into the White House. Altogether, blacks turned out for Kennedy in staggering numbers. A Gallup poll put the figure at 70 percent, and an IBM poll came up with 68 percent. (In 1956, Adlai Stevenson got 60 percent.) From the black perspective, those numbers left no doubt of the community’s role in sending Kennedy to the White House.

 

Nixon was embittered by his narrow loss and the surprising black turnout for Kennedy. Later explaining his “no comment” at the height of the King uproar, he admitted “this was a fatal communication gap. I had meant Herb [Klein, his press secretary] to say that I had no comment at this time.” This explanation doesn’t quite conform to reality. Nixon in fact had heard a drumbeat of voices within his campaign begging him to speak out immediately, but he remained silent.

 

John Kennedy never explained his reason for placing the call to Coretta King. Was the candidate driven by politics or by goodwill? Cynics see only a man of callous manipulation, and torchbearers for Kennedy see only his grace and humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized, both impulses inspired Kennedy’s call, and they did not necessarily contradict each other. And that ninety-second conversation laid massive expectations on the Kennedy presidency. Before he even settled into the White House, Jack Kennedy was put on notice that blacks from Harlem to Montgomery expected him to listen to their leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hear their cries for equality. (Levingston 19-22).

 

Martin Luther King never gave Kennedy total credit for his release from the Georgia state prison.  A recording of an interview of him conducted December 21, 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a man who intended to write a book about the civil rights movement has King saying the following.

 

"Well, I would say first that many forces worked together to bring about my release," King said. "I don't think any one force brought it about, but you had a plurality of forces working together.  …

 

"Now, it is true that Sen. Kennedy did take a specific step.  He was in contact with officials in Georgia during my arrest and he called my wife, made a personal call and expressed his concern and said to her that he was working and trying to do something to make my release possible.

 

"His brother, who at that time was his campaign manager, also made direct contact with officials and even a judge in Georgia, so the Kennedy family did have some part, at least they expressed a concern and they did have some part in the release, but I must make it clear that many other forces worked to bring it about also."

 

The interviewer never finished the book and the tape was lost until the man's son rediscovered it five decades later while rummaging through dilapidated boxes left there by his father (Duke 1-2).

 

I detect regret in King’s remarks made later about his relationship with Richard Nixon.  “I always felt that Nixon lost a real opportunity to express … support of something much larger than an individual, because this expressed support of the movement for civil rights in a way. And I had known Nixon longer. He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me, you see” (Frank 4). 

 

Knowing what transpired during the next five years, I am gratified that Kennedy, not Nixon, made that necessary call. 

 

 

Works cited:

 

Duke, Allan.  “Rare recording of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about John F. Kennedy released.”  CNN.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/us/mlk-kennedy-recording/index.html

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Hiegel, Taylor.  “Remembering Kennedy's micro-targeting in the 1960 election.”  NBC News.  November 2, 2015.  Web.  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/remembering-kennedys-micro-targeting-1960-election-flna2D11641336

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/



Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part One

 

Before dawn, on Wednesday, October 26, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was sleeping in a prison cell in DeKalb County, Georgia, when sheriff deputies aimed their flashlight beams into his face and barked at him to get up. They handcuffed him, shackled his legs, and hustled him out of the cell. It was 4 a.m. Hurried along, he asked repeatedly for an explanation, but the men said nothing. With a terrible foreboding, King soon found himself seated in the back of a police car rolling into the night; the only light came from the headlamps piercing the darkness.

 

Like all black men, King feared the chilling portent of a late-night drive into the countryside; it had happened to others, the stories he’d heard were horrific.

 

At home in Atlanta, Coretta King knew nothing of her husband’s ominous ride. She was six months pregnant with their third child, and she had already had an emotional week.

 

King hadn’t wanted to join the student-led sit-in. But the band of youths, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, insisted. The SNCC was well-organized and impatient. Its target was one of Atlanta’s venerable institutions, Rich’s department store; its goal: to desegregate the store’s snack bars and restaurants. The young activists urged King to come along—and go to jail with them—to draw attention to their campaign. King advised the students to hold off until after the presidential election now just weeks away; but the students saw an opportunity to force the candidates to address the issue of segregation. If King were arrested with dozens of young protesters, then both contenders would have no choice but to speak out. “We thought that with Dr. King being involved in it,” said student leader Lonnie C. King, “we would really see where these guys stand.” The students’ passion—and conscience—were impossible for Martin Luther King Jr. to ignore (Levingston 1-2).

 

King and the SNCC demonstrators had been arrested at an Atlanta department store lunch counter, “and then, after all those arrested with him were released, held for violating the terms of his ‘probation’ for an earlier traffic violation: driving (while black) with an expired license.  The judge sentenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to six months’ hard labor” (Goodman 1).

 

On that early Wednesday morning, Martin Luther King Jr. had no idea where the two deputies were taking him. An hour passed, and he realized he was deep into “cracker” country where no one protested a lynching. By dawn, King discovered he had been granted a less evil fate as the squad car turned into the maximum security state prison in Reidsville.

 

But his danger was far from over. If he were put to hard labor, as the judge had ordered, he would work side by side in a road gang with ruthless white criminals, many of them killers who had nothing to lose and everything to gain—national notoriety and prison respect—by murdering a black celebrity.

 

On that same Wednesday morning, Senator John Kennedy phoned the governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver. Some quiet, back-channel way had to be found to free the civil rights leader. Kennedy was motivated by his outrage, by his sympathy for the King family, and by bald political calculation. In a meeting with Kennedy just weeks earlier, King had urged the senator to take some dramatic action to prove to blacks that his commitment to their cause was genuine. His moment had arrived. If Kennedy were able to play a decisive role in King’s release, the black community was likely to reward him with an outpouring of support. But if he acted on King’s behalf, he risked a vicious backlash from Southern whites. The senator had to walk a fine line: show decency to a black man without alienating the white community.

 

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy raised suspicions in the black community by his blatant courtship of Southern white support. After the Democratic National Convention in July, he began shoring up his reputation among Southern leaders, meeting privately with them to allay fears that he would be an aggressive civil rights president. Kennedy promised Governor Vandiver that as president he would never use federal troops to force Georgia to desegregate its schools. In return, Vandiver declared his preference for the senator and vowed to lead Georgia into the Kennedy column on Election Day.

 

Now, some three months later, early in the morning at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, the telephone jangled on the bedside table, waking Vandiver and his wife. On the line was Senator John Kennedy speaking in his New England accent. “Governor,” he said, according to Vandiver’s recollection of the conversation, “is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail? It would be of tremendous benefit to me.”

 

“Senator, I don’t know whether we can get him released or not,” Vandiver replied.

 

“Would you try and see what you can do and call me back?” Kennedy said.

 

Working in secrecy, Vandiver swung into action for the senator.

 

As news of King’s jailing spread, both presidential candidates received a petition from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and nearly twenty other civil rights organizations demanding that they “speak out against the imprisonment” (Levingston 3-7).

 

King had developed a better relationship with Richard Nixon than he had developed with the Kennedys. 

 

King, when he was 28 and famous for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, met Nixon in March 1957, in Africa, when Ghana celebrated its independence. They agreed to stay in touch and met three months later in Nixon’s office at the Capitol to discuss among other topics the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That summer Nixon worked to strengthen the bill, taking on such powerful Southern Democrats as Richard Russell, who opposed it, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who had been pushing for a weaker version of the voting-rights section.

 

“I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had,” Dr. King later wrote to the vice president, telling him “how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality… This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” Nixon replied in much the same spirit: “I am sure you know how much I appreciate your generous comments. My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.” They talked frequently after that, and in September 1958, after a deranged black woman in Harlem stabbed Dr. King almost fatally, Nixon was among the first to write to him. He praised King’s “Christian spirit of tolerance,” which he said would ultimately win over “the great majority of American for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are committed” (Frank 1).

 

In his book “The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,” David Margolick opines that King and Bobby were never close. They were intermittent allies but never friends. They spoke infrequently. Almost never socialized together. Seldom did they candidly share their thinking with one another. According to Margolick: “Theirs was an uneven relationship, and for King, a slightly degrading one: he was the black man invariably asking for things, and Kennedy the white man doling them out. . . . King was the one to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ” (Kennedy 1).

 

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King shared an era and a cause, but they were not close allies …. They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences (Grier 2).

 

In the Nixon camp, strategists calculated the political consequences and concluded the best course of action was silence. Nixon held fast to his decision even after a visit from his staunch supporter baseball hero and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson. As William Safire, then Nixon campaign aide and future New York Times columnist, told the story, Robinson came out of his ten-minute meeting with “tears of frustration in his eyes.” Complaining bitterly, he told Safire: “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding.’” Robinson was so distraught he declared: “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.” Yet, the baseball star continued to support the Republican and later said the outcome of the election had left him “terribly disappointed.”

 

In the Kennedy camp, the imprisoned preacher had two passionate proponents: White House aide Harris Wofford, a longtime friend of the Kings, and Sargent Shriver, the senator’s brother-in-law and head of the campaign’s Civil Rights Section. Because of their fervor for black rights, Wofford and Shriver were regarded as overly sentimental activists with impaired political judgment and were relegated to the periphery of the campaign. But the two men exerted a subtle yet powerful influence on the campaign: They forced a sense of conscience upon the political realists.

 

 Wofford phoned Louis Martin, a successful black businessman and newspaper publisher who had deep political roots and was helping the campaign reach out to the black community. Martin was concerned about King, and after commiserating, the two men batted around some ideas. “What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal,” Wofford told Martin, “like picking up the telephone and calling Coretta.” It would be enough, Wofford observed, for the candidate to show his sympathy for her.

 

“That’s it, that’s it!” Louis agreed. “That would be perfect.”

 

Now came the hard part: getting this idea to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago, and persuading him to act on it. After his private call to Governor Vandiver in the morning, the candidate had attended a breakfast with fifty businessmen. Now he was in a hotel suite at O’Hare Airport waiting to leave town.

 

After several tries Wofford finally tracked down Sargent Shriver, who was also in Chicago but not with the Kennedy entourage out at the airport. Understanding the urgency, Shriver listened to Wofford then said, “I’ll go right straight out to the airport. I’ll put it to Jack right now. It’s not too late” (Levingston 8-10).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Grier, Peter.  “Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy: civil rights' wary allies.”  The Christian Science Monitor.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2014/0120/Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-and-John-F.-Kennedy-civil-rights-wary-allies

 

Kennedy, Randall.  “Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy: a fraught relationship.”  The Washington Post.  April 27, 2018.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/martin-luther-king-and-robert-kennedy-a-fraught-relationship/2018/04/27/227e8f82-4712-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html?utm_term=.923d82f02fef

 

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/

 



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Accommodation

 

There were other arrests, other acts of violence, notably during the months of March and April 

 

The events of February 27 did not put-off student demonstrators – if anything, it spurred them on. They also received more support from [previously neutral] students who were appalled by their treatment. Such events attracted even more media attention and by April 1960, the leadership of the sit-ins decided to expand their movement so that they boycotted all downtown businesses in Nashville associated with segregation. The action was so successful that it is calculated that 98% of the African American population in Nashville took part in the boycott (Trueman 4).

 

On March 3 Mayor Ben West appointed a seven-member biracial committee to investigate segregation in the city. Despite the committee’s numerous attempts at a compromise, the students declared that they would accept nothing less than the acknowledgement of their rights to sit at the store lunch counters along with white customers. On April 5, the committee suggested that the counters be divided into black and white sections. [Whites would occupy counter stool from one end of the row while Blacks occupied stools beginning at the opposite end of the row] The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), which worked with the Nashville Student Movement, rejected the proposal, arguing that segregation of the counters was no better than black exclusion from them (Momodu 2-3).

 

One of the important phases of the movement in Nashville [Diane Nash years later declared] was the economic withdrawal, where the oppressed people really withdraw their participation from their own oppression. So there was a withdrawal of shopping, by the blacks, and by whites who agreed with us, and who would participate, from the downtown area, that while blacks couldn't be served at the lunch counters or in the restaurants of the department stores, we didn't shop downtown at all. That was the height of the Easter shopping season, which used to be even important to, to retail merchants than they are now. Everybody used to get brand new Easter outfits, that … could possibly afford to. And that boycott was, I think, about 98% effective, or more, among blacks in Nashville. So that the next time — when we began negotiating with the merchants again, they were much more interested in talking to us than they had been the first time (Interview Nash 10).

 

On April 19, a bomb destroyed the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the defense attorney representing many of the protesters. The bombing triggered a mass march.   John Lewis remembered: One of the attorneys that had been defending us, I think it was April 19, 1960, about six o'clock in the morning, the home of Z. Alexander Looby, he was one of the attorneys for the Legal Defense Fund, who taught part-time at Fisk, his home was bombed. He lived across the street from Meharry Medical College and the bomb impact broke the windows of the school. About seven o'clock we had a meeting with this group of students called the Central Committee of the Nashville Student Movement, which represented students from Fisk, American Baptist, Tennessee State, Peabody, Vanderbilt. We all met and decided that we would have a mass march on City Hall in response to the bombing of Attorney Looby's home. We sent the mayor a telegram saying to him to meet us on the steps of the City Hall by noon. By noon, we had more than five thousand students and community people marching on City Hall and the mayor came and spoke (Interview Lewis 9).

 

Diane Nash related: Attorney Looby was a very, very respected man in the community. He had a reputation of defending people who didn't have enough money to adequately pay him, and of being a really decent human being. And quite by accident, the student central committee had a meeting scheduled for six a.m. that morning. And I remember I was up, getting dressed to go to the meeting, when I heard the explosion.

 

…

 

The students met on Tennessee A&I's campus, and we marched, I think, three abreast. We were very organized. One of the things that we made it a point of was that whenever there was a demonstration, we were to be overly dressed. The men generally wore suits and ties, and the women — we looked like we were dressing up for Sunday. And anyway, we marched quietly — we were met later by students at Fisk. We passed Fisk campus. And other students, other schools had points where they joined in to the march. There were many thousands of people that marched that day. We marched silently, really. And the — the long line of students must have continued for many, many blocks. Miles, maybe. And we marched to the mayor's office.  … We had sent telegrams ahead of time, telling him that as a result of the bombing, turning the Looby home into a state of violence, tension, violence in the city of Nashville, we felt like we needed to talk …. So we met him on the steps of City Hall. And confronted him with what his feelings as a man, were. As a person. I was particularly interested in that, as opposed to just his being a mayor (Interview Nash 12, 14, 15).

 

Nash asked Mayor West if it was wrong for a citizen of Nashville to discriminate against his fellow citizens because of his race or skin color. The mayor admitted that it was wrong, giving the students an important symbolic victory in their campaign. Nash then asked the mayor if the lunch counters in Nashville should be desegregated. The mayor said they should (Momodu 5).

 

I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said, that he felt like it was wrong, for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters, solely on the basis of the color of their skin. … I think that was the turning point.  The Nashville newspaper reported that, in the headlines, the next day …  (Interview Nash 15).

 

Weeks of secret negotiations resulted.  Diane Nash and the other student committee members tried to understand the merchants’ reservations, one important reservation being that there might be a boycott by whites at the lunch counters, if they began to serve blacks. And we started really strategizing how we could avoid that. So, some of the whites in Nashville …  who recognized that it was important to desegregate the city, figured into …the strategy, because they made it a point to sit next to the blacks, who were being served, so that there could not be a white boycott. So, those kinds of experiences made me really look at the fact that bringing about social change through violence is probably not … as realistic. Because, who do you kill? Do you kill all whites? That doesn't make sense, because we had whites who were our opposition the first year, who the second year… took an attitude … it's not that bad, in fact, it really makes sense.   … they were helpful to us the second year, in bringing about desegregation (Interview Nash 16).

 

On May 10, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to black customers for the first time; the customers arrived in groups of two or three during the afternoon and were served without incident. With that agreement, Nashville became the first major southern city to begin desegregating public facilities (Momodu 6).

 

Whereas the bus boycott in Montgomery had been successful because of its economic clout, there had been no overt comment by anyone within the city’s authority about the immorality of segregation. For a mayor to do this, combined with the impact on a city’s local economy, was a major achievement for a state such as Tennessee.

 

The story of the Nashville sit-ins did not end with the desegregation of lunch counters. Towards the end of 1960, a number of the leaders of the movement helped to found the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Diane Nash became a full-time SNCC field worker while John Lewis was elected the leader of SNCC in 1962. …

 

Several of the SNCC leaders, who had honed their leadership skills during the sit-ins, became involved in the Freedom Rides. The sit-in leaders were also involved in helping to organize the Selma to Montgomery march.

 

Most of those who led the sit-ins became major figures in the civil rights campaign. Diane Nash was appointed to a national committee by J F Kennedy that promoted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. John Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 after two decades of being recognized as one of the civil rights movement’s major figures.

 

The Rev James Lawson – who taught about the importance of a non-violent campaign – was expelled from Vanderbilt University Divinity School for his part in the sit-ins – but has since been honoured by the university (Trueman 5-6).

 

 

Works cited:

 

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Momodu, Samuel.  “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashville-sit-ins-1960.

 

Trueman, C. N.  “Nashville Sit Ins.”  historylearningsite.co.uk.  March 27, 2015.  Web.  https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/nashville-sit-ins/.



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Opposing Values Collide

 

Just shy of 22 years old, Diane Nash became one of the leaders in the Nashville Student Central Committee, which would organize the actual sit-ins at discriminatory restaurants throughout the city.  Leading up to her first sit-in, in February 1960, Nash worried about being arrested. She’d voiced her concern in the workshops, saying that she’d help with phone calls and organizing but in the end, she would not go to jail. “But when the time came, I went,” she says, of the dozens of arrests she’d face in the not too distant future (Morgan 1)
.

We felt we were right. We felt we were right, and rational. When we took a position that segregation was, was wrong, and we really tried to be open and honest and loving with our opposition. A person who is being truthful and honest, actually is, is standing in a much more powerful position than a person who's lying, or trying to maintain his preference, even though on some level he knows he's wrong. I think, on some level, most people really deep-down know that segregation was wrong, just based on race, and disregarding everything else about the person (Interview Nash 5).

Well, the first time [February 13] we took a seat at a lunch counter [John Lewis recalled] and we were denied service, they said, "We don't serve you; you can't be served." It was a great feeling; it was my first real act of protesting against this system of segregation. I sort of had this feeeling for some time that you just wanted to strike a blow for freedom and this was a great sense of pride to be able to sit down and at the same time become part of an organized effort (Interview Lewis 4).

Diane Nash recalled her feelings of anticipation before sitting down in protest. People used to tickle me, talking about how brave I was, sitting in, and marching, and what have you, because I was so scared. All the time. It was like wall-to-wall terrified. I can remember sitting in class, many times, before demonstrations, and I knew, like, we were going to have a demonstration that afternoon. And the palms of hands would be so sweaty, and I would be so tense and tight inside. I was really afraid. The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience, to be among a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough, that you would put yours between them and danger.

…

… the first sit-in we had, was really funny, because the waitresses were nervous. And they must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day ....  I mean, literally, it was almost a cartoon. Because I can remember one in particular, she, she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one and, and she'd pick up another one, and she'd drop it and another. It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that, that laughing would be insulting and you know, we didn't want to create that kind of atmosphere. At the same time, we were scared to death (Interview Nash 5-6).

The students continued their sit-in efforts. Interviewed years later, John Lewis revealed that they occupied lunch counter stools on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We didn't have any classes on those days and we continued to go down to the lunch counters and restaurants to sit in.”

 

We would continue to sit and some days we would stay all day and take turns. A shift of students would stay there until they were forced to close the lunch counters completely. Or we would occupy all of the seats. In some instances, stores like Woolworth's and Kress's, McClelland's, would just close the stores. And that continued for a period of time (Interview Lewis 5).

The protest soon attracted the support of other students (black and white) and the numbers soon went into the hundreds. The organisers of the sit-in were concerned that not all those involved in the protest had been schooled in non-violent techniques (Trueman 1).

 

There were people who couldn't take it [John Lewis later stated], couldn't take the discipline. But they did other things, like picking people up and taking them to the meeting places, or passing out leaflets, or making signs. But they couldn't handle putting themselves in positions where they could be attacked or arrested. And it was good that they knew that (Nance 1).

 

 Therefore, two students, Bernard Layfayette and John Lewis, produced a handout for all those involved with their ’10 Rules of Conduct’. These were the required standards for all those who were supporting the protest. The rules stated:

 

Do Not:

 

Strike back nor curse if abused … Hold conversations with a floor walker. Leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so. Block entrances to stores outside nor the aisles inside.

 

Do:

 

Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times Sit straight: always face the counter. Report all serious incidents to your leader. Refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Love and non-violence is the way.

 

Towards the end of February, the mood of the store managers had become more ugly and supporters of segregation gathered at the stores concerned, along with the demonstrators (Trueman 1-2).

 

The first violent response to the protests came on February 27 ….  The protesters were attacked by a white group opposed to desegregation. The police arrested eighty-one protesters; none of the attackers was arrested. Those arrested were found guilty of disorderly conduct. They all decided to serve time in jail rather than pay fines.

 

This was a day [John Lewis divulged] when we had been warned by a local white minister, Will Campbell, who had told us he had word from a reliable source that we would be arrested and that there would be some form of violence. A small group of us, on that day—it was a cold day in Nashville, we even had snow—on that particular day, went down and started sitting in at Woolworth's and later during the day there was some violence on the part of a young white teenager who pulled students off the seats or put lighted cigarettes down their backs, that type of thing. We continued to sit (Interview Lewis 5-6).

Lewis had been hit.   He escaped having a lighted cigarette put down his back.

Diane Nash found something amusing in her day’s experience.  The day that the police first arrested us was interesting too, because their attitude, they had made a decision they were going to arrest us if we sat-in that day, and so, they announced to us "O.K., all you nigras, get up from the lunch counter or we're going to arrest you". And their attitude was like, well, we warned you. So they repeated it a couple of times, and nobody moved. And of course, we were prepared for this. So they said, "Well, we warned you, you won't move, O.K. Everybody's under arrest." So we all get up and marched to the wagon.  But everybody who was at the lunch counter was arrested. So then the police had the attitude like, O.K., we warned them, they didn't listen. And then they turned and they looked around the lunch counter again, and the second wave of students had all taken seats. And they were confounded, kind of looked at each other like, "now what do we do", you know? They said well, O.K., we'll arrest those too, and they did it. Then the third wave. No matter what they did and how many they arrested, there was still a lunch counter full of students, there (Interview Nash 7).

 

“We refused to strike back,” John Lewis recalled.  I think studying and attending the nonviolence workshops we had been disciplined to understand, to be willing to adjust to the violence, the pain and the hurt. At the same time we didn't concentrate on what happened to us. But we were there for a purpose and the arrest. It just sort of inspired us. I didn't have any bad feelings about it. I didn't necessarily want to go to jail. But we knew, in a sense, using that particular method really as a tactic at that point that it would help solidify the student community and the black community as a whole. The student community did rally. The people heard that we had been arrested and before the end of the day, five hundred students made it into the downtown area to occupy other stores and restaurants. At the end of the day ninety-eight of us were in jail. There were mass meetings all over the city that Sunday. We refused to come out of jail. We didn't want anyone to go our bond. But early Sunday morning, the colleges and universities there had put up the necessary bail money and we were let go (Interview Lewis 7).

 

Works cited:

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Nance, Kevin.  “John Lewis on 'March: Book One. “  Chicago Tribune.  August 23, 2013.  Web.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-xpm-2013-08-23-ct-prj-0825-march-john-lewis-20130823-story.html

 

Trueman, C. N.  “Nashville Sit Ins.”  historylearningsite.co.uk.  March 27, 2015.  Web.  https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/nashville-sit-ins/.



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Gearing Up

 

The Nashville Sit-Ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were among the earliest non-violent direct action campaigns in the 1960s to end racial segregation in the South. They were the first campaigns to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. The sit-in campaign was coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and Nashville Christian Leadership Council, which was made up primarily of students from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee State University. Diane Nash and John Lewis, who were both students at Fisk University, emerged as the major leaders of the local movement (Momodu 1).

 

Diane Nash would say in an interview: You know, I heard about the Little Rock story, on the radio. … I remember the Emmett Till situation really keenly, in fact, even now I can, I have a good image of that picture that appeared in Jet magazine, of him. And they made an impression. However, I had never traveled to the south at that time. And I didn't have an emotional relationship to segregation. I had – I understood the facts, and the stories, but there was not an emotional relationship. When I actually went south, and actually saw signs that said "white" and "colored" and I actually could not drink out of that water fountain, or go to that ladies' room, I had a real emotional reaction.  I remember the first time it happened, was at the Tennessee State Fair. And I had a date with this, this young man. And I started to go the ladies' room. And it said, "white and colored" and I really resented that. I was outraged. So, it, it had a really emotional effect (Interview Nash 1-2).

 

Diane Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago, away from the strong racial divisions that saw African Americans treated as second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws in the South. It wasn’t until she enrolled at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959 that she came face-to-face with overt discrimination.

“There were signs that said white, white-only, colored. [The] library was segregated, the public library. Parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels,” she recalls. “I was at a period where I was interested in expanding: going new places, seeing new things, meeting new people. So that felt very confined and uncomfortable.”

Among the many facilities that weren’t available to Nash and her peers were restaurants that served black customers only on a “takeout basis,” which meant they weren’t allowed to sit and eat inside. Instead, black patrons were forced to eat along the curbs and alleys of Nashville during the lunch hour (Morgan 1).

John Lewis grew up in rural Alabama on a farm in Pike County about forty or fifty miles from Montgomery in a strictly segregated world. You had the white world and the black world. Segregated school bus [unclear]. In '57, I went to Nashville to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary to study, with my great desire to come to Atlanta to study at Morehouse but my parents couldn't afford it. I could go to the Seminary and work and so I enrolled in it (Interview Lewis 1).

I grew up about 50 miles from Montgomery. Growing up there as a young child, I tasted the bitter fruits of racism. I saw the signs that said white men, colored men; white women, colored women; white waiting, colored waiting. And I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents why. They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t go getting in trouble.”

 

But in 1955, at 15 years old, I heard of Dr. King, and I heard of Rosa Parks. They inspired me to get in trouble. I remember meeting Rosa Parks as a student. In 1957, I wrote Dr. King a letter and told him that I wanted to attend a little [whites-only] college 10 miles from my home—Troy State College, known today as Troy University. I submitted my application and my high-school transcript. I never heard a word from the school, so that gave me the idea that I should write Dr. King.

 

In the meantime, I had been accepted to a little college in Nashville, Tennessee, so I went off to school there. King heard that I was there and got in touch with me. He told me that when I was back home for spring break, to go and see him in Montgomery.

 

…

 

A young lawyer met me at the Greyhound bus station and drove me to the First Baptist Church—pastored by Ralph Abernathy—and ushered me into the office. I saw Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy standing behind a desk and was so scared that I didn’t know what to do. Dr. King said, “Are you the boy from Troy? Are you John Lewis?” And I said, “I am John Robert Lewis”—I gave my whole name. And he still called me “the boy from Troy”! He told me to go back and have a discussion with my mother and my father. He said they could lose their land; their home could be burned or bombed. But if I got the okay from them, we would file a suit against Troy State and against the state of Alabama, and I would get admitted to the school. I had a discussion with my mother and my father, and they were terribly afraid, so I continued to study in Nashville (Newkirk II 1-2).

 

During the school year of '58 and '59, Lewis started attending nonviolent workshops conducted by James Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

 

Jim Lawson [Diane Nash recalled] was a very interesting person. He had been to India, and he had studied the movement, Mohandas Gandhi, in India. He also had been a conscientious objector, and had refused to fight in the Korean War. And he really is the person that brought Gandhi's philosophy and strategies of non-violence to this country. And he conducted weekly workshops, where students in Nashville, as well as some of the people who lived in the Nashville community, were really trained and educated in these philosophies, and strategies. I remember we used to role-play, and we would do things like actually sit-in, pretending we were sitting at lunch counters, in order to prepare ourselves to do that. And we would practice things such as how to protect your head from a beating, how to protect each other, if one person was taking a severe beating, we would practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence. So that the violence could be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured. We would practice not striking back, if someone struck us.  There were many things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put into practice at the time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my life (Interview Nash 3).

 

Lawson’s students actually ventured out to segregated stores and restaurants to do nothing more than speak with the manager when they were refused service. “Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers” (Diane 2).

 

You know, we had, after — during the workshops, we had begun what we called testing the lunch counters. We had actually sent teams of people into department store restaurants, to attempt to be served, and we had anticipated that we'd be refused, and we were. And we established the fact that we were not able to be served, and we asked to speak to the manager, and engaged him in a conversation about, why not, the fact that it really was immoral to discriminate against people because of their skin color.

 

…

 

The first time we talked to the merchants, their attitude, well, you wanted a meeting, here, we're having it. They listened to what we had to say, they very quickly said no, we can't do it, and then their attitude was like, we're busy men, we're ready for the meeting to be over. That's it, no, we can't have desegregation.

 

 And then Christmas break had happened. And we had intended to start the demonstrations afterwards, and we hadn't really started up again. So when the students in Greensboro sat-in on February 1, we simply made plans to join their effort by sitting-in at the same chains that — that they sat-in at (Interview Nash 3-4).

 

We came back after the Christmas holidays and continued to have the workshops. Right after February first, second, or third we received a telephone call from students in North Carolina saying, "What can you do to support the students in Greensboro (Interview Lewis 3).

 

On February 13, 1960, twelve days after the Greensboro sit-ins occurred, local college students entered S.H. Kress, Woolworth’s, and McClellan stores at 12:40 p.m. in downtown Nashville. After making their purchases at the stores, the students sat-in at the lunch counters.  Store owners initially refused to serve the students and closed the counters, claiming it was their “moral right” to determine whom they would or would not serve. The students continued the sit-ins over the next three months, expanding their targets to include lunch counters at the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals, Grant’s Variety Store, Walgreens, and major Nashville department stores, Cain-Sloan and Harvey (Momodu 6).

 

 

Works cited:

“Diane Nash.”  AJC.  Web.   https://www.ajc.com/news/national/diane-nash/7bAodNsSPqTDcEOVCkvgdK/.

 

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Momodu, Samuel.  “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashville-sit-ins-1960.

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Newkirk II, Vann R.  “How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis.”  The Atlantic.  King Issue.  Web.  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/john-lewis-martin-luther-king-jr/552581/