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  This book,

  with love and appreciation,

  is dedicated to our partners in life—

  for Liz,

  for Kori

  Before this thing is over, my son is going to end up bearing the heavy end of this burden.

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING SR. to Rev. Otis Moss Jr. and Atlanta Student Activists

  When Judge Mitchell gave Dr. King’s sentence, it was like being in a room when someone enters and announces a death. Everyone is shocked, frozen, and emotional.

  —REV. OTIS MOSS JR.

  Martin told me late one night that when being driven across those rural Georgia roads in the middle of the night, “I knew I’d never see anybody again. That kind of mental anguish is worse than dying, riding mile after mile, hungry and thirsty, bound and helpless, waiting and not knowing what you’re waiting for, and all over a traffic violation.”

  —ANDREW YOUNG

  And Dr. King can be heard saying, “We will transform these jails from dungeons of shame to havens of victory.” And that is exactly what happened.

  —DOROTHY COTTON

  PROLOGUE

  Sunday, October 23, 1960

  Coretta Scott King eagerly waited to see her husband. The dining room at Atlanta’s Paschal’s Restaurant was packed on this Sunday night; she was surrounded by the boisterous celebrations of students, friends, families, and professors all greeting one another. After five tense days in jail, the freed student sit-in demonstrators were fast arriving, but Coretta was impatient for Martin to walk through the door.

  Martin Luther King Jr. had never spent a night in jail until this week, and Paschal’s, where the food had so often sustained his team’s impassioned strategy sessions, felt like the right place for a welcome-home party. The word from Mayor William Hartsfield’s office was that the last protesters who were still in jail from earlier in the week were now free. This night of their return, there was a sense that last Wednesday’s arrests at Rich’s department store had successfully seized the attention not only of the city but of the entire nation.

  With the presidential election sixteen days away, the students had timed the protest to affect a close national contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, both of whom had been mostly silent on issues of race. King had not been the instigator of the massive wave of sit-ins centering on Rich’s, one of the largest department stores in the South, and had at first been reluctant to join the students. But, not wanting to let them down, he had followed their lead, backing the Morehouse College activist Lonnie King. Lonnie wasn’t related to the King family, though he had once been a youth leader at Ebenezer Baptist Church under the tutelage of Martin Luther King Sr., known as Daddy King.

  Martin and Coretta Scott King had endured much in their first seven years of marriage: the bombing of their first home, where their newborn lay sleeping; a knife attack while King was on tour for his first book; harassment by the police and the tax authorities designed to discourage a growing civil rights movement. When King was arrested with more than fifty students, five days earlier, he decided to refuse bail and face an extended stay in jail. If the Atlanta university students were willing to take this risk to desegregate downtown lunch counters, he could not walk away in the face of their resolve.

  The businessman and movement supporter Jesse Hill had called Coretta earlier that Sunday evening to invite her to the gathering at Paschal’s. Word was spreading through the community that the students had agreed to the mayor’s proposal of a monthlong truce and that they would be released. The pause would give Mayor Hartsfield time to negotiate a difficult desegregation agreement with Atlanta’s white business elite. As she dressed for the evening, Coretta was delighted at the prospect of welcoming her husband home. Today, Sunday, was the third birthday of their youngest child, Martin III, and perhaps he could even sneak in a kiss for his sleeping son later that night. Despite having to care for their two children (and being five months pregnant with their third), Coretta had managed to visit her husband in the Fulton County Jail nearly every day. She knew her visits were essential to King’s ability to endure the despondency of prison life, and they had both been heartened at how, despite King’s apprehension, his time in jail had not been as crushing as he had feared. Being surrounded by the students seemed to buoy him up, to steady him. She understood he did not want her to leave the children to be jailed alongside him. Yet when King was behind bars, Coretta once wrote that she felt as though she were imprisoned with him; being on the outside did not help.

  Though he was now supposedly a free man, King had yet to appear at Paschal’s. The servers were bringing out hot plates of food, manna for those who had suffered nothing but jail fare for days. Students shouted with relief when they saw their liberated friends. Yet there was no sign of King, and Coretta started to feel frightened; she had what she called “a premonition of evil.” Finally, a student came over to confirm what was quickly becoming apparent: “They kept Dr. King in jail.”

  Student leaders ran out of the restaurant, heading back to the Fulton County Jail to figure out what was wrong. All anyone knew was that while the students had been released, King had not.

  Unbeknownst to Coretta and everyone else gathered at Paschal’s that night, the following days would heighten a crisis that would not only help determine the victor of the 1960 election but transform American politics for decades to come. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would end up spending a total of nine days in three different jails—nine days that changed everything. As Sunday evening gave way to midnight on Monday, those around King experienced the sickening realization that another courthouse was summoning him, that unexpectedly he potentially faced a far more dire predicament than before.

  King’s family would remember those days in late October 1960 as the time when they most feared for his life.

  * * *

  There wasn’t much to pack; you traveled light to and from the Fulton County lockup.

  Earlier on that Sunday evening, King had sat silently beside his cellmate Lonnie King, who, as the leader of the students, had presided over a heated discussion about Mayor Hartsfield’s proposal to get them out of jail. King was content to let the navy veteran and former Morehouse football star lead the way; he trusted Lonnie as a neighbor who shared a newspaper route with his younger brother. The students debated for two hours about whether they should accept Hartsfield’s offer: the longtime mayor was, after all, one of the only white politicians in the South who actively courted Black voters. Hartsfield, whose eccentric southern charm masked Machiavellian cunning, was asking for the sit-in leaders’ trust, giving white Atlanta business owners time to see the need to desegregate not only lunch counters but also the entire downtown economic core.

  But could Hartsfield really pull it off? The sullen, stubborn attitude of the wealthy department store owner Dick Rich showed
how difficult this endeavor might be. In the end, the students accepted the proposal, telling the press, “We now await substantial evidence of the good faith.”

  Guards approached, ordering everyone in Lonnie’s cell to come with them. One of them said to King, “You gotta wait, there’s people here from DeKalb County.” As Dr. King froze, Lonnie saw a look of shock flash across his face.

  The very name—DeKalb County—called up a host of terrible associations. DeKalb was Klan country. Unbeknownst to King and the students, DeKalb County had secured a bench warrant to stop King from walking free from neighboring Fulton County’s cells. King and his staff, in the midst of their efforts to get the students out of jail, had not discussed the brief newspaper stories indicating that the minister was very much still in the authorities’ sights. Even in light of the injustices that Black Georgians had faced for generations, it seemed impossible, even ludicrous, that an old twenty-five-dollar traffic citation, for something as minor as possessing an out-of-state driver’s license, could send King to the DeKalb County Jail, and potentially to the notorious Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, where Black people were treated as if they were as worthless as the state’s red clay soil.

  Just as one jail door was opening, another was quietly inching ajar to receive him.

  * * *

  Everything Lonnie King knew about the authorities in DeKalb County suggested King might never leave their custody alive. King quickly recovered his usual stoic demeanor, telling Lonnie and his stunned fellow students not to worry, to continue walking out. Yet for the first time, the weight of responsibility for King’s fate fully hit Lonnie. He was the one who had asked—pressed, even—his childhood friend to put himself in danger alongside them. Now Dr. King would be left behind to confront even more perilous legal troubles, and Lonnie would no longer be there to help him.

  King appeared vulnerable to Lonnie with the students leaving the jail. Lonnie realized that Daddy King would never forgive him if anything happened to his son. He was also sure that Coretta believed he was going to get her husband killed.

  As King talked with his brother, A.D., who had accompanied their father, he seemed to regain his composure. Despite his own unease, Daddy King reassured the angry students who had not yet left the jail that “M.L. will be all right.”

  When guards told protesters to start walking out, a student cried, “Why are you releasing us? We are supposed to stay here.” The students did not want to leave without King, but he believed they were right to leave jail under the terms of the agreement they had negotiated. He told them to have Coretta call his lawyer. One young woman, Carolyn Long, was in tears, and King went over to let her know it was all right to go. Eventually, the young people staggered through the glass doors of the jail and into the mellow autumn dusk, where some fellow student leaders were waiting for them. King was still in the relative safety of Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, and the movement’s attorneys, epitomized by the determined and agile Donald Hollowell, would strive to protect him.

  King, however, had left himself dangerously exposed. The Georgia courts were well practiced at finding avenues for retaliation against Black people who dared to raise their heads. At this fateful juncture of King’s thirteen-year career, the thirty-one-year-old activist would soon face the possibility of months on a prison work gang. It was difficult to imagine the scholarly King serving such a sentence, but there was potentially even worse in store for him. Whether the result of a guard’s outburst of violence or a paid hit job, killings in the Georgia prison system were common and could be covered up with little fuss. While King remained impassive, his father was justifiably fearful; it was impossible to know from what direction his son’s enemies might strike.

  On the verge of the 1960 election, King was still an emerging leader on the national level, far from the towering figure of the marches on Birmingham, Washington, and Selma he would later become. It was there, incarcerated in Georgia, where King first came to understand and accept the dangers he would face in the course of his fight to change America. Later, when students criticized him for not boarding the bus during the 1961 Freedom Rides, King replied, “I think I should choose the time and place of my own Golgotha.” It would be on that week’s long night ride to the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, hundreds of miles from Atlanta, that he discovered the stations of the cross along the way.

  * * *

  The days of heightened peril that followed changed King forever—scarring, fortifying, and galvanizing him. While King’s arrest just weeks before Election Day in 1960 has historically been treated as a minor aspect of the presidential race’s closing days, the truth of how it actually played out, and its resulting impact on national life, has never been revealed in full. The most well-known narrative centers mostly on John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert’s political calculations and the support for King displayed by his staffers Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver. While the importance of the latter’s actions to Black voters may seem obvious, it was a leap into the electoral unknown with regard to white voters. It was not self-evident that the Kennedy campaign’s efforts to help King would redound to its benefit.

  This intervention would prove to be crucial, but how King emerged from the trials of the dungeon is also the story of King’s family and staff, lawyers like Donald Hollowell, Black Atlanta student activists, and a Kennedy campaign aide whom historians have largely ignored: Louis E. Martin, the pioneering Black newspaper editor. These overlooked characters are no less a part of this national drama than the Kennedy campaign itself.

  Martin, in particular, played a critical role in helping the Kennedy brothers, Wofford, and Shriver alter the course of the campaign. He quickly perceived the problems with Kennedy’s muted support for civil rights and used his experience to move the campaign to action. His verve and immense creativity would help tilt the election. And yet Martin’s role has largely been neglected by histories of the Kennedy era. He was the ultimate unseen strategist, making the right things happen, speaking blunt truths without favor to white bosses, and then claiming little of the credit. Martin said, “It wasn’t just a job with me. I looked on it as a lever, to move this mountain of racism.” Martin’s determination would prove pivotal, and he dared his team to act despite orders to desist.

  Martin, along with his partner Harris Wofford and their boss, Sargent Shriver, advocated on behalf of King when even the slightest miscalculation might spell disaster as the presidential contest neared its knife-edge conclusion. Despite the relationship Vice President Nixon had built with King before the election, Louis Martin was growing more and more convinced that Kennedy represented greater hope for Black Americans, and he was determined to help Kennedy live up to that potential.

  In the last sixty years, America has experienced many “October surprises”—unexpected turns and abrupt shifts in the weeks before a presidential election. Martin Luther King’s imprisonment at Reidsville might have been an October surprise neither the Nixon nor the Kennedy campaign wanted, but this trio of Kennedy aides made a daring bet that they could nonetheless turn it to their advantage. Black voters, they thought, were theirs to win, and these same voters would subsequently hold the new president to account on civil rights.

  Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law (though he was known by the family as the “too-liberal-in-law”), was the head of this groundbreaking effort to reach Black voters, a group seldom accorded much importance before 1960. Shriver proved insightful enough to recognize that as two white men, he and Wofford would fail without Louis Martin’s understanding of the Black community. To their credit, they listened, learned, and cleared the way for the editor who would eventually be called, by those who knew his efforts best, “the godfather of Black politics.”

  The story of Martin, Wofford, and Shriver, and their fight against Georgia’s entrenched racial hierarchy, remains an underappreciated example of how the practice of politics—so often perceived as craven when not corrupt—can sometimes make a startling differenc
e. In later years, Shriver told young activists that the “politics of death” is marked by “bureaucracy, routine, rules, status quo.” Then he added, “The politics of life is personal initiative, creativity, flair, dash, a little daring.” These civil rights iconoclasts all practiced the politics of life during nine fateful days in the fall of 1960.

  And though these three Kennedy staffers went rogue to secure King’s release, the minister himself was no helpless bystander. The decisions he made over the course of October 1960 proved critical to the unfolding of his career. The agonizing choice to go behind bars and to refuse bail helped determine the future course of the civil rights movement and transformed America.

  “IN TROUBLE”

  In the spring of 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign hurtling toward an undecided Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Bobby Kennedy summoned his brother’s new speechwriter, Harris Wofford, into his office. Bobby, who managed Jack’s campaign, was famous for his irritability and his slashing ripostes. That day he was his typically blunt self and told Wofford that he would soon have a new role in the campaign: “We’re in trouble with Negroes. We really don’t know much about this whole thing. We’ve been dealing outside the field of the main Negro leadership and have to start from scratch.”

  Secretly delighted by this assignment, Wofford sensed that he was being placed right where he needed to be. He was eager to start working under the successful Chicago businessman Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy brother-in-law whom Wofford had recently befriended. Shriver’s chief responsibility was heading up the Civil Rights Section (CRS) of the campaign, an initiative that had yet to produce any meaningful results. Wofford knew that they were starting from behind, working for a candidate with scant knowledge of how to bond with Black voters.