The authors of Douglass and Lincoln present fully for the
first time the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s imprisonment in the
days leading up to the 1960 presidential election and the efforts of
three of John F. Kennedy’s civil rights staffers who went rogue to free
him—a move that changed the face of the Democratic Party and propelled
Kennedy to the White House.
Less than three weeks before the
1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.
was arrested at a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. That day
would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail—and the time
that King’s family most feared for his life.
An earlier, minor
traffic ticket served as a pretext for keeping King locked up, and later
for a harrowing nighttime transfer to Reidsville, the notorious Georgia
state prison where Black inmates worked on chain gangs overseen by
violent white guards. While King’s imprisonment was decried as a moral
scandal in some quarters and celebrated in others, for the two
presidential candidates—John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—it was the
ultimate October surprise: an emerging and controversial civil rights
leader was languishing behind bars, and the two campaigns raced to
decide whether, and how, to respond.
Stephen and Paul Kendrick’s Nine Days tells
the incredible story of what happened next. In 1960, the Civil Rights
Movement was growing increasingly inventive and energized while white
politicians favored the corrosive tactics of silence and stalling—but an
audacious team in the Kennedy campaign’s Civil Rights Section decided
to act. In an election when Black voters seemed poised to split their
votes between the candidates, the CRS convinced Kennedy to agitate for
King’s release, sometimes even going behind his back in their quest to
secure his freedom. Over the course of nine extraordinary October days,
the leaders of the CRS—pioneering Black journalist Louis Martin, future
Pennsylvania senator Harris Wofford, and Sargent Shriver, the founder of
the Peace Corps—worked to tilt a tight election in Kennedy’s favor and
bring about a revolution in party affiliation whose consequences are
still integral to the practice of politics today.
Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is
the first full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of
the closest elections in American history. Much more than a political
thriller, it is also the story of the first time King refused bail and
came to terms with the dangerous course of his mission to change a
nation. At once a story of electoral machinations, moral courage, and,
ultimately, the triumph of a future president’s better angels, Nine Days is a gripping tale with important lessons for our own time.
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