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Title details for Nine Days by Paul Kendrick - Available

Nine Days

The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election

by Paul Kendrick
Stephen Kendrick
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
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.
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.
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 12, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705268315
      • File size: 279830 KB
      • Duration: 09:42:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 28, 2020
      A trumped-up traffic case endangered Martin Luther King Jr. and transformed America, according to this probing if sometimes overwrought study. Father and son journalists Stephen and Paul Kendrick (Douglass and Lincoln) explore an October 1960 episode in which the civil rights activist was jailed for leading antisegregation sit-ins in Atlanta and then sentenced to four months in Reidsville State Prison for driving without a Georgia license. (He had an Alabama license.) His incarceration sparked an uproar and pleas for presidential candidates John Kennedy and Richard Nixon to intervene. According to the authors, Kennedy’s actions, including a sympathy call to King’s wife and quiet lobbying of Georgia politicians to release King, were made out of pragmatic considerations rather than idealistic principles, yet they won him crucial Black votes. Meanwhile, Nixon courted Southern whites by avoiding the issue. The Kendricks argue cogently that the episode inaugurated the modern racial divide between Democrats and Republicans, though they overhype the unlikely possibility that King might have been assassinated at Reidsville. Still, King is shown in an unusually intimate and human light—hesitant, fearful, unhappily girding himself for the ordeal of prison. The result is a revealing take on a watershed moment in American politics and in King’s personal journey.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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