Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election, Kendrick and Kendrick, B

     These events took place in October, 1960. The imprisonment of the 31-year old King and the response of the Kennedys, particularly three of their campaign staffers, had a profound effect on the election and the ensuing decades.                                        Harrison Wofford, along with his boss, Sargent Shriver, had been tasked with liaising with the Negro community. Forty percent of Blacks had voted for Ike, and Nixon had a better reputation on civil rights than Kennedy. Shriver's team was known as the Civil Rights Section, or CRS. They were assisted by a Black Chicago newspaperman, Louis Martin. King came from middle-class Atlanta, a staunch Republican community, and in light of Nixon's reaching out to him, was inclined to believe in the VP. The catalyst for King's time in jail came from a Morehouse student leader, Lonnie King, who had targeted Rich's department store, the most famous in Atlanta. He planned a sit-in at their lunch counter and kept encouraging Martin L. King to join the students. On Oct. 19, King and others were arrested at Rich's. Nineteen women and seventeen men refused bail and were sent to the Fulton County Jail. Although he had been arrested before, it was King's first night in jail.                                                                                                                   As national attention focused on Atlanta, its mayor, William Hartsfield, sprang into action. He brokered a deal to have everyone released from jail and negotiated a truce that would eventually desegregate the stores. To do so, he said that Sen. Kennedy had been in touch, even though it was only Wofford who had called, and he had done so of his own volition. When word of the Kennedy campaign's involvement spread, those in the Republican party seeking the Black vote encouraged Nixon to chime in.                                                                                                                                    As matters in Fulton County were heading toward resolution, an unforeseen problem in neighboring DeKalb County arose. King had a suspended sentence there for driving with an Alabama license while a Georgia resident, and the local judge felt that his actions at Rich's violated the terms of his probation. When the students were freed, King was sent alone to DeKalb. He faced a hearing in a packed court house and, at day's end, the judge revoked his probation and sentenced him to four months in a work gang. The next morning at 3 am, King was awakened, shackled, and driven three hours to the notorious state prison at Reidsville. That same morning, JFK called Georgia Governor Vandiver and asked if he could get King out of jail.  Sargent Shriver also convinced Jack to call Coretta King and, in a minute-and-a-half conversation, Sen. Kennedy expressed his concerns to Mrs. King.                                                                                                                       The following day, Bobby Kennedy called the supervising judge, who had an appeal of the license conviction before him. He decided to grant the appeal and allow King to post bond. The judge mentioned the call and King acknowledged the help from the Kennedys when he was released saying "I hold the Senator in very high esteem..." Wofford, Martin and Shriver decided they had to capitalize on the story and had 3 million pamphlets printed praising Kennedy and lambasting Nixon. The CRS team had those pamphlets distributed at Black churches in the South and Midwest.                                                                                                                                     The election was close. It was the last time an election was fought in every section of the country. Eighteen states were decided by three points, or less. In Georgia, there was a foreshadowing of future trends. DeKalb voted Republican and  Blacks in the state started to turn to the Democrats. Nationally, the Black vote helped Kennedy by increasing from 61% in 1956 for Stevenson to 68% for JFK. Nixon felt he had lost the election because of his actions during the King crisis. When Theodore White published his groundbreaking 'The Making of the President, 1960', he attributed the Black vote in eleven states as decisive.                                                                                                                      "The arrest of King is not only the fulcrum on which the 1960 election pivoted but the dividing line between between the moderate vice president and the president who reshaped a political order that divides us still. Nixon's intuitive genius for exploiting racial divisions, born in the final stretch of the 1960 election, maintains its hold over us. By way of his 'southern strategy' Nixon took Americas's explicit rhetoric of racism and smoothed down its rough edges so that the Republican party...could turn the solid Democratic South red in 1972 and keep it that way for decades."