Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick (review)

Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, coauthors of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008) and Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America (Boston, 2004), is a vivid narrative of the nine days in October 1960 when Martin Luther King Jr. remained in a Georgia jail. King had been arrested for participating in an Atlanta sit-in at Rich's department store as part of a massive wave of protests against the Atlanta business establishment over the issue of segregation. It was the first time King remained in jail for more than one night, described by the authors as a time when King's family "most feared for his life" (p. 5). It was a presidential election year, as the authors note, and the arrest of King, who was increasingly becoming a national figure on civil rights, was "a crisis that would help … determine the victor of the 1960 election" (p. 5). While the majority of the protesters were released, King languished in jail and was kept on a twenty-five-dollar traffic ticket. Refusing to pay bail, King was subsequently sentenced to four months of hard labor, to be served out at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, where Black prisoners worked on chain gangs supervised by vicious white guards. Presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were forced to make a choice on Black civil rights issues on the national stage. Nine Days is the story of how the arrest of King prompted the candidates and their campaigns to grapple with the question of Black civil rights and how their responses ultimately helped determine the outcome of the 1960 presidential race. Mainly it is the story of how the Civil Rights Section (CRS) of the Kennedy campaign, including Black journalist Louis E. Martin, Harris Wofford, and Sargent Shriver, convinced Kennedy to intervene in the situation in King's behalf. Shriver in particular, in his campaign role in charge of outreach to Black voters, pressured for King's release beyond the authority of Kennedy. In terms of organization, the text contains a prologue, fourteen chapters structured around the nine days that King spent in jail, and an epilogue.

The prologue and the first two chapters, "In Trouble" and "You Can't Lead from the Back," lay the foundation of the larger story. The series of protests taking place in Atlanta at the time were largely organized and led by students such as Morehouse College student Lonnie King (no relation to Martin Luther King Jr.) in the downtown section of the city. As a result of conversations with student leaders, MLK was compelled to lend his voice to the cause and participate. According to the authors, "the students had timed the protest to affect a close national contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon" (p. 3). These first three sections discuss the events that led up to the Kennedy campaign's greater involvement, including some discussion of the development of the CRS under Harris Wofford, upon the release of most of the students and King's retention after refusing to pay bail. The remaining sections delve deeper into the machinations of the CRS.

Nine Days is cogently written and is supported with a wealth of primary sources, including interviews conducted by the authors with eyewitnesses to the events covered in the text, archival collections such as the John F. Kennedy Papers, E. Frederic Morrow Papers, and the NAACP Papers, newspapers, oral history collections, and television and film resources. The authors conducted more...