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As riots broke out in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Harlem, King traveled from city to city trying to cool tempers and reminding demonstrators that moral change is not accomplished through immoral means. He had learned that principle from the Sermon on the Mount and from Mahatma Gandhi, and almost all his speeches reiterated the message. "Christianity," he said, "has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up his cross, with all its difficulties and agonizing and tension-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering."

Garrow tells of a tense encounter with Chicago's tough mayor, Richard J. Daley. As was his style, King sat silent through most of the boisterous meeting. The King supporters were feeling betrayed. They thought they had reached an understanding with Daley permitting them to march through Chicago with police protection in exchange for calling off a boycott. But Daley had double-crossed them, obtaining a court order that banned further marches. The air was hostile, and it looked as if the meeting would break apart in bitterness. King finally spoke up, with what one onlooker described as a "grand and quiet and careful and calming eloquence.

"Let me say that if you are tired of demonstrations, I am tired of demonstrating. I am tired of the threat of death. I want to live. I don't want to be a martyr. And there are moments when I doubt if I am going to make it through. I am tired of getting hit, tired of being beaten, tired of going to jail. But the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing is to get rid of the conditions that lead us to march.

Now, gentlemen, you know we don't have much. We don't have much money. We don't really have much education, and we don't have political power. We have only our bodies and you are asking us to give up the one thing that we have when you say, "Don't march."

King's speech changed the mood of the meeting and ultimately led to a new agreement with Mayor Daley.

We have only our bodies, King said, and in the end that was what brought the civil-rights movement the victory it had been seeking so long. When I was in high school, the same students who cheered the news of Kennedy's assassination also cheered King's televised encounters with southern sheriffs, police dogs, and water hoses. Little did we know that by doing so we were playing directly into King's strategy. He deliberately sought out individuals like Sheriff Bull Connor and stage-managed scenes of confrontation, accepting beatings, jailings, and other brutalities, because he believed a complacent nation would rally around his cause only when they saw the evil of racism manifest in its ugliest extreme.

By forcing evil out into the open, he was attempting to tap into a national reservoir of moral outrage—a concept my friends and I were not equipped to understand. Many historians point to one event as the single moment in which the movement attained at last a critical mass of support for the cause of civil rights. It occurred on a bridge outside Selma, Alabama, when Sheriff Jim Clark turned his policemen loose on unarmed black demonstrators.

The mounted troopers spurred their horses at a run into the crowd of marchers, flailing away with their nightsticks, cracking heads and driving bodies to the ground. As whites on the sidelines whooped and cheered, the troopers shot tear gas into the crowd. Most Americans got their first glimpse of the scene when ABC interrupted its Sunday movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, to show footage. What the viewers saw broadcast from Alabama bore a horrifying resemblance to what they were watching from Nazi Germany. Eight days later President Lyndon Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the U.S. Congress.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44