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

The untold story of the 1960 presidential election and the civil rights struggle that propelled Kennedy to the White House
On a Sunday evening in late October 1960, Coretta Scott King sat in the elegant dining room of Paschal’s restaurant, waiting for her husband to be released from the Fulton County jail. Four days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested along with dozens of students at a sit-in at Rich’s, the iconic Atlanta department store whose policy of accepting black customers while barring them from its lunch counters and tearooms symbolized the hypocrisies of the Jim Crow South. In September of that year, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had squared off in the first televised presidential debate, largely dancing around the issue of segregation. Now, hardly two weeks before the country would choose its next president, America’s fraught racial divide exploded into full view as news broke over the wire: King, the young minister who was quickly making a name for himself as the nation’s most eloquent champion of civil rights, wouldn’t be getting out of jail after all.

A trumped-up charge—driving with an out-of-state license—served as a pretext for keeping King in jail, and later for his extralegal transfer to Reidsville, the notorious Georgia state prison where black inmates worked on chain gangs overseen by capricious white guards. While King’s imprisonment was decried as a moral scandal in some quarters and celebrated in others, for Kennedy and Nixon it was the ultimate October surprise: a figure as saint-like as he was polarizing was languishing behind bars, and the two campaigns raced to decide whether, and how, to respond.

Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick’s Nine Days tells the story of this seminal—and largely overlooked—moment in American political history. In 1960, the civil rights movement was growing increasingly inventive and energized while white politicians favored the corrosive tactics of silence and stalling—until, that is, an exceptional group of individuals took the helm of the Kennedy campaign’s civil rights section. While Nixon had long been favored to win the black vote, the CRS convinced Kennedy to agitate for King’s release.

At once a story of electoral machinations, amoral self-interest, and, ultimately, the triumph of a future president’s better angels, Nine Days is a gripping political tale with important lessons for our own time.