After his friend Martin Luther King died, he kept the flame of the SCLC burning. They had marched too long, bled too profusely, to give up now
AS HE RAN home crying, the hot tears coursing down his cheeks, he knew exactly what he had to do. He would find his father’s pearl-handled .32. He knew where it was. Then he would run back to the family store while the white police officer was still there, the one who had told him “Get back, nigger! Don’t you see a white man coming in the door?” and had smacked him in the belly with his nightstick—and he would shoot him dead.
That conviction grew all the stronger when he met Martin Luther King. Together in 1957 they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that led, with prayers, sit-ins and marches, the civil-rights campaigns of the 1960s: for desegregated lunch counters, for equality in hiring and education, for the vote. When Martin was killed, at 39, in 1968 the SCLC fell on hard times for a decade, but in 1977 he took over as president and broadened what it did.
Besides, non-violence had wrought a spiritual change in him. He had become a new creature, perplexing to his enemies, as everyone in the movement had. The first proof came early. In Mobile in 1955 he and another minister rode one day in the front of the bus to Prichard, a more racist town. When a white passenger came up to bawl them out he quietly told him to sit down, and the man obeyed. Pretty soon, no black person on Mobile’s buses had to give up his seat to a white.
In each of these trials the old anger would flash through him, and with prayer he would hold it back. The hardest point came on that spring day when Martin was shot in Memphis, a rare day when he was not at his side. He curbed his grief by pouring energy into the two big United Methodist churches, Central and Cascade, which he ran in Atlanta for many years, building up membership mightily.
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