Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
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business with might not want to deal with a bunch of bleeding hearts), I cannot say. But I respected their sense of propriety and justice. Nelson Rockefellers attitude back then
was the very soul of the well-worn and oft-misused phrase
compassionate conservatism.
Even the most cavalier student of American history knows
that Martin King ended up imprisoned in the Birmingham
city jail in the spring of 1963, and the hows and whys
are not the subject of this book. But something that has been
missed in the ongoing historical excavation is a fascinating
issue of economics. Just how was the SCLC able to make
good on its promise to bail out the schoolchildren whose parents would never allow them to stay in jail when we did not
have enough money to cover even a fraction of the unanticipated number of protesters locked up by Birminghams notoriously brutal public safety commissioner Bull Connor?
A good friend once told me, It seems like you were the bagman of the Civil Rights Movement. He meant it as a compliment, Im sure, but either way he was exactly right. Along
with Stanley Levison, my role in The Movementjust as in
my Wall Street workwas to make it rain.
Martin famously spent several gut-wrenching days in
solitary confinement, but by the time I had gotten in to see
him, he had been allowed back into the large, crowded holding cell. Solitary had been an intense experience. Martin King
may have been a man whose very personality was forged by
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or, in this case, the broken nub of a pencil. The eight white
clergymen had truly upset Martin, and this was a man who
had been nothing but forgiving when he had faced down
fire hoses and police dogs or been stabbed in the chest while
autographing books.
Take this out of here, Martin whispered, opening my
suit coat and stuffing the pages in my waistband. Have Dora
type it up, okay? I thought it was crazy, but I was his lawyer
and a close friend. I began hiding the crucial sheets of newsprint where I could.
This mish-mash of words and arrows connecting them
would one day become the Letter from a Birmingham Jail,
a document in American social history up there with the
Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But I
didnt know that then. All I knew was that there was
newsprint and toilet paper stuffed under my shirt and down
my pants, and Martin was not going to solve the bail money
problem from inside a cell. It was up to me.
See if you can smuggle some paper in for me tomorrow, Martin said.
I handed in the first scraps of what would turn out to be several days of Martins writings to Dora and Wyatt Tee, the
SCLCs chief of staff at the time.
What am I supposed to do with this? Dora asked.
Treat it like anything else he hand writes and asks you
to type, I said.
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