David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

segregationists. The South seemed to be moving backwards.
    And Birmingham? Birmingham was the most racially divided city in America. It was known as “the Johannesburg of the South.” When a busload of civil rights activists were on their way to Birmingham, the local police stood by while Klansmen forced their bus to the side of the road and set it afire. Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods had their homes dynamited by the city’s local Ku Klux Klansmen so often that Birmingham’s other nickname was Bombingham. “In Birmingham,” Diane McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home, “it was held a fact of criminal science that the surest way to stop a crime wave—burglaries, rapes, whatever—was to go out and shoot a few suspects. (‘This thing’s getting out of hand,’ a [police] lieutenant might say. ‘You know what we’ve got to do.’)”
    Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, was a short, squat man with enormous ears and a “bullfrog voice.” He came to prominence in 1938 when a political conference was held in downtown Birmingham with both black and white delegates. Connor tied a long rope to a stake in the lawn outside the auditorium, and ran the rope down the center of the aisle and insisted—in accordance with the city’s segregation ordinances—that black people stay to one side of the line, and whites to the other. One of the attendees at the meeting was the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sitting on the “wrong” side and Connor’s people had to force her to move to the white side. (Imagine someone trying that on Michelle Obama.) 1 Connor liked to spend his mornings at the Molton Hotel downtown, doing shots of 100 proof Old Grand-Dad Bourbon, and sayings things like, A Jew is just a “nigger turned inside out.” People used to tell jokes about Birmingham, of the sort that weren’t really jokes: A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. She is horrified: “Did Jesus say He’d go with you?” The husband replies: “He said He’d go as far as Memphis.”
    Upon arriving in Birmingham, King called a meeting of his planning team. “I have to tell you,” he said, “that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign.” Then he went around the room and gave everyone a mock eulogy. One of King’s aides would later admit that he never wanted to go to Birmingham at all: “When I kissed my wife and children good-bye down on Carol Road in Atlanta, I didn’t think I would ever see them again.”
    King was outgunned and overmatched. He was the overwhelming underdog. He had, however, an advantage—of the same paradoxical variety as David Boies’s dyslexia or Jay Freireich’s painful childhood. He was from a community that had always been the underdog. By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched. Along the way they had learned a few things about battling giants.

3.
    At the center of many of the world’s oppressed cultures stands the figure of the “trickster hero.” In legend and song, he appears in the form of a seemingly innocuous animal that triumphs over others much larger than himself through cunning and guile. In the West Indies, slaves brought with them from Africa tales of a devious spider named Anansi. 2 Among American slaves, the trickster was often the short-tailed Brer Rabbit. 3 “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd ever made,” one ex-slave recounted in an interview with folklorists a hundred years ago:
    He ain’t de biggest, an he ain’t de loudest but he sho’ am de slickest. If he gits in trouble he gits out by gittin’ somebody else in. Once he fell down a deep well an’ did he holler and cry? No siree. He set up a mighty mighty whistling and a singin’, an’ when de wolf passes by he heard him an’ he stuck his head over an’ de rabbit say, “Git ’long ’way f’om here. Dere ain’t room fur two. Hit’s mighty hot up dere and nice an’ cool down here. Don’ you git in dat bucket an’ come down here.” Dat made de wolf all de mo’ onrestless and he jumped into the bucket an’ as he went down de rabbit come up, an’ as dey passed de rabbit he laughed an’ he say, “Dis am life; some go up and some go down.”
    In