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

the most famous Brer Rabbit story, Brer Fox traps Rabbit by building a baby doll out of tar. Brer Rabbit tries to engage the tar baby and instead gets stuck, and the more he tries to free himself from the tar, the more hopelessly entangled he becomes. “I don’t care what you do wid’ me, Brer Fox,” Rabbit pleads to the gloating Fox, “but don’t fling me in dat briar-patch.” Brer Fox, of course, does just that—and Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, uses the thorns to separate himself from the doll and escapes. Fox is defeated. Rabbit sits cross-legged on a nearby log, triumphantly “koamin’ de pitch outen his har wid a chip.”
    Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also “painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.” African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn’t resist giving Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit tricked Fox, gambling that he could not bear the thought that a smaller and lesser animal was enjoying himself so much. Levine argues that over the course of their long persecution, African-Americans took the lessons of the trickster to heart:
    The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters’ property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.
    Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.
    The executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by King, was Wyatt Walker. Walker was on the ground in Birmingham from the beginning, marshaling King’s meager army against the forces of racism and reaction. King and Walker were under no illusions that they could fight racism the conventional way. They could not defeat Bull Connor at the polls, or in the streets, or in the court of law. They could not match him strength for strength. What they could do, though, was play Brer Rabbit and try to get Connor to throw them in the briar patch.
    “Wyatt,” King said, “you’ve got to find the means to create a crisis, to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” That is exactly what Walker did. And the crisis created by Wyatt Walker was the photograph of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog—leaning in, his arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.”

4.
    Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King’s “nuts and bolts” man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker—slender, elegant, and intellectual, with a pencil-thin mustache and a droll sense of humor. Every Wednesday afternoon he reserved for a round of golf. To him, women were always “dahlin’,” as in “I’m not hard to get along with, dahlin’s. I just have to have perfection.” As a young man he joined the Young Communist League because—as he would always say, tongue planted firmly in cheek—it was one of the only ways a black person in those years could meet white women. “In