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

college,” the historian Taylor Branch writes, “he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite.” 4 Once, when he was preaching in Petersburg, a small town in Virginia, he showed up at the local whites-only public library with his family and a small entourage in tow, with the intention of getting arrested for breaking the town’s segregation laws. What book did he check out that he could wave in front of the assembled photographers and reporters? A biography of the great hero of the white South, Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the Confederate Army in its battle to defend slavery. That was vintage Wyatt Walker. He was perfectly happy to be carted off to jail for breaking Petersburg’s segregation laws. But he made sure to rub the town’s nose in its own contradictions at the same time.
    In Birmingham, King, Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth formed a triumvirate. Shuttlesworth was the longtime face of the Birmingham civil rights struggle, the local preacher whom the Klan could not kill. King was the prophet, gracious and charismatic. Walker stayed in the shadows. He did not allow himself to be photographed with King. Even in Birmingham, many of Bull Connor’s people had no idea what Walker looked like. King and Shuttlesworth were equipped with a certain serenity. Walker was not. “If you get in my way, I’ll run smack dab over you” is how Walker described his management style. “I don’t have time for ‘good morning, good afternoon; how do you feel.’ We’ve got a revolution on our hands.”
    Once, in Birmingham, when King was giving a speech, a two-hundred-pound white man charged the stage and began pummeling King with his fists. As King’s aides rushed to defend him, McWhorter writes:
    They were astounded to watch King become his assailant’s protector. He held him solicitously and, as the audience began singing Movement songs, told him that their cause was just, that violence was self-demeaning, that “we’re going to win.” Then King introduced him to the crowd, as though he were a surprise guest. Roy James, a twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who lived in an American Nazi Party dormitory in Arlington, Virginia, began to weep in King’s embrace.
    King was a moral absolutist who did not stray from his principles even when under attack. Walker liked to call himself a pragmatist. He was once attacked by a “mountain of a man”—six foot six, 260 pounds—when he was standing in front of a courthouse in North Carolina. Walker didn’t embrace his assailant. He got up and came back at him, and each time the man’s blows sent Walker tumbling down the courthouse steps, he picked himself up and came back for more. The third time, Walker recalled later, “he caught me good, knocked me almost senseless. And I went back up a fourth time. By this time, you know, if I’d had my razor I’d have cut him.”
    One famous night, the three of them—Walker, King, and Shuttlesworth—were about to preach to fifteen hundred people at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, when the church was surrounded by an angry white mob threatening to burn the building down. King, predictably enough, took the high road. “The only way we are going to save the people upstairs,” he told the others, “is we who are the leadership have to give ourselves up to the mob.” Shuttlesworth, imperturbable as always, agreed: “Yeah, well if that what we have to do, let’s do it.” Walker? He looked over at King and said to himself: “This man must be out of his goddam mind.” 5 (At the last moment, federal troops came and dispersed the crowd.) Later, Walker would embrace nonviolence. But he always gave the sense that turning the other cheek wasn’t something that came naturally.
    “At times I would accommodate or alter my morality for the sake of getting a job done because I was the guy having to deal with the results,” he said once. “I did it consciously; I had no choice. I wasn’t dealing with a moral situation when I dealt with a Bull Connor.” Walker loved to play tricks on Connor. “I have come to Birmingham to ride the Bull,” he announced, eyes twinkling, upon his arrival. He might put on a Southern drawl, and call in some imaginary complaint to the local police about “niggers” headed somewhere in a protest, sending them off on a wild goose chase. Or he might lead a march that wasn’t a march, one that went around and around, through office