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

lobbies and down alleyways, until the police were tearing out their hair. “Oh, man, it was a great time to be alive,” he said, recalling the antics he got up to in Birmingham. Walker knew better than to tell King all that he was doing. King would disapprove. Walker kept his mischief to himself.
    “I think Negroes like myself have developed almost a mental catalog of the tone of voices of how a white face speaks to them,” Walker told the poet Robert Penn Warren in a long interview just after the Birmingham campaign ended. “But everything that a white person says is interpreted by the nuance of the tone of voice, or maybe the hang of the head, or the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue, you know—things that in the ordinary, normal ethnic frame of reference would have no meaning, take on tremendous and deep and sharp meaning.”
    Warren then brought up the trickster folktales of the African-American tradition. You can almost see a sly smile cross Walker’s face: “Yes,” he replied, he found “pure joy” in poking fun at the “master,” telling him “one thing that you knew he wanted to hear and really meaning something else.”
    People called Martin Luther King “Mr. Leader” or, in lighter moments, “De Lawd.” Walker was Brer Rabbit.

5.
    The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C—for confrontation. The staging ground was the city’s venerable 16th Street Baptist Church, next to Kelly Ingram Park, and a few short blocks from downtown Birmingham. Project C had three acts, each designed to be bigger and more provocative than the last. It began with a series of sit-ins at local businesses. That was to draw media attention to the problem of segregation in Birmingham. At night, Shuttlesworth and King would lead mass meetings for the local black community to keep morale high. The second stage was a boycott of downtown businesses, to put financial pressure on the white business community to reconsider their practices toward their black customers. (In department stores, for example, blacks could not use the washrooms or the changing rooms, for fear that a surface or an item of clothing once touched by a black person would then touch a white person.) Act three was a series of mass marches to back up the boycott and fill up the jails—because once Connor ran out of cells he could no longer make the civil rights problem go away simply by arresting the protesters. He would have to deal with them directly.
    Project C was a high-stakes operation. For it to work, Connor had to fight back. As King put it, Connor had to be induced to “tip his hand”—thereby revealing his ugly side to the world. But there was no guarantee that he would do that. King and Walker had just come from running their long campaign in Albany, Georgia, and they had failed there because the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had refused to take the bait. He told his police officers not to use violence or excessive force. He was friendly and polite. His views on civil rights may have been unevolved, but he treated King with respect. The Northern press came to Albany to cover the confrontation between white and black, and found—to their surprise—they quite liked Pritchett. When King was finally thrown in jail, a mysterious well-dressed man—sent, legend had it, by Pritchett himself—came the next day and bailed him out. How can you be a martyr if you get bailed out of jail the instant you get there?
    At one point, Pritchett moved into a downtown motel so that he could be on call should any violence erupt. In the midst of a long negotiating session with King, Pritchett was handed a telegram by his secretary. As Pritchett recalled, years later:
    I…must have shown some concern over [it] because Dr. King asked me if it was bad news. I said, “No, it’s not bad news, Dr. King. It just so happens this is my twelfth weddin’ anniversary, and my wife has sent me a telegram.” And he says—I never will forget this and this shows the understandin’ which we had—he said, “You mean this is your anniversary?” And I said, “That’s right,” and I said, “I haven’t been home in at least three weeks.” And he said, “Well, Chief Pritchett, you go home tonight, no, right now. You celebrate your anniversary. I give you my word that nothing will happen in Albany, Georgia, till tomorrow, and you can go, take your wife out to dinner, do anything you want to, and tomorrow at ten o’clock,