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

we’ll resume our efforts.”
    Pritchett would not throw King in the briar patch. It was hopeless. Not long afterward, King packed his bags and left town. 6
    Walker realized that a setback in Birmingham so soon after the Albany debacle would be disastrous. In those years, the evening news on television was watched in an overwhelming number of American households, and Walker wanted desperately to have Project C front and center on American television screens every night. But he knew that if the campaign was perceived to be faltering, the news media could lose interest and go elsewhere.
    “As a general principle, Walker asserted that everything must build,” Taylor Branch writes. “If they showed strength, then outside support would grow more than proportionately. Once started, however, they could not fall back.…In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more.”
    Several weeks in, Walker saw his campaign begin to lose that precious momentum. Many blacks in Birmingham were worried—justifiably—that if they were seen with King, they would be fired by their white bosses. In April, one of King’s aides spoke before seven hundred people at a church service and could persuade only nine of them to march with him. The next day, Andrew Young—another of King’s men—tried again, and this time found only seven volunteers. The local conservative black paper called Project C “wasteful and worthless.” The reporters and photographers assembled there to record the spectacle of black-on-white confrontation were getting restless. Connor made the occasional arrest but mostly just sat and watched. Walker was in constant contact with King as King commuted back and forth between Birmingham and his home base in Atlanta. “Wyatt,” King told him for the hundredth time, “you’ve got to find some way to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” Walker shook his head. “Mr. Leader, I haven’t found the key yet, but I’m going to find it.”
    The breakthrough came on Palm Sunday. Walker had twenty-two protesters ready to go. The march would be led by King’s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. “Our mass meeting was slow getting together,” Walker recalled. “We were supposed to march at something like two-thirty, and we didn’t march until about four. In that time, people, being aware of the demonstration, collected out on the streets. By the time they got ready to march, there were a thousand people up and down this three-block area, lining up all along the sides as spectators, watching.”
    The next day, Walker opened the newspapers to read the media’s account of what had happened, and to his surprise he discovered the reporters had gotten it all wrong. The papers said eleven hundred demonstrators had marched in Birmingham. “I called Dr. King and said, ‘Dr. King, I’ve got it!’” Walker recalled. “‘I can’t tell you on the phone, but I’ve got it!’ So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren’t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred.”
    It was a situation straight out of one of the most famous of all trickster tales—the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles “am so much like annurrer you can’t tell one from turrer.”
    Underdogs have to be students of the nuances of white expression—the hang of the head, the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue. Their survival depends on it. But those in positions of power have no need to look at the weak. Deer had disdain for the lowly Terrapin. To him, a turtle was a turtle. The comfortable elite of Birmingham were just like Deer. “They can only see…through white eyes,” Walker explained, gleefully. “They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and Negro spectators. All they know is Negroes.” 7
    Connor was an arrogant man who liked to swagger around Birmingham