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

book to which this chapter is greatly indebted—is Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Touchstone, 2002). If you think Walker’s story is extraordinary, then you should read McWhorter’s book. It is as good a work of history as I have ever read. “In Birmingham, it was held a fact of criminal science” appears in a footnote on page 340; “One of the attendees at the meeting was the president’s wife,” page 292; “A Jew is just a ‘nigger turned inside out,’” page 292; “A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning,” page 30; “They were astounded to watch King,” page 277; “militant out of Dr. Seuss,” page 359; “We got to use what we got,” page 363; “The K-9 Corps,” page 372; and “Sure, people got bit by the dogs,” page 375. McWhorter’s account of the showdown in Kelly Ingram Park is extraordinary. I have greatly condensed it.
    King’s mock eulogy appears in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (Simon and Schuster, 1988), 692. For Branch’s description of Wyatt Walker (“he acquired dark-rimmed glasses”), see page 285. “As a general principle, Walker asserted that everything must build” is on page 689. King’s words to the parents whose children had been arrested appear on pages 762–64.
    “When I kissed my wife and children good-bye” is from an interview of Wyatt Walker by Andrew Manis at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, New York City, April 20, 1989, page 6. A transcription of the interview is held at Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, Alabama. From the same interview are: “This man must be out of his goddam mind,” 14; and “They can only see…through white eyes,” page 22.
    “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd” is cited in Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2007), 107. Also from Levine are: “The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him,” page 112; “painfully realistic stories,” page 115; and “The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery,” page 122. The story of the Terrapin is on page 115.
    “I’m not hard to get along with, dahlin’s” is from a Wyatt Walker interview with John Britton that is part of the Civil Rights Documentation Project, housed in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. See page 35 of the transcript. Also from the interview are: “If you get in my way, I’ll run smack dab over you,” page 66; “If I’d had my razor,” page 15; “At times I would accommodate or alter my morality,” page 31; “Oh, man, it was a great time to be alive,” page 63; “Tip his hand,” page 59; “I called Dr. King,” page 61; and “It was hot in Birmingham,” page 62.
    Robert Penn Warren conducted several interviews with civil rights activists and leaders as part of his research for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? These interviews are collected in the Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project and housed in the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. “Pure joy” comes from tape 1 of his interview with Wyatt Walker on March 18, 1964.
    The argument that the trickster tales informed the civil rights movement has been made before. For example: Don McKinney, “Brer Rabbit and Brother Martin Luther King, Jr: The Folktale Background of the Birmingham Protest,” The Journal of Religious Thought 46, no. 2 (winter-spring 1989–1990): 42–52. McKinney writes (page 50):
    Just as Brer Rabbit’s cunning tricked Brer Tiger into doing exactly what the small animals wanted (i.e., he begged to be tied up), so the nonviolent techniques that issued from King and his cadre of shrewd advisors had a similar effect in getting Bull Connor to do what they wanted; namely, to imprison black protestors in such numbers that not only drew national attention, but also virtually immobilized the city of Birmingham.
    See also Trudier Harris, Martin Luther King, Jr., Heroism and African American Literature (University of Alabama Press, forthcoming).
    The detail from the conversation between Pritchett and King about Pritchett’s wedding anniversary is cited in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (Penguin, 1983), 363–65.
    Walker’s explanation for why the movement needed Bull Connor’s