The next day, Tuesday, October 18, Daddy King joined the leadership of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers’ Union in an endorsement of the Nixon-Lodge ticket. These were the city’s senior Negroes, for the most part—men who had grown up with a loyalty to the “party of Lincoln” and whose status within their community as relatively big businessmen reinforced that identity against the Democratic encroachments since Franklin Roosevelt. This year, there was an additional factor binding them as conservative Baptists to the Republicans: Kennedy’s Catholic faith. Perhaps for that reason they took the unusual
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