W. E. B. Du Bois himself, who had known Negro leaders stretching back to Frederick Douglass, wrote that if passive resistance could conquer racial hatred, which he doubted, then Gandhi and Negroes like King would have shown the world a way to conquer war itself. Jet magazine put King on its cover, calling him “Alabama’s Modern Moses.” The New York Times, in a “Man in the News” profile published during the trial, described King as a man who believed that “all men are basically good,” and whose pulpit oratory “overwhelms the listener with the depth of his convictions…. He is particularly well
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