In Birmingham, some six weeks after leaving the Albany jail, he reached for the politic view of Albany, insisting that the struggle already was a success. Negro voter registration had more than doubled there in 1962, King told his audience in Birmingham, and had risen by some 30,000 in all of Georgia. One result, he declared, was the victory of the racial moderate Carl Sanders in the recent governor’s race. He said the movement already had won over Pritchett and other leading whites of Albany, who were going through the motions of defending a system they believed was, and ought to be, doomed.
