The Fifties

by David Halberstam

King and his people were conducting the most perilous undertaking imaginable, for they knew that the more skillfully they provoked their enemies, the more dramatic the footage they would reap, and also the more likely they were to capture the moral high ground. King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway. He needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among other things, proper villains. He wanted ordinary white people to sit in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated, assaulted them. As such he was the dramatist of a national morality play: The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats. A play required good casting and Martin King soon learned to pick not just his venues carefully, but also his villains.