On October 19, two days before the last of the candidates’ four scheduled debates, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta during a lunch counter sit-in. He’d waited a long time before joining the sit-ins. But now he was in, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. His brother Robert intervened, and got King out of jail. Nixon, who had a much stronger record on civil rights than Kennedy, did nothing. He later came to believe that this lost him the election, one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy winning by a
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