A few months later, the accomplished Black tenor Roland Hayes was jailed in Rome, Georgia, seventy miles from Atlanta, when a shoe-store clerk asked Hayes’s wife to move from her seat near the window to one in the back of the store. When Hayes complained that he and his wife had done nothing wrong, a police officer “gave me all he had on the jaw,” Hayes said, and then handcuffed and arrested him. Two weeks later, in his Sunday sermon at Ebenezer, Reverend King addressed the attack on Hayes. Perhaps it would help if more well-known Black men and women were beaten up, Reverend King said, so that
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