“Every black child in the South has an experience of racism that shafts his soul,” wrote James Farmer, the civil rights activist, who was nine years older than Martin Luther King Jr. and had his own such story. “For the lucky, it is like a bolt of lightning, striking one to his knees. For the others, a gradual dying, a sliver of meanness working its way to the heart.” As W. E. B. Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis has written, the truth of such stories may lie as much in their moral validity as in their factual accuracy. When he told the story of his shattered boyhood friendship, Martin
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