One day while writing in a cluttered hotel room in Atlanta, King gave an interview to James Baldwin, the Harlem-born author who had emerged as one of the nation’s most vital writers on race. The stepson of a Baptist minister and a child prodigy who once seemed destined for his own career in the pulpit, Baldwin described King as “not like any preacher I had met before. For one thing, to state it baldly, I liked him … King is immediately and tremendously winning, there is really no other word for it … I wanted to ask him how it felt to be standing where he stood, how he bore it, what complex of
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