“How long do you think it will be before we can make a move?” Ralph Abernathy asked. King may have been thinking about his personal life as much as social and political affairs when he answered. He may have been thinking about starting a family, finishing his dissertation, and establishing his leadership with a new congregation. Or he may simply have been thinking about the slow rate of social and political change he’d seen in the first twenty-four years of his life, in the North and South. “Not for a long time,” he said. “At least several years.”
