Years later, Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest friends and associates would speculate about the effect of those beatings. “I think Martin was a much more fearful man than he appeared,” said Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist and pacifist who was one of King’s closest advisers. King had no trouble confronting racist white sheriffs, Rustin said, but he could not bear conflict with older civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young, or even, sometimes, with the members of his own organization. “Now I think all this sprang from the fact that his father had so brutalized him as a
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