Nine Days: The Race To Save Martin Luther King Jr.’S Life And Win The 1960 Election

Sonali Kolhatkar speaks with Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1960 election.

The past two decades have seen their fair share of close Presidential election races, including the 2000 and 2016 races where Republicans narrowly prevailed. But one extremely close and historic Presidential race that shifted the political landscape for a generation was the 1960 election of Senator John F. Kennedy, who beat candidate Vice President Richard Nixon by a razor-thin margin.

Pivotal to the outcome of that race was an “October surprise” involving the incarceration of none other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Telling the story of how the freeing of Dr. King swept Black voters toward a Democratic President in a new book are my guests, the father-and-son team Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick.

Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick are the co-authors of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, as well as Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America. Their new book is called Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election.

Rising Up with Sonali is a radio and television show that brings progressive news coverage rooted in gender and racial justice to a wide audience. Rising Up With Sonali was built on the foundation of Sonali Kolhatkar's earlier show, Uprising, which became the longest-running drive-time radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles hosted by a woman. RUS airs on Free Speech TV every weekday.

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