Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio

Author:Bill Minutaglio [MINUTAGLIO, BILL/DAVIS, STEVEN L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781455522118
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Right now parents who had wanted their children to see the famous Dr. King are pulling their kids closer. James has to be afraid that this crowning moment, this civil rights flare shot straight from the heart of inflexible Dallas, will be utterly ruined. People can hear the chants from the protesters outside.

One of them, Jimmy Robinson, a twenty-four-year-old from a Dallas suburb, is eagerly telling reporters: “We don’t want to start a commotion. We just want to let the people know that we do not believe in what the NAACP and Martin Luther King stand for.”2 He is representing the National States Rights Party, he says, a pro-segregationist group from Georgia whose founder describes Hitler as “too moderate.”

Inside the auditorium, James has to consider King’s safety, and what all this means for Dallas, and even for himself. He has been working for five straight years to bridge Dallas to the national civil rights movement, and this could be the culmination. He led some of the first wide-scale and organized civil rights protests downtown; he helped spur the integration of Dallas schools. He writes the most hard-charging column in the city, in the leading black newspaper; he leads a church founded by slaves; he serves as head of the NAACP; he is in regular communication with Lyndon Baines Johnson; and now, almost as a capstone, he has finally gotten King to come to Dallas.

He has told people King will address the poll tax.3 King and James are fighting it on all fronts, while still urging people to figure out how best to pay it so they can continue to vote. But many people are hoping for more. They want to hear King’s version of “Dallas at the Crossroads”—not the version from the people downtown. They want to hear how Dallas will change, and how fast it will change.

Maybe that’s why someone in the city might want to kill Martin Luther King Jr.—and everyone who has turned out to see him.

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