![]() It was a store that didn’t even sell books-a store whose management refused to hire Black clerks until a boycott forced the issue. So he sat at a table with a pile of books at the white-owned Blumstein’s department store on West 125th Street. And now, in Harlem on September 20th, he was being denounced as an Uncle Tom for not appearing at a Black-owned bookstore whose politics conflicted with the mainstream image he was trying to project. The book tour was meant to mobilize support for the movement’s next phase, but days after his first event he’d been kicked, choked, and arrested by the Montgomery police. It had led both to a Supreme Court decision that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional and to retaliatory bombings of Black churches. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “ Stride Toward Freedom,” a memoir of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott-a protest that, at three hundred and eighty-two days, was the most sustained mass action in American history. As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. ![]()
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