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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It is Friday, and so that's time again for StoryCorps. Ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we have a story from Atlanta, King's hometown. It was 1960, and the presidential race pitted Vice President Richard Nixon against Senator John F. Kennedy.
LONNIE C KING: Seventy thousand-plus African American students were saying, freedom now. But it was as if it was happening on Mars because neither one of those running for office ever mentioned what was happening all over the South.
MARTIN: So civil rights leader Lonnie C. King enlisted the help of his childhood friend, Martin Luther King Jr.
KING: I planned to put the movement on the front page of the newspapers around the world. And the best way to do that was to try to get King to go to jail with us. Now, he had promised, through his father, that he wouldn't get involved in the activities that were going on in Atlanta 'cause Atlanta did not need him as his father saw it. Daddy King was against us. Still, when we planned the boycott of downtown Atlanta, I called Mr. Martin to ask him, would he go? 'Cause I'd known him since 1945. And so he was giving me all the very erudite kinds of reasons. And I said, M.L. - I was L.C. and he was M.L.
SARAH COOK: (Laughter).
KING: I said, wait a minute, now. You can't lead from the back. You got to lead from the front. The reason I chose to tell him that was because his daddy used to preach that. I said, Atlanta is your hometown, capital of the South, and I need you to go with me. And he said, OK, I'll be there.
He went to jail with us that morning, on 19 October. And we had about 200 people who went to jail that day. They had to go and get some spare bunks from other counties in order to have space for us. Now, King's arrest did exactly what I thought it was going to do, 'cause it was an international story. And so the Kennedys got involved. And they put out 11 million flyers that they called the Blue Bomb, all over America to Black churches. So John Kennedy was given the credit for interceding in the release of King, and Kennedy beat Nixon with 70% of the Black vote. You know, democracy is not a state of being that you automatically are born into. You have to work constantly to try to sustain it, 'cause there are always people around who want to minimize democracy for a certain set of people.
COOK: Well, in the midst of all that, what gives you hope?
KING: Well, I think the glass is half full, not half empty, and that's what keeps me going. Now, my body is 79, but my mind is 25, thinking and planning and working on what I've been doing most of my life. That's my calling, as I saw it, and I haven't veered too far from that.
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MARTIN: Lonnie C. King speaking with his friend, Sarah Cook. Lonnie King died in 2019. He was 82 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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