 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Stephen and Paul Kendrick, the two authors of Nine Days. Before we begin, though, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, February 16th at noon, Robert Watson will discuss his new book, George Washington's Final Battle, which describes Washington's active role in choosing the location of a new capital on the shores of the Potomac. And on Monday, February 22nd at noon, Robert Elder will tell us about Calhoun, American heretic, his new biography of John C. Calhoun, one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. Elder argues that Calhoun's story is crucial for understanding today's political climate. Many of the authors we feature in these programs have conducted research in the records held by the National Archives and its presidential libraries. And I often check the acknowledgments of new releases. It makes me proud to see that the Kendricks not only made use of our records, but also thank two staff members by name, Mary Rose Grossman and James Hill of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The 1960 campaign was one of the most hotly contested and closest presidential elections. Neither John F. Kennedy nor Richard Nixon had spoken forcefully on the issues of race, but the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks before the election forced the campaigns to choose action or silence. Nine Days has earned a number of positive reviews. The Washington Post reviewer, Nick Bryant, wrote that it is an enthralling story, not least because it brings together such an extraordinary and irrefining dramatic persona. Raymond Arsenal, writing in the New York Times, said that no brief review can do justice to the Kendricks' masterly and often riveting account of King's ordeal in the 1960 October surprise that may have altered the course of modern American political history. And in the Chicago Tribune, Rick Cogan calls Nine Days an enlightening and captivating work that tackles a story that resonates loudly in our current times as a thoughtful examination of the trickery relationship between race and politics. In addition to Nine Days, Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick have written Douglas and Lincoln and Sarah's Long Walk, a story of the struggle for equality by free black inhabitants of Boston before the Civil War. Their articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Fortune American Heritage and Huffington Post. Stephen is the senior minister of First Church Boston Unitarian Universalist and the author of The Lively Placed Mount Auburn, America's first garden cemetery. Paul is the executive director of Rust Belt Rising, a Midwest political training organization, as well as an adjunct professor at National Lewis University in Chicago. Paul served in President Obama's White House and on the 2012 Wisconsin campaign. Now let's hear from Stephen and Paul Kendrick. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, David. It is an honor to be able to present our book through the auspices of the National Archives and indeed we did a lot of work at the Kennedy Library and also other libraries without librarians, this kind of work is not possible. So we owe you so much and the nation does. So yes, we found a story that we wanted to tell. We thought it needed to be told. It has largely been a sort of hidden paragraph in Kennedy biographies or books about the closeness of the 1960 election, one of the closest in our history. What made that election remarkable is that it brought back the debate format. It was a close race between a sitting vice president, Richard Nixon, who had befriended a young activist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. And a Kennedy who had grown up in Massachusetts and had no close roots to black life in general. And so we're introducing you into a world that is somewhat foreign to us because in a Gallup poll taken right before the 1960 election, it was a very close drawn race between in terms of black voters as to who they would support and which party they thought would be most sympathetic to their concerns. This is a world where the black vote is up for grabs and Martin Luther King, Jr. and activists is trying not to take sides. But he would like, he very much want the two candidates to speak out on race, which they are reluctant to do. We discovered this story because a friend of ours, his mentor and dear friend was a man named Harris Wofford. You may remember him as a senator from Pennsylvania. He was a healthcare advocate. He was certainly one of the great avatars in American life for volunteers in terms of participation in volunteerism in American life. Harris was a remarkable man. And I was reading in a book about the story of how Harris got himself involved in the 1960 election. And I thought, you know, I think there's a real wonderful story here. So I called our friend, Carl, and said, you know, can you get us in touch with Harris? And he said, sure, you know, he's 89 years old but he's spry, he's very happy to talk about his life and all the things that brought him to this day. And he gave us hours and hours of interviews. But more importantly, he gave us a deep sense of a decency and kindness. He really truly was a remarkable man. And in meeting Harris Wofford, we realized we were talking to among the last of the links between RFK, JFK, and MLK. Harris was devoted, dearly, to the work and mission and life of Martin Luther King Jr. They shared Gandian principles of non-violence and Harris tried to support Martin Luther King whenever he could with true devotion and affection. But he also gave a lot of time and work to support John F. Kennedy. He was a man that he thought had almost unlimited potential for growth but he wasn't so certain where his moral core was or his deep passion for civil rights that he cared so much about. And so right before the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy plucked Harris from the faculty of an ultra-dom and created a special speech writing position for him. And that didn't work out terribly well. And RFK said, you know, we need you in the speech writing shop. And he introduced him to the brother-in-law, Sergeant Shriver. And that's how Harris really found his place within the 1960 Kennedy campaign. He became part of the civil rights section, an innovative outreach to black voters all across the country. And Kennedy was behind. Nixon really was seen as Mr. Civil Rights in Washington. He certainly was understood as being much more sympathetic to civil rights than his boss, Dwight Eisenhower. And so this is a world we found absolutely fascinating. We think we know so much about the 1960 election but so much of what we do believe are kind of mythic qualities. What we discovered is that this was an unusual world where in fact there was a lot of ground to make up with the civil rights section. Harris was introduced to Sergeant Shriver who became his boss and dear friend. And together they found themselves in a very paradoxical situation. As two white liberals, they found themselves in charge of the outreach to black America. And that was kind of an untenable situation. And so they had the wisdom and foresight and the depth of understanding that they knew that they needed to reach out to someone else. And I'll let Paul take it from there. So as we were getting to know Harris better, I was getting very interested in his partner on the campaign, Louis Martin. Louis Martin was a Chicago Defender journalist who Shriver'd heard good things about and he recruited to come onto the campaign and really helped turn around the campaign's black outreach. And in Louis' Library of Congress papers were incredible unpublished memoirs and notes about these times on the Kennedy campaign. And it was frankly a joy to get to know Louis Martin's daughters. Some of whom I think are watching today and we really thank Trudy Martin-Header and Dr. Tony Martin because they helped us allow you as the reader to know this remarkable man who orchestrated so much civil rights change but kind of got left out of history, has really been neglected for his masterful role as a strategist. And so Louis comes out of the campaign and Shriver and Wofford to their credit really empower him. They really listen to Louis and understand that he is respected in black communities across the country, understand which levers to press, who they need to reach out to. He is pushing the campaign to be bolder on civil rights in this substantive outreach that they're doing. And so Shriver and Wofford, they're ready to listen and understand he has a perspective and other experiences that they're really gonna need. And so suddenly this friendship became at the heart of the book of this bold interracial trio because as the king crisis happens this how they worked as a team and their audaciousness would really matter but it's something that readers are really enjoying in nine days. And so Sergeant Shriver, as my father said he is the Kennedy's brother-in-law. He's in charge of all the constituents the outreach entities of the campaign but particularly the civil rights one. He had been in Chicago before the campaign passionate of speaking out against racism and but he was viewed kind of skeptically by the Kennedy brothers. He was thought of as the two liberal in law maybe too passionate, too idealistic worried about his judgment. So he really had something to prove when his father-in-law said, well you gotta go help your brother-in-law get elected president. He had been running the merchandise bar in Chicago. Now he's on the campaign. Now he's got Louis Martin and Harris Wofford as this key trio for the events that would transpire. But we got then very interested in the Atlanta student movement. And because the story allows us to see these famous figures, Kennedy, the Kennedy brothers, Nixon, King as young men making fast decisions that would change history and define their legacies. What we suddenly realized is we had a book that was you're gonna see them through the eyes of lesser known characters who we thought really deserved to be centered in this narrative. And so the Atlanta student movement was led by someone named Lonnie King and that's him rallying Morehouse, Spellman, Clark and other Atlanta university students in 1960. And then on the other side is time, precious time we've got to spend with him recording his memories. Unfortunately, Harris and Lonnie both passed away in 2019 but it made us so grateful that we had recorded their recollections for this book. But Lonnie, he heard that students were doing sit-ins in North Carolina in the spring of 1960. And he says to a fellow student, Julian Bond, well, someone ought to do that here. And Julian Bond says, well, I'm sure someone will. And Lonnie says, all right, we'll call a meeting. And that is a real lesson for all of us about just taking action, not waiting for anyone else. And soon over the months, the Atlanta student movement is doing sit-ins, forcing the question of desegregation of inequality by putting their bodies on the line and going to jail. But at the same time, Martin Luther King is moving home to Atlanta at age, he's 31 years old. And he grew up with Lonnie King and Ebenezer Church. But Martin Luther King has moved home to Atlanta as the sit-in movement is burgeoning. And King was kind of searching for how he was going to change America because four years on from the Montgomery bus boycott, and this is a King that's unfamiliar to a lot of us, but he was kind of struggling with self-doubt with trying to understand how he was gonna make the national change that people were expecting of him and worried he was becoming a one hit wonder. And so the students asked King to go to jail with them. They had been inspired by what he did in Montgomery, and now they were injecting the civil rights movement with new momentum, with a new approach. And as the 1960 elections approaching, they want to force, Lonnie wants to force politicians to address civil rights, and if they're famous, they're emerging mostly regionally, but somewhat well-known friend, Dr. Martin Luther King would go to jail with them, then maybe the politicians would have to talk about civil rights as much as Kennedy and Nixon don't want to. And Stephen, so tell us more about how that world of 1960 in Atlanta and the political parties was so different than what we have today. Well, because neither Nixon nor Kennedy really wanted to address civil rights, the students were quite wise in trying to enlist Martin Luther King to go to jail with them. What transpired was a great surprise to the King family. In fact, the events of the nine days are gonna be the time where the King family most feared for his life. And as we said earlier, there was a sense that really maybe Nixon was ahead of King and ahead of Kennedy in terms of outreach to black voters. This is a great picture of Martin Luther King meeting Nixon in Ghana three years before. And Nixon invited King to Washington, DC at least twice. They communicated by letter. The students were absolutely certain that if King and the other 50 or more students went to jail, it would be Nixon who would speak out. That turned out not to be the case. And in fact, you can make a very strong case and political scientists and historians have made it through the years that it is the events of the next nine days that upon which the fulcrum of the decision of where this election will turn comes. So when King gets arrested, suddenly at first he's with the other students in Atlanta and that's not so bad. He can depend on Mayor Hartsfield to protect them. And King did not enjoy going to jail. He went to jail more than 20 times in his career but he hated it, he hated the isolation. And it was always very, very tough. And but when he was surrounded by his younger friends, Lonnie King and the energy of the students he found he could get through it. But then there came a turn because he had been arrested a little bit before by giving the writer Lillian Smith a ride to her cancer treatments. And for a black man to be driving a white woman in a car, not so good in 1960, Georgia. And but he was given essentially a $25 minor ticket which unveiled that he had not transferred his driver's license from Alabama to Georgia in his recent move. So he thought really frankly nothing of it. It was the most minor of traffic tickets imaginable. But it turned out that the judge and to Cobb County that he was there for kept this in mind. And when the time came for the students to be freed when Mayor Hartsfield came up with a superbly Machiavellian plan to get them all out and to get the downtown businesses to begin the process of desegregation, King was not freed with them. And therefore this story turns and becomes infinitely more dangerous because suddenly it looks as if he's gonna have to find himself in a much more dangerous situation. Back then the student movement was coming up with a new strategy. It was jail, no bail. For a black man to voluntarily go into prison was almost certifiably insane. It was incredibly dangerous. And those around King understood just how dangerous this turn of events was going to be. And he was gonna go before a pretty racist judge and Oscar Mitchell certainly was going to justify his reputation because once he had King in front of him suddenly that $25 ticket and probation became a four months hard labor. And it was devastating. Daddy King was warned by those around him that King was likely to be killed. And certainly Andrew Young later in life in conversations with Paul described hearing about the fate of Steve Biko the South African activist. And he thought to himself that's really almost what happened to my friend. So these are pictures here of the transfer when he's going from the relative safely of the Fulton County Jail into Dacobb County first and then eventually as we shall see he's gonna be heading off into much more dangerous territory. These pictures really give you a sense of the gravity of the situation in which he finds himself. Paul you made a major find that helps us really describe what happened to King at this juncture. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the transcript. Yeah. So as we talk about overlooked but ought to be celebrated heroes in American history that are part of this story Donald Hollowell was King's brave lawyer. He was fearless. He drove through backwoods of Georgia to defend falsely accused black Americans. And he was just would not back down from any no matter how racist the judges were when no matter what things they said to him he could brilliantly argue and call for memory everything in a case. And so he is the student's lawyer. So when the students are arrested it's Hollowell that is working to get them out. But when King goes before Oscar Mitchell now suddenly this is being sent to the chaining and the dangerous state prison Reedsville in rural Georgia is on the line. And what we found in the sweet Auburn library research library in Atlanta was the trial transcript of what happened that day when Hollowell is arguing. And it also helped us be able to vividly for you give you the dialogue of the sit in arrest that riches department store itself that kind of begins the crisis. But this was there to help us see how Hollowell wanted to put segregation on trial. The judge wanted to use these technicalities of motor vehicle or codes to persecute King. Hollowell is standing up for King and for the principles of the unfairness and inequality of how the students are treated. But nonetheless Oscar Mitchell rules as he does and this is King that day indicator. And so Coretta King who we see here eight years later she calls Harris Wofford because Harris Wofford again had been a friend to the Kings had been an advisor to her husband in a panic saying they are going to kill Martin. I know they are going to kill him. And for Harris he had already gotten the Kennedy campaign involved in this situation without a kind of approval to do so. But one thing that's amazing about National Archives Presidential Libraries is we found in Louis Martin's papers from the campaign early in this week a draft of a press release that never made it out but that essentially takes is starting to see the advantage that their campaign has gotten involved in this situation of trying to get King out. And it was a draft that never made out the door but it let us know, you know, Louis was seeing the potential way to communicate something about their candidate to voters if they speak out. Now I want to go back to Nixon also had advisors black advisors who wanted him to speak out for his friend King. This is Jackie Robinson, the baseball legend and Eisenhower White House staffer, the first black staffer in white house history, E. Frederick Morrow. They are working to help elect Nixon. They believe that the GOP will really seize the mantle of the black vote and the leader on civil rights note. And this is a desperate situation. And when we talk about the Nixon Presidential Library, the folks that were so helpful for us in being able to get access to a folder of everything related to Martin Luther King and Nixon and there's all these telegrams from around the country of black leaders saying you got to speak up for King. You got to help King get out. And so there's fascinating stuff that we use in the book to give the Republican side of this race of who's going to speak out for King and how do we get King out before he is killed because Daddy King has been told and we found examples in the Atlanta papers of those days of murders in Reedsville. But Daddy King has been told his son is going to be quietly assassinated. So that's kind of the state of play that has Coretta calling Harris. But for Harris, so this is his friend's life in jeopardy and he and Louie have an idea of what they can get their candidate to do. But before they do that, Stephen, talk about the night transfer that happened to Dr. King to Reedsville when the danger truly hits its peak during this nine day crisis. King has awakened at roughly 3.30 in the morning, roused it out of his cell, he's manacled and shackled and put in the backseat of a waiting police car with a German shepherd in the backseat and he is not spoken to by the two officers who were taking him. Andrew Young described this as truly the dark night of the soul for King. King really assumed that he was going to be killed. That was his operative assumption. He thought that he would never see his family again. They drove for hours and hours and then King began to get the suspicion that perhaps they were headed towards Reedsville. This rural and very tough penal prison where we discovered and doing research of newspapers of the very same week that these events happened that prisoners at Reedsville had gotten out to reporters in the Atlanta Journal Constitution descriptions of just how violent and tough Reedsville actually was. And this is contemporaneous material. We didn't have to make anything up. It's right there. And so instead of being relieved, King knows that he is in a lot of trouble. And in meantime, Hollowell and others are frantically trying to see what can be done somehow to free King. Now, what the King family did not know is that at that point, Harris and Louis had really kind of almost inadvertently gotten the King's, they got the Kennedys involved and really knowing that they needed to do something. So we won't go into a lot of this in this description today, but there's a lot of backroom channels going on. So if you pick up a history book, the likely the paragraph you're gonna see is that the candidate picks up the telephone and Kennedy has a brief minute and a half conversation with Coretta King. That is an idea that Harris and Louis Martin came up with and they called their friend, Sergeant Shriver, who was then out in Chicago, saying get to the candidate, if we can get this phone call made, it could make all the difference to voters all across the country in terms of black America. Black Americans don't expect much from white politicians, but at least they could have some sense that one could be humanly sympathetic. And really, I think, frankly, to everyone's surprise, that's exactly what Kennedy does. Kennedy is often depicted as quite Machiavellian and certainly he was a very shrewd politician. And there was nothing saying that this was a good move to make. Two and a half weeks before an extraordinarily close election where both candidates had tried to stay away from the thorny topic of civil rights, but Kennedy did the decent thing. He picked up the telephone. He had that conversation with Coretta, offered his solicitude and solace and remarked that, like his wife, Jackie, he knew that she was pregnant. And it was a very short conversation, but it seemed to change everything. Things started to move in a very quick way. And meantime, absolute radio silence from the Nixon campaign. It's perhaps true that Nixon was expecting Eisenhower to say something, but the candidate did not ask his president to make these remarks. Remarks were later written. We have them in the archive, but they were never delivered by the president and they certainly were never delivered by the vice president. And so Nixon stayed silent. And perhaps, perhaps upon that, the campaign turned, but there are one more important phone call to be made and a very audacious move, a shrewd and powerful idea by Lewis Martin, one of the great political practitioners of the modern era called the Blue Bound. Paul, you wanna talk about? Yeah, so as my father mentions, you'll read in the book the back channels with some very unexpected people in Georgia that led to ultimately Bobby calling the judge, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes that really surprised the Wofford, Martin and Shriver when they learned that the Kennedy brothers ultimately decided, well, oh, they've gotten us involved in this thing. We ought to do more than a gesture. Let's fix this, let's get King out. And so Bobby will eventually call this judge. We chronicle in the book how that comes to happen because it's not as simple as the myth about him just getting mad and doing it. And so King will be able to be brought home to Atlanta, to the students that are waiting for him safe and sound to speak that night at Ebenezer for Lonnie King. It was profound relief. He had had such guilt all week that he had gotten his friend into this life-threatening situation. And he worried, you know, Daddy King and Greta. He's told us, I thought they were gonna kill me for getting Martin into this situation, but they're able to get him home from Reedsville that his lawyer, Hollowell, goes out there and it's an incredible scene of how they, I won't give it away, of how they get King home. But Louis Martin, as my dad alluded to, thinks a couple of days on, I don't think people have really focused, but black voters have not really focused in on this very morally decent thing that my candidate did. And so Louis has the idea that Harris immediately backs and Sergeant Triver tells them, all right, I'll help you do without ever telling my brother's laws about it, that we're gonna do a hard-hitting pamphlet distributed in black America through churches and in the cities, through barbershops, through bars, through anywhere where people are, but white voters are never gonna focus in on it. They're never gonna know. Louis, who is so funny, Louis said in his, I think in oral history for the JFK Library, it may have been in his papers. As far as white reporters knew, it might have well been in Chinese. It was not written for white voters to focus in on because Kennedy had to hold them. Nixon, the reason he's not speaking out is Nixon wants to flip the Democratic South that voted Democratic. Nixon wants to win for the GIP. He's not speaking out about this controversial minister. And so Louis sees the opening, all right, we are gonna flip that Atlanta black community, like the King family who votes for Republicans right now. It's called the blue bomb because the cover is blue. It's a pamphlet that shows that quote, Nixon is the candidate, excuse me, Kennedy is the candidate with a heart and how Nixon didn't speak out and as quotes from different leaders, you can see it at the JFK Library once things are open and safe again. As part of the National Archives. And it gets reprinted in different cities and Harris is up all night getting it onto a bus that's heading to a church in North Carolina. Shriver at that point is in Chicago. He goes on Sunday morning to a church on the south side, sees people walking out with the flyers but people describe it as electricity. It was explosive. And Louis knew how to tell a powerful story. He, because he came from the Chicago Defender World, Louis Martin knew how to get people in the heart. And so when the election day ultimately comes and we tried to tell these days in a very dramatic way that helps you feel like you're there as part of a very close election that could have gone either way and everything made a big difference when an election across the country in so many states was so close. And so black voters are the difference in at least nine states and they have shifted seven percentage points from the 1956 election in terms of a higher margin for the Democrats. And the black vote, after then you have the Civil Rights Act and the rest of the 60s. But even by 1964, it's to like near 90% or actually above in 64 to the Democrats. So our political parties are never the same but this was the fork in the road. This was a pivotal moment. But again, Wofford and Triver, they listened. They understood Louis had these ideas and they backed him and Triver said, well, if we lose the election, my brothers will be mad about that. So why don't we just, we were just not even gonna tell them and we're gonna make this happen. And so how they orchestrated that is a part of the book that I think make you wanna get up and cheer it's really exciting that they have this idea and they make it happen. And so Steve, talk about how this gives us the world we have today and then I'll finish with some of the lessons for all of us. Robert F. Kennedy summoned our team of civil rights section mavericks. And he said, you bomb throwers have lost the election. But that's really not the way it all worked out. And that's what's amazing about this is the saving of Martin Luther King's life inadvertently, almost accidentally ended up being the smart political move. But that's not why they made it. In the end, they made it because it seemed to be the right thing to do. And we're not probably so used to that in our modern politics. We often think of politics as craven and corrupt but this is ultimately a story of courage and human decency. It's also a story about interracial friendship but we don't wanna press that too hard because the ultimate truth of it is that there have been openings in American life where people have been able to make these connections across our racial lines but we can't be naive or sentimental about it. But when there are those openings, Paul and I have tried to write sympathetically about those opportunities and what it takes to take those opportunities to have the courage to do it. And yes, in many ways, this is a world that's almost unrecognizable to us but it helps create the world that we live in today. Nixon creates in his bitterness, he creates a Southern strategy and that really holds our politics in place until this day. It's not any great surprise that on January 6th, a picture splashed all across the world of one of the mob strolling across the Capitol with a picture of Charles Sumner and John Calhoun in the background and a confederate flag. So the Southern strategy is a very powerful whole but it is precisely at this point in 1960 with this incredible team of very sympathetic characters who worked to free King out of a deep friendship and sense that he, this 31 year old man, is really the key to unlocking the future of civil rights in America and that he must be saved. And it is their friendship and their bravado and their willingness to toss it ice that really makes all the difference. It helps make the world in which we live in today. When we see how young all these characters are, it's a salutary reminder that it's the students of the Atlanta Senate movement. They kind of forced the issue. King went on the trail. He understood and was sympathetic and understood that they didn't need to be led. They needed to be sympathetically listened to. And Paul has some interesting thoughts about the characters in our book and the ones who listened. Yeah, it is certainly the ones who listened that are able to achieve the outcomes that they were striving for in terms of Shriver and Wofford and the power of this diverse team. But then ultimately, John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy do listen to the ideas that come from their civil rights unit. Nixon did not listen to Jackie Robinson and Eve Frederick Mauro who were asking him to speak out. He kind of kept things in his own head. And so, but he ultimately does not win the selection, does not seize the blackboard. And there's something amazing in the Nixon Library because as we think about what were his emotions after this in his, the Martin Luther King file in the Nixon Library and aid wrote a proposal to him of, well, why don't you reach out to the people that contacted you about King in prison and thank them for doing so and say that your body's relieved and I'm paraphrasing. And on this memo is just scroll two letters, no. And so it created a wound in Nixon that does accelerate, like the breaking of this friendship with King that he, because he did not speak up for King, that Nixon will embrace this Southern strategy to focus on fear and grievance to win the white South that Lyndon Johnson helped Kennedy hold on to while Louis Martin was getting this message out to black America that was moving black voters after months of substantive civil rights outreach that was very novel that the campaign did. But for King, I think we have to go back to his courage and ultimately King did what he was uncomfortable doing which is go to jail and his father didn't want him to do it and he didn't want to do it right before the election. And, but he listened to young activists, something that we all have to do today and listening to young people. And he did the thing that scared him, that he did the thing, how to fit his comfort zone to go to a jail cell. But through this experience, Andrew Young told us that, well, then King understood what his mission was going to take from after that. He never joked about that ride to reach there. He joked about a lot of life-threatening situations. He never joked about that night because that anxiety of thinking you are going to your death that you will never see your family again. King called that worse than dying. But for King, but once he faced that, he could go on to Birmingham and he could go to jail. He could face down the anxiety he had of solitary confinement and do the things that allowed him in Birmingham to create a moral theater where American hearts and minds be changed, where politicians could not look away, where Kennedy ultimately would get behind civil rights legislation to put force behind it as Louis Barton and Harris Wofford had been working on him and Martin Luther King had been working on him to do to address their priorities. But King could face down anything. He understood what the rest of his life would be, that he would be putting his life on the line every day, but he was prepared to do that to change America. And so King's courage is something that we just cannot take for granted. And I think the story helps you know him in a more accessible way, how he became that leader at the March on Washington speech of Selma, how it was young students, the women of Spelman, the men of Morehouse and Clark and other landed universities, Lonnie King, who helped inspire him to become then the national leader. And as Americans said, wow, as they're learning about this story afterwards, well, because people have found out about Kennedy helping this Southern minister, it was all part of how Martin Luther King elevates to becoming a national leader, but the civil rights movement is more than Martin Luther King. It's also the Lonnie Kings and all the women and men, the Atlanta student movement. And they give an example to all of us because there's something we can all do to force a conversation about things that are wrong. And then Louie Martin, Harris Wauverge, Sergeant Triver, they really show that political courage and getting Kennedy to speak up against an injustice. And that's something that we all have to do today when we see something that is wrong. We have to be willing to speak up, to take action and to be bold. And all of these things were things that made all of them uncomfortable, that carried lots of risk. But Nixon decided to play it safe on these things. But Wauverge, Triver, Martin, the Kennedy brothers, they were able to grow, to listen to each other, to show the moral leadership in how they spoke out for King. And that is something that we can all do today in our daily lives for things that are wrong if we are going to make civil rights progress, if we were to realize equality in America. So we hope you enjoy nine days. We cannot thank National Archives enough for the research we did to tell the story vividly for you as a reader to feel like you're there in these days, but to have research discoveries that helped us understand them and help you the reader understand them. So for what the National Archives and their presidential libraries do every day, we are so thankful and we really appreciate you letting us share the story of nine days with you today. Thank you so much.