Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election

FEATURING PAUL KENDRICK AND STEPHEN KENDRICK – 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 which 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.

This story originally aired on January 14, 2021.