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

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail-and the time that King's family most feared for his life.



While King's imprisonment was decried as a moral scandal in some quarters and celebrated in others, for the two presidential candidates-John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon-it was the ultimate October surp...