King had most recently enacted Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence by publicly forgiving his would-be assassin, a woman who struggled with mental illness. He marked the end of his convalescence by going to India, the birthplace of a man whose self-discipline he had admired since he was in theology school: the late Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of the mass movement that secured India’s independence from the British, in 1947. It became clear to him how much stamina he would need to withstand the battles and backlashes ahead. Later, King viewed his months of recovery as a period of productive recalibration. He said yes, and she plunged a steel letter opener deep into his chest. “Is this Martin Luther King?” a woman in sequinned cat-eye glasses asked when she got to the table. The staff had put his signing table at the back, by the shoes. 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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