Nine Days

"A history of the 1960 US presidential election with a focus on the role played by the imprisonment of Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of an Atlanta sit-in"-- Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta. An earlier, minor traffic ticket served as a pretext for keeping King locked up, and he was transfered to Reidsville, the notorious Georgia state prison where Black inmates worked on chain gangs overseen by violent white guards. An emerging and controversial civil rights leader was languishing behind bars, and the campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon raced to decide whether, and how, to respond. The Kendricks show how these events changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history. -- adapted from jacket