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denounced King as a “bootlicker,” Adam Clayton Powell called him Martin “Loser” King, and young ghetto dwellers dismissed him, with heavy irony, as “De Lawd.” It was the migration from South to North which, more than anything else, had eroded his constituency. In the settled black communities of Georgia and Alabama, his special amalgam of evangelical rhetoric and middle-class respectability provided the right chemistry for explosive change. But in the bleak ghettos of Chicago and Detroit, these same qualities—and particularly his relentless emphasis on non-violence and integration—proved less effective. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, an angry black voice cried out, “Fuck that dream, Martin! Now, goddamnit, now!”
    Arnold Walker had formed his own judgment of “De Lawd” up close. He owed that opportunity to Mike Haynes, the former assistant minister at Twelfth Baptist, who over the years had remained close to King. King had once asked Haynes to be his assistant in Montgomery, but the young minister had stayed on in Boston and eventually succeeded Dr. Hester at Twelfth Baptist. Whenever King came to Boston, Mike Haynes handled the logistics—meeting him at the airport, driving him around town, scheduling his time.
    Arnold had known Haynes for years, and when Haynes was elected to the state legislature, Arnold—six years his junior—became a member of his entourage. So he wasn’t surprised one morning in April 1965 when Haynes wandered into Carroll’s Cut-Rate and asked whether he would like to be a driver for King during his visit to Boston later that month.
    It was an extraordinary moment in the civil rights struggle—both forAmerica in general and for Boston in particular. Only six weeks before, the nation had witnessed King’s double confrontation in Selma, Alabama—the first on March 9, when state troopers doused the marchers with tear gas, then waded into their ranks swinging clubs and cattle prods; the second on March 11, when a much larger group of marchers—including five hundred from Greater Boston—finally succeeded in crossing the Pettus Bridge. Later that evening, one of the white Bostonians, a Unitarian minister named Jim Reeb, was badly beaten as he emerged from a black restaurant. Two days later, he died of a fractured skull, and for nearly a week the story of Reeb’s death ran side by side with the Selma story on the front pages of Boston’s newspapers, giving Bostonians an acute sense of their stake in those events.
    The movement for racial equality in Boston was gaining velocity at precisely the same moment. On April 14, a committee of distinguished Massachusetts citizens released a long-awaited report on racial imbalance in the state’s public schools. Defining imbalanced schools as those with more than 50 percent black enrollment, the committee found fifty-five such schools in the state, forty-five of them in Boston. It concluded that “racial imbalance is educationally harmful to all children, white and non-white, because separation from others leads to ignorance of others and ignorance breeds fear and prejudice.” Among the remedies which the committee recommended was busing—the first time such a step had been proposed by any public body in Massachusetts. The report stirred predictable protest, with Louise Day Hicks, chairwoman of Boston’s School Committee, calling the busing proposal “undemocratic” and “un-American.” But on April 20, the Boston branch of the NAACP—which had engaged in a steadily escalating confrontation with the School Committee—filed suit in Federal District Court seeking desegregation of Boston’s schools.
    Boston blacks had been in touch with King all that winter, seeking his aid in their hour of need. King felt a large debt to the birthplace of abolitionism, which had supported his Southern campaigns with hundreds of volunteers and thousands of dollars. Besides, he had long wanted to