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David And Goliath Chapter 6 Summary

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David and Goliath Chapter 6 (Difficulty Paper)
Chapter 6 in David and Goliath focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the American Civil Rights Movement. At the beginning of the chapter Gladwell shares with us a picture taken on May 3, 1963 by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the Associated Press. This famous picture portrays an African American student from Birmingham, Alabama being attacked by a police officer’s German shepherd. The young man just stands there; seemingly calm and unfazed at what is in front of him. Martin Luther King Jr. is a perfect example of an underdog. By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being …show more content…

This wasn’t the first time King had been in the position of the underdog, he was used to it. African American at that time had been forced to be the underdog in almost every possible aspect of their lives. However, this gave them an advantage when it came to their fight for equal rights; they fought hard knowing they had absolutely nothing to lose. The executive director of the South Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by King, was Wyatt Walker. Walker was on the ground in Birmingham from the beginning, marshaling King’s meager army against the forces of racism and reaction. Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts who joined up with King in 1960. Walker was a much more radical version of King; and often manipulated situations to his advantage, making things seem much worse than they were. One example of this is when Walker had planned the march in the city. Although Walker had only 18 people with him, there were hundreds of spectators gathered on the sidewalks watching. Because of this, local newspapers miscalculated the amount of people participating in the march. By appearing to have a much larger number of supporters than he actually had, Walker was able to use this as a snowball effect to gain even more

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