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Malcolm Gladwell Analysis

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Malcolm Gladwell uses famous photograph in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement that was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson to demonstrate that even though underdogs are outnumbered along the journey they learn a few things about fighting giants. In 1963 Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, Alabama to take fight against city’s racist police commissioner Eugene ”Bull” Connor. The picture taken in 1963 was of a young teenager being attacked by a police dog. The well dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp to his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though he is saying,” Take me, here I am, expresses Gladwell.” Even to this day this photo has not lost it’s power to shock. King was outgunned and overmatched, he was an overwhelming underdog. However he had an advantage the same of David Boies’s dyslexia or Jay Freireich’s painful childhood. …show more content…

African Americans took these lessons of the trickster to heart. The trickster gets to break the rules. The executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership, the organization led by Martin Luther King Jr., was Wyatt Walker. Walker and King were aware they could not match Bull Connor’s strength but what they could try to get Connor to throw them in the briar patch. “Wyatt,” King said, ” you’ve got to find the means to create a crisis to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” That’s exactly what Walker did. The crisis he created was the photograph of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C- for confrontation. Project C was a high stakes operation, for it to work Connor had to fight back. As King claimed Connor had to “tip his hand” so he can reveal his ugly

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