User:Randy Kryn/garrowstatement

David J. Garrow March 2015 Statement "'From 1963 to 1968, no one had a greater strategic & political influence on Dr. King than Jim Bevel. From the original idea of an 'Alabama Project' targeted to 'GROW: Get Rid of Wallace' in the wake of the 16th Street Baptist Church murders in September, 1963, through the idea of marching to Montgomery from Selma in the wake of Jimmie Lee Jackson's killing in Marion in February, 1965, through the idea of SCLC fundamentally enlarging its purview by moving north & joining the Chicago Freedom Movement in early 1966, to his powerful & persuasive arguments that American military violence in Southeast Asia was a moral issue about which the world's most celebrated advocate of confrontational nonviolence could not remain silent, Jim Bevel again & again successfully urged Dr. King to confront evils, domestic & foreign, with the great courage both of them possessed. No sins of the flesh, no matter how egregious, can erase from history's record the hugely influential role that Jim Bevel played in determining America's course in the 1960s.'"