David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

classrooms. For a time, it seemed like
Americans could talk of little else. It
was an image, as one journalist put it,
that would “burn forever...the thin,
well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning
into the dog, his arms limp at his side,
calmly staring straight ahead as though to
say—‘Take me, here I am.’” For years,
Martin Luther King and his army of civil
rights activists had been fighting the
thicket of racist laws and policies that
blanketed the American South—the rules
that made it hard or impossible for
blacks to get jobs, vote, get a proper
education, or even to use the same water
fountain as a white person. Suddenly, the
tide turned. A year later, the U.S.