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

tongue planted firmly in cheek—it was
one of the only ways a black person in
those years could meet white women.
“In college,” the historian Taylor Branch
writes, “he acquired dark-rimmed
glasses that gave his face the look of a
brooding Trotskyite.”^4 Once, when he
was preaching in Petersburg, a small
town in Virginia, he showed up at the
local whites-only public library with his
family and a small entourage in tow,
with the intention of getting arrested for
breaking the town’s segregation laws.
What book did he check out that he could
wave in front of the assembled
photographers and reporters? A
biography of the great hero of the white