famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he declared his intention to "return to the South" with his "dream" of deliverance and racial brotherhood. Among the considerations that led to his decision to involve himself in the strike of garbage workers in Memphis, where he met his death in 1968, the one that weighed most heavily, in all likelihood, was the plea of civil rights workers there that King belonged in the South and that Southern blacks still believed in nonviolence. He always spoke of himself as a Southerner. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he referred to "our beloved Southland." He honored the best in the Southern heritage and insisted that "we Southerners, Negro and white, must no longer permit our nation and our heritage to be dishonored before the world." The diehard segregationists, he claimed, did not represent the real South. "One day," he said in the Birmingham letter, "the South will recognize its real heroes"—the "disinherited children of God" who were "standing up for what was best in the American dream."

By addressing their oppressors not only as fellow sinners but also as fellow Southerners, King and his followers exposed the moral claims of the white supremacist regime in the South to the most damaging scrutiny ; and the appeal to a common regional past was probably just as important, in the eventual victory over segregation, as the appeal to "profound and ultimate unities," in Niebuhr's phrase. King always believed, even in the face of what sometimes must have seemed overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that "there are great resources of goodwill in the Southern white man that we must somehow tap." When Lyndon Johnson became president, it was important to King to point out that Johnson was a "fellow Southerner" who was "concerned about civil rights." Sympathetic Southern whites sensed that King spoke not only for black people but for the soul of the entire South. Hence the "admiration," as Lillian Smith told King, of "thousands of white Southerners" for what he was doing.

Leslie Dunbar, a white participant in the civil rights movement, attended a White House reception for civil rights activists, listened to the "Southern accents buzzing hungrily" around a plate of barbecued ribs, and found himself touched by the "fraternity of white and black that for the moment makes every Northern white man and every Northern Negro ... an outsider." With all her sins, Dunbar wrote, "the South inspired her sons and daughters, even her suffering black ones, to love

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