her." Many white Southerners had come to love her, however, with an uneasy conscience, and King knew how important it was to keep up an unremitting pressure on the "conscience of the community." He did not expect segregationists to give up without a struggle, but neither did he expect the struggle to accomplish anything unless it was based on a "great moral appeal." That this appeal was not lost on those to whom it was immediately addressed—conscience-stricken Southern moderates—is indicated by a minister's remark that white clergymen had become "tortured souls." Very few of them, he said, "aren't troubled and don't have admiration for King." Dunbar described civil rights activists as "strange revolutionaries," who "come as defenders of the land and its values. They come, as one prominent white Southerner once put it to me, to give us back our country." The movement's claims could be interpreted in this way only because it was able to recognize itself as the product of the culture it was seeking to change—the product, specifically, of the "characteristically theological cast of Southern thought," as Dunbar put it, with its habit of "seeing all lives as under the judgment of God and of knowing, therefore, with certainty the transience of all works of men."

The civil rights movement did not direct its moral appeal exclusively to white Southerners, of course. It depended on public opinion in the North, ultimately on federal intervention. Leaders of the movement recognized the importance of "public relations," in King's words. "Without the presence of the press," he wrote in 1961, "there might have been untold massacre in the South." "Little would have been accomplished," according to Coretta King, "without television.... When the majority of white Americans saw on television the brutality of segregation in action, ... they reacted ... with revulsion and sympathy and with demands that somehow this ... must stop." A "dramatization to the nation of what segregation was like," in the words of Wyatt Walker, required the presence of national news media. According to Andrew Young, "we were consciously using the mass media to try to get across to the nation" the evils of racial discrimination. When the young radicals in SNCC reproached the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its preoccupation with national media coverage, they were reminded that the movement could not succeed without it. When they complained that the SCLC never stayed in one place long enough to build up a permanent local organization and thus left behind a "string of embittered cities," Hosea

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