Here's a wonderful quote about change, to suddenly decide to do the right thing.

The quote is from the remarkable new book Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: My Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn:

My mother was already leaving the law behind. But King's protest wasn't the only experience that changed her that summer. Another chance meeting seems to have solidified her conviction that direct action, rather than legal study, was her best path forward.

One 102-degree day in July, Bernardine was at the church that served as headquarters for King's rent strike, working on a legal appeal, when somebody shouted, “There's an eviction two blocks away!” My mother and a few other legal advisors grabbed their armbands and ran outside, to find a group of sheriff's deputies carrying someone's belongings out of an apartment and dumping them onto the sidewalk.

“Nobody's shouting,” my mother remembers. “Nobody's saying anything. But they're dumping the kitchen table, children's clothing, toys, dresser drawers everything is piling up in the street.”

Suddenly, she felt somebody next to her-a presence that felt unusually imposing. A man turned to her and asked, “Would you hold my suit coat?”

“And it's Muhammad Ali!” she says, laughing. “The most recognizable person-along with Dr. King-in the world at the time! How did he get there? I have no idea. How did he know to come? Who called him?”

Ali handed her a blue, silk-lined seersucker coat, stepped forward, and picked up a kitchen table. He turned without a word, walked into the apartment building, and started up the stairs. “Instantly,” my mom remembers, “everybody, of the one hundred or two hundred of us standing around, picks up something and follows him inside.”

The deputies just stood there watching while the crowd put the person's apartment back together, piece by piece. “And that was it!” she says. “It was a people power moment. It was a moment of defiance, a gesture by somebody who could carry it off with such panache and so little fear. And it just gave everybody a spark of what's possible.

“And it was that combination-seeing King, night after night, speaking in churches, out there on the West Side-and then these marches on the weekends... It was all so powerful and so brilliant. It changed my life.

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The book has an intriguing intro:

Between 1835 and 1842, scandal tightened around two clergymen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg. It destroyed their reputations, drove them out of their jobs and into prison, and banished them from public life. Their legal exoneration of the most serious charges against them came too late to reverse the damage. I have been thinking about this small vortex of turbulence ever since I happened on the relevant files in the early 1990s. The campaign of denunciations and rumour that took down the Lutheran preachers Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel belongs to an age before the advent of paparazzi, radio, television and digital social media, but that is precisely what endows their story with fabular power. Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.

Ooh! Witchy start!

The book is #1 in LitHub's best-reviewed nonfiction list for this week.

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