The lights went out.

They both dressed quickly in the dark. They discovered there was no water in the bathroom. They went downstairs.

The darkened lobby was full of panicking hotel staff and guests. Several people were bleeding but it seemed no one was dead. George pushed his way outside. By the streetlights he saw a hole five feet across in the wall of the building, and a spill of heavyweight rubble across the sidewalk. Trailers parked in the adjacent lot had been wrecked by the force of the blast. But, by a miracle, no one had been badly injured.

A cop arrived with a dog, then an ambulance drew up, then more police. Ominously, groups of Negroes began to gather outside the motel and in Kelly Ingram Park on the next block. These people were not the nonviolent Christians who had marched joyfully out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing hymns, George noted anxiously. This crowd had spent Saturday evening drinking in bars and pool halls and juke joints, and they did not subscribe to the Gandhian philosophy of passive resistance favored by Martin Luther King.

Someone said there had been another bomb, a few blocks away, at the parsonage occupied by Martin Luther King’s brother, Alfred, always known as A. D. King. An eyewitness had seen a uniformed cop place a package on the porch a few seconds before the blast. Clearly the Birmingham police had tried to murder both King brothers at the same time.

The crowd got angrier.

Soon they were throwing bottles and rocks. Dogs and water cannon were the favorite targets. George went back inside the motel. Verena was helping to rescue an elderly black woman from a wrecked ground-floor room by flashlight.

“It’s getting nasty out there,” George said to Verena. “They’re throwing rocks at the police.”

“So they damn well should. The police are the bombers.”

“Think about this,” George said urgently. “Why do the whites want a riot tonight? To sabotage the agreement.”

She wiped plaster dust off her forehead. George watched her face and saw rage replaced by calculation. “Damn, you’re right,” she said.

“We can’t let them do it.”

“But how can we stop it?”

“We have to get all the movement leaders out there calming people down.”

She nodded. “Hell, yes. I’ll start rounding people up.”

George went back outside. The riot had escalated fast. A taxicab had been overturned and torched, and was blazing in the middle of the road. A block away, a grocery store was alight. Squad cars approaching from downtown were halted at Seventeenth Street by a hail of missiles.

George grabbed a megaphone and addressed the crowd. “Everybody stay calm!” he said. “Don’t jeopardize our deal! The segregationists are trying to provoke a riot—don’t give them what they want! Go home to bed!”

A black man standing nearby said to him: “How come we have to go home every time they start violence!”

George jumped on the hood of a parked car and stood on the roof. “This is not helping us!” he said. “Our movement is nonviolent! Everybody go home!”