Then, out of nowhere, out of Africa, came Babatunde Olatunji, drummer, singer, sage. He of the primal chants and flowing robes and tribal beats, a strange stranger in a strange land. No one, not even his African-American brothers and sisters, really knew what to make of him at first. But if ever the country was primed for something new, something wild, it was now, and soon he turned gapes and murmurs into smiles and cheers, and hi-fi’s everywhere pulsed with the strains of the aptly titled “Drums of Passion,” Olatunji’s breakthrough release on Columbia Records. Four decades later, the album has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and has inspired beyond measure, musically and otherwise.

But then, it’s always been Olatunji’s nature to inspire, to teach, to enlighten. In fact, he has long looked the part of the proverbial sage on a mountaintop, the serene soul perched at the precipice, ready to illumine world-weary travelers. His visage, strikingly beatific, is the sort of preternatural mug that quells evil spirits and tames wild beasts. His voice, still thick with the timbre of his native Nigeria, is both soothing and fervid, equally suited for bedtime stories and suicide prevention. And his graceful comportment radiates an aura of supreme confidence, which no doubt helps stoke the illusion that he is vertically endowed, a veritable giant among men, when in fact he is only 5-foot-7. But these extraordinary attributes are mere complements to his most dazzling quality, that which has rendered Olatunji a near diety in the eyes of millions: his undisputed mastery of conga drums.

“Rhythm,” he often says, “is the soul of life!” It is a credo to which he has subscribed since he was raised on rhythm in Ajido, a Nigerian village peopled by the millions-strong Yoruba tribe. There, he was schooled early in what he has termed the “evocative power” of drums, specifically, conga drums hand-fashioned from wood and goat hide. They gave voice to happenings profound and mundane, to births and deaths and everything in between. They were, in effect, the chief chroniclers of village life and thus were carefully hand-crafted so as to resonate with maximum effectiveness. Even today, Olatunji’s instruments retain a certain proletarian quality owing much to workmanship that has changed little in centuries.

“There’s a trinity about drums,” he has noted. “There’s got to be a spirit in the body of the drum. And the wood has to stay alive in order for it to produce sound. The skin on the drum is alive, too. But you’ve got to know how to tan it, because when it [encounters] the spirit of the person playing it, it then becomes an irresistible force.”

In 1950, Olatunji applied for and received a Rotary scholarship to attend Moorehouse College in Atlanta. Bent on bettering the lives of his Nigerian compatriots, he strove to become a diplomat, spending his undergraduate years studying political science, sociology and psychology, disciplines in which he might find ways to quell the civil unrest that threatened the world, especially his motherland, Nigeria, and his adoptive land, America. It wasn’t until he formed a small drum and dance ensemble during his postgraduate days at New York University, where he continued his diplomatic track with the study of public policy, that he rediscovered the captivating, transcendent effect of his native music on American audiences. Olatunji soon ceased his academic endeavors and dedicated himself to the drums.

It was 1958, and the boy who had dreamed of one day becoming an ambassador was now a man on the way to attaining his goal. Not officially, and certainly not in the traditional sense, but what did it matter? Music and rhythm spoke louder than words, anyway. And the time was ripe for social revolution: His sudden rise to fame came during an era that witnessed America’s most epic (and tragic) struggle for civil equality.

In this same period, the year before he and his congas would pierce universal consciousness, he began his musical ministry in earnest. He even toured portions of the United States with Martin Luther King Jr., drumming at civil rights rallies and other such assemblies. He would do likewise later with Malcolm X. Consequently, Olatunji’s name soon became linked as much with social issues as with music, though his ardent activism never overtook his affinity for the stage.

Among the countless performances he gave was a high-profile gig with the Radio City Symphony at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, where there happened to be a Columbia Records executive in attendance. Impressed by Olatunji’s raw, exotic riffs, he immediately signed his new find and introduced him to one of Columbia’s top music producers, John Hammond. An A&R wiz who would go on to bring Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen into the Columbia fold, Hammond helped sculpt Olatunji’s unique sound while maintaining its searing integrity. The resulting “Olatunji! Drums of Passion” set ears and souls afire.

Before the album was released, or even titled, however, Olatunji, a spirited proponent of musical education programs, told the Columbia suits of his notion to tour elementary schools, first in New York City and neighboring states, then nationally, to promote the album and showcase this revolutionary sound of his. Of course, it wasn’t revolutionary to him, but to most everyone else it was cutting edge. Record company flacks also seemed to think it was a bit risqui, especially for children. Think of the children! “[Columbia] said, ‘What are you going to take that to schools for? What are we going to call it? ‘” Olatunji recalled. “And I said, ‘Drums of Passion!’ They hesitated. Now, when you think of the language on television today, the fact that they hesitated is amazing!”

Consequently, the tour received no promotional support from the label. But Olatunji maintained his course and, in the spring of 1959, having secured sponsorship from the Organization for Childhood Education and the Rockefeller Foundation, he struck an agreement with the New York Board of Education whereby he would perform at weekly school assemblies in Queens, Long Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. He did likewise at schools in New Jersey and Connecticut, then convinced other school systems around the country to follow New York’s example, and began a nationwide sweep. At a few hundred dollars per gig, the tour would by no means make him wealthy, but it would allow him to showcase his music before throngs of malleable young minds, the next wave of voters and politicos and power brokers.

Two youths in particular who witnessed Olatunji’s awesome exhibition and, consequently, became lifelong disciples, were the late comic Andy Kaufman and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, both of whom were elementary students on Long Island, where Yoruba tribesmen aren’t exactly commonplace. Thus, Olatunji, with his otherworldly garb and rough-hewn instruments of beast hide and teak (this was the anti-Fabian if ever there was one) had their rapt attention even before skin met skin.

Kaufman, for one, was so impressed that he soon purchased his own congas and sought out lessons from the master himself at one of Olatunji’s many outposts in Greenwich Village. Years later, he even went so far as to incorporate his own alien breed of conga drumming into many of his performances. Hart, similarly floored by Olatunji’s impassioned exhibit, followed a more predictable and infinitely more renowned percussive path, eventually joining forces with psychedelic kingpin Jerry Garcia to form the Grateful Dead.

During his promotional tour for “Drums of Passion,” and on tours for his subsequent Columbia albums in the early- to mid-1960s, Olatunji, whose fame was rising steadily, continued to champion education and social reform. His chant “Akiwowo,” from “Drums of Passion,” got frequent airplay on mainstream New York radio courtesy of WLWU DJ Murray the K, and on the television front, Olatunji made appearances on Ed Sullivan’s variety program in 1961, and Johnny Carson’s then New York-based “The Tonight Show” in 1963.

In late August 1963, upon completing an extended engagement at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, he sped (literally — he got a ticket along the way) cross-country to attend the March on Washington in the nation’s capital, the storied gathering at which King delivered his prescient “I have a dream” speech, which echoed Olatunji’s beliefs and hopes. Inspired, he began to more fully realize how his growing celebrity could be an effective vehicle for his own cultural and political agendas.

The next year, following performances at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where he was hired as a featured performer on the African Pavilion, one of 36 such pavilions that spotlighted foreign artists, Olatunji used most of his modest paycheck to establish the Olatunji Center for African Culture at 43 E. 125th St. in Harlem. For the next quarter century, until it closed in 1988, he and his volunteer staff hosted workshops and offered music and dance lessons (only $2 apiece), all intended to promote African culture.

By 1966, Olatunji’s contract with Columbia ended following his sixth album for the label, “More Drums of Passion,” intended as a sequel to his triumphant debut effort. But it, as well as the four albums he’d recorded during the years in between (“Afro Percussion,” “Zungo!” “Flaming Drums!” and “Highlife,” the last being the most jazz-infused of the lot), failed to achieve the widespread popular and critical acclaim of their predecessor. And so, for the next two decades, Olatunji found himself spending much more time on the road than in the studio, tooling cross-country in a station wagon to various performances, largely at universities, where he happily, passionately preached his philosophy of peace, love and knowledge through rhythm.

He occasionally returned to the studio to make guest appearances on records of such celebrated jazzmen as Cannonball Adderly and Pee Wee Ellis. And while he never had a chance to do so with John Coltrane, he remained a prime influence on the lauded saxophonist who, impressed not only by Olatunji’s percussive prowess, but by his efforts to revive African culture in America, even lent monthly financial support to the Olatunji Center in Harlem until his untimely death in 1967.

Cut to: Oakland, Calif., New Year’s Eve, 1985: After toiling in relative obscurity for nearly 20 years, this was a second chance of which Olatunji had not even dreamed. His former pupil Mickey Hart, now a world-famous rock ‘n’ roll drummer, had reintroduced himself to his mentor at one of Olatunji’s shows in San Francisco and invited Olatunji to open for the Grateful Dead at a New Year’s bash at the Oakland Coliseum. Hart, from day one a fervent champion of Olatunji’s, figured it was about time student and teacher combined forces to blow some minds, not to mention roofs.

And his instincts were right. It was a stunning night, one that saw Olatunji in top form, flailing and tapping and thumping and chanting, ushering in the new year the only way he knew how: with a bang (actually, many bangs), not a whimper. The tie-dye ocean swirled. The capacity crowd crowed, grooved to the beat, even sang along. In short, they dug it, and dug it big. Baba, as he’d become fondly known, rocked the house. Baba was back.

Proclaimed Olatunji, “When I think of that night, it gladdens my heart.” Hart, too, saw the crowd’s zeal and realized what potential there was in collaborating with his boyhood hero. Beginning in 1986, Olatunji and Hart created “Drums of Passion: The Invocation,” a collection of Yoruba tribal devotions to various gods, with Hart producing and occasionally accompanying on hoop drum and concussion stick. The album, which also featured the guitar licks of longtime Olatunji fan Carlos Santana, hit the shelves in 1988. Hart also reintroduced Olatunji’s 1986 album of love songs, “Dance to the Beat of My Drum,” which was renamed “Drums of Passion: The Beat,” and re-released as part of Hart’s international series “The World” in 1989.

But it wasn’t until 1991, when Olatunji and Hart formed the group Planet Drum, that their efforts received large-scale attention and praise. The ensemble’s first album, “Planet Drum,” earned a Grammy award and exposed Olatunji to yet another generation of listeners. Six years later, their 1997 effort “Love Drum Talk” garnered Grammy attention as well, though this time only a nomination. Nevertheless, it got some critical raves. The Jazz Times review called the album “a powerfully infectious meditation on the nature of indiscriminate love that grooves as it teaches … [Olatunji] delivers the cure once again.”

Olatunji, now 72, still resides in New York, his epicenter for more than four decades. While he is somewhat grayer and slower-moving than when he began, his social activism is stronger than ever (not long ago he attended his first star-studded Hollywood charity function at the home of Goldie Hawn), He continues to teach and perform around the city, the country and the world; it is a calling taken seriously, heeded joyously. Plainly put, Baba loves his work.

“The spirit of the drum is something that you feel but cannot put your hands on,” he once mused, attempting to explain the allure of his craft. “It does something to you from the inside out . . . it hits people in so many different ways. But the feeling is one that is satisfying and joyful. It is a feeling that makes you say to yourself, ‘I’m glad to be alive today! I’m glad to be part of this world!’”

First, the messy details, quickly. Sometime Monday parts or all of the following “quote” flew around Twitter and Facebook, attributed to King:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Then someone Googled the first sentence, and found King never said it. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle went up with a “gotcha” post, accusing folks with reservations about both bin Laden’s killing and its celebration with fabricating evidence that King would have agreed with them. But then it came out that, while King didn’t say the first sentence, he had in fact made the other two statements, on Page 53 of his book “Strength to Love.” And it turned out nobody “fabricated” anything: A 24-year-old teacher named Jessica Dovey wrote her own thoughts, sans quote marks, before the King quote, and posted it on Facebook, but as the post was cut and pasted and abbreviated in countless ways, King’s words and Dovey’s got jumbled. No fabrication; no harm, no foul.

But the frenzy over the King quote came along with a disturbing wave of thought-policing, from all over the political spectrum, and they seem to be related. Battles raged Monday not so much over whether the U.S. killing Osama was morally or legally justified, but over the right way to feel about it, and the right way to express those feelings (which seemed to be the core issue the King “quote” was addressing). Has social media made us a nation of biddies, chiding everyone over the “appropriate” way to feel about public events? David Sirota’s Salon piece, “‘USA! USA!’ is the wrong response,” was widely attacked. Maybe I should count Sirota among the feelings-police, but he made a valid political argument, and he came in for an avalanche of criticism merely for suggesting sobriety, not celebration, was the right response to bin Laden’s death. It was somehow read as Sirota criticizing Obama’s decision, which he did not. (It was also posted more than 100,000 times on Facebook, so a lot of people also agreed with Sirota.) Can one both believe that the killing was the right thing to do, and also be sober, even sad about it? Yes, you can, but in some quarters, anything less than high-fiving the president’s “victory” was suspect.

I witnessed a similar Facebook and Twitter frenzy last week when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. I wrote on Twitter, Facebook and my blog that I was “sad” the idiotic birther controversy had come to that. Within moments tweets were flying — I’m beginning to conflate Twitter with Angry Birds, given all my Twitter trouble lately — accusing me of finding fault with Obama’s decision to release the long-form document. I expressly wrestled with the good-or-bad move question in my blog post; and I came down ambivalent. But I was not ambivalent about my sadness the president had been forced to prove his legitimacy to the likes of Donald Trump. People can feel otherwise, but why attack me for a heartfelt response to an insult to the president?

As I wrote on Sunday night, I personally had a hard time seeing bin Laden’s death as something to celebrate, but I didn’t judge those who did. The 9/11 attacks were of such enormity, rippling out to reach so many people in such different ways, we’re all entitled to our subjective reactions; it was everyone’s tragedy, and everyone grieves differently. Ultimately, I’m with Mona Eltahawy, in feeling like I could have done without the drunken “frat-boy” air of some of the partying; but for all I know, someone I see as a drunken frat boy might have lost his mother in the towers, or on one of the doomed planes.

I think we’re seeing the rise of the Feeling Police because in a time of profound social dislocation, a lot of people aren’t sure what they believe about right or wrong, justice or injustice, and they’re not sure whom they trust to give them information and guidance about it. It might be the New York Times; it might also be some witty guy on Twitter; it might be Penn Jillette on Facebook; at its best it’s a moral and political figure like Martin Luther King Jr.

But we can’t outsource our own moral or political values to Dr. King. We also can’t ask President Obama to be Dr. King. I realized years ago that was part of my own problem with Obama being a mere mortal politician, making compromises whether on healthcare reform or government spying. He’s a gifted politician who seems to have a strong moral core, but he’s a politician; and now he’s commander in chief. I can’t expect him to be the prophetic, perfect visionary we white liberals have needed our black leaders to be. Also: You can believe fervently in the power of King’s words about love, and hate, and violence — as I do — and still accept that President Obama did the right thing, based on the knowledge he had before him.

And for now, I do. That doesn’t mean I won’t avidly consume every new account of the operation that led to bin Laden’s killing. If some of the information behind it was acquired through torture or other “extra-legal” means, I want to know that. I may come to believe the president made the wrong decision, but I don’t think that, given what I know.

Back to feelings for a bit: We can’t help focusing on feelings, in the absence of hard information. We’re social animals; we trust our “feelings” to tell us something real. So I had very intense feelings looking at the now iconic picture White House photographer Pete Souza snapped of the president and his team as they “watched” the bin Laden operation in the Situation Room Sunday night. (There’s no hard information about what they were actually watching.) You’ve seen it. It’s riveting. Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed. The only person looking as grim is the president himself; he’s slumped in his chair, looking hard at the screen. Vice President Joe Biden looked stricken; the New York Times reported that he was fingering rosary beads. The military leaders in the room were more granite-faced, but I was reassured to see our civilian leaders grimacing at the reality of killing bin Laden and his family members – even if they’d make the same decision tomorrow. Their “feelings” — at least what appear to be their feelings — reassure me they approached the decision with the moral gravity it deserved.

If Hillary Clinton had been pumping her fist and yelling “USA, USA!” after the killing I’d have been aghast, and said so. The range of “appropriate” feelings — and the way you telegraph them — is more clear-cut when you’re talking about our leaders. Being reassured by seeing their feelings, while we wait for information, makes sense. But ultimately we need, as citizens, to decide if we believe this was a just decision, a moral decision and a decision that made the U.S. safer (which may add up to three different things.) We can’t simply outsource that judgment, whether to King, Obama or our favorite pundits. Wasting time adjudicating whether people are expressing the right reaction in the right way is a silly distraction.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that.  Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, “It’s a bit too a propos. What ‘thousands’ would King have been talking about? In which enemy’s death was he supposed to be rejoicing?” She also wonders, “Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?”

Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I’m not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. [Jillette has since explained the quote further to Salon (see below), stating that it was an honest mistake.] After all, this is the guy who created the documentary “Penn and Teller: Bullshit!” and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.

Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it’s easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response. (See update below.)

Update 2: On Tuesday afternoon, Penn replied to Salon by email, detailing how he made an “honest mistake,” and conveying his dismay over the suggestion that he would purposefully fabricate a quote from Martin Luther King.

“I made a mistake,” Penn wrote, “I read the quote, thought it was too perfect, checked part of it from the MLK book and then cut and pasted it. The part I checked was not the part that was wrong, and I posted it. A stupid, but honest mistake. When someone pointed out the mistake, I apologized as best I could in the limited number of characters. And then I apologized and explained a few more times.”

Penn also stressed his sadness that the mistake on Twitter apparently led some people to think he was disrespecting Dr. King. “It hurts me to have people think I disrespected Martin Luther King,” he wrote.

Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.

Here’s what Barbour told the Standard:

“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

…

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

King did appear in Yazoo City in 1966 — in the wake of the killing shooting* of civil rights activist James Meredith — but that was a year after Barbour graduated high school, and four years after Barbour said he saw King.

Here’s the Clarion-Ledger’s fact-check:

A search of the King Papers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the papers of David Garrow, author of the definitive biography on King, Bearing the Cross, failed to find evidence King spoke in Yazoo City in 1962.

The paper couldn’t find anyone who remembered a King visit in ’62.

I also spoke with Garrow, who is the author of the definitive King biography, “Bearing the Cross.” Garrow pointed out that King was in the Mississippi Delta region in February 1962, and he stopped at several towns. However, Garrow’s papers do not indicate that Yazoo City was one of the stops.

This is hardly the first time the governor has been accused of getting his civil rights history wrong. One of his childhood friends, for example, told me last year that Yazoo City was riven by racial tensions in the 1950s and 60s, despite Barbour’s rosy memories of that era. Meanwhile, Barbour managed to get his name next to “KKK” in newspaper headlines around the country this month after he refused to condemn a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring a founder of the Klan.

The overriding question remains: Will Barbour’s series of missteps on matters of race hurt him in a GOP primary?

* CORRECTION: Meredith was shot but not killed in 1966

That’s why something like Sarah Palin claiming to be a victim of “blood libel” doesn’t raise an eyebrow among the true believers. It’s the myth that keeps the checks rolling in for most right-wingers. The liberals are all-powerful and they oppress us.

It’s especially rich coming from Palin, obviously. The only thing the former governor seems to enjoy more than attacking her political opponents is acting like the entire world is aligned against her and her poor family. A tasteless joke from a late night comedian isn’t simply part of the cost of living a public life, it’s more proof that a cabal of liberal elites is devoted to the relentless persecution of innocent conservative Americans. (Part of the game involves purposefully conflating criticism from media figures with organized political attacks. What, after all, is the true difference between David Letterman and the DNC? They’re all liberals.)

The longtime opponents of what they mockingly termed “the culture of victimhood” now revel in every perceived slight. Republicans accused of unethical behavior make great martyrs.

How bad is the delusion? When they aren’t actually treated like oppressed minorities, they pretend they were. Have you seen the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s exhaustive and remarkable “Insurrectionism Timeline”? Allow me to make the much less exhaustive Timeline of incidents in which young right-wingers pretended to have been the victims of political violence, or even “hate crimes.”

Every so often, some young Republican will pretend to have been the victim of a violent hate crime. In 2006, there was Justin Jatkoff, who was supposedly beaten senseless by either black people or “a homosexual rights group” who’d sent him an “odd/threatening” e-mail. (He was actually just beaten up by his friends.)

Later that year, a conservative Mormon college student named Francisco Nava claimed to have received hundreds of death threats for a column attacking Princeton University’s “hookup culture.” He said he feared for his safety. Then he claimed he was brutally attacked by men in stocking caps who beat him with a bottle of Orangina. After he became a conservative cause celebre, the cops got him to admit that he’d invented the threats and the attack.

And then there’s Ashley Todd, College Republican National Committee field representative, who claimed to have been brutally attacked by some liberal black person during the 2008 campaign, because she had a McCain sticker on her car. A “B” — for “Barack” — was even carved into her cheek. As we all remember, the B was backwards, because Todd has “carved” it herself.

When Democrats were complaining of death threats as the healthcare debate raged, then-minority whip Eric Cantor claimed someone shot up his office. Police determined that the bullet that landed inside a window at his campaign office had been fired randomly into the air.

The Tea Partiers, of course, are frequent self-declared victims of brutally unfair media coverage, and in their more feverish fantasies, they are even intimidated by “union thugs.” (Violent, “thuggish” union members are the enforcers of the modern Apartheid-like regime that conservatives are forced to live under.)

Even when Republicans occupied the White House, controlled both houses of Congress, and maintained a working majority on the Supreme Court, they imagined themselves victims of all-powerful liberals.

So on this Martin Luther King Day, please, spare a thought for America’s forgotten minority: Comfortable white conservatives. Especially the ones in academia, Hollywood, and the media.

That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early ’80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren’t supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.

But those polls were taken before the first week of October ’83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King — which had easily cleared the House over the summer — landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber’s top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold — both for the ’84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party.

Helms, though, saw a much different opportunity: to give those conservative white voters in his state a reason to buck their partisan heritage and side with their Republican senator in ’84. Thus it was that he declared his intent to filibuster the King holiday, claiming the slain civil rights hero had been a devotee of “action-oriented Marxism” and that the movement he’d led had actually been a haven for Communists.

It didn’t matter that he stood little chance of prevailing in the legislative fight. By the fall of 1983, even Ronald Reagan, like Helms a hero of the New Right (whose political career was probably saved by Helms’ assistance in North Carolina’s 1976 presidential primary), had come around to supporting the idea of a King holiday — or at least to saying that he’d sign the bill if it reached his desk. Previously, Reagan had offered the standard line of King holiday opponents that giving federal workers a new day off would be too expensive. As J. Bennett Johnston, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, explained to the New York Times, “If you took a secret poll, the Senate would not want additional holidays. But the symbolism of it is so strong, that sweeps aside those arguments very quickly.”

But Helms wasn’t interested in the outcome; he was interested in the show. Undoubtedly, then, he was tickled when one of the first Democrats to lash out at his filibuster was Ted Kennedy — precisely the kind of unabashedly liberal, integrationist Northern liberal who reminded those white Southern Democrats why they’d been abandoning their party in recent presidential elections. “Everybody who disagrees with Mr. Kennedy is a racist and right-winger,” Helms sneered. With a massive push underway to register black North Carolinians to vote, Helms was asked if his stand might hurt him in 1984. But he knew better: “I’m not getting any black votes, period.”

Within days, Helms struck a deal with Baker, then the chamber’s majority leader, to give up his filibuster. In exchange, the final vote would be put off for two weeks, which would give Helms time to pursue a legal bid to force the Justice Department to release the files that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had compiled on King. This, too, was a doomed mission, not that Helms cared. What it really meant was two more weeks at the center of a national media firestorm, making one more stand for old Dixie against Kennedy and the rest of the liberals.

The Senate debate kicked off on Oct. 18, a Tuesday, with Helms — his legal effort squelched by a federal judge the day before — offering a motion to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee so that King’s ties to “elements of the Communist Party USA” could be fully explored. What he was really trying to do, though, was bait Kennedy into a face-to-face showdown. The Massachusetts Democrat, fully aware of what Helms was looking for, had already indicated that he wouldn’t respond personally to any of Helms’ claims. But his thinking changed when Helms brought up Kennedy’s two slain brothers, John and Robert, who had approved a temporary wiretap of King in the fall of 1963.

“His argument is not with the senator from North Carolina,” Helms said of Kennedy. “His argument is with his own dead brother who was president and with his dead brother who was the attorney general.”

That brought Kennedy to the floor to declare that “I am appalled at the attempt of some to misappropriate the memory of my brother Robert Kennedy and misuse it as part of this smear campaign. Those who never cared for him in life now invoke his name when he can no longer speak for himself.” Kennedy also accused Helms of making a “false” statement — that the King bill never received committee hearings. Helms immediately objected to Kennedy’s language, claiming that it was a violation of rules that prohibit senators from questioning each other’s honor. Baker convinced Kennedy to substitute the word “inaccurate,” though Kennedy did manage another swipe: “The senator,” he said of Helms, “needs to learn the rules.”

On and on it went, with one outraged liberal after another rising to defend King’s name and to take exception to Helms’ words. In a particularly memorable scene, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan held up a binder of documents about King that Helms was promoting, pronounced it a “packet of filth,” and dropped it on the ground. Even Dole, who served as the bill’s floor manager, took on Helms, saying of his claim that the holiday would waste money, “Since when did a dollar sign take its place atop our moral code?”

Eventually, Helms’ motion was rejected, 76-12. So were a series of other motions designed to derail or alter the proposed holiday. The next day, the vote on the main bill was finally called, and it passed with ease, 78 to 22. “It’s a tyranny of the minority!” Helms roared.

Very quickly, it became clear that Helms’ grandstanding hadn’t been in vain. By the time the King fight was over, polls showed Hunt’s lead vanishing — down to single digits, less than half of what it had been months earlier. As the campaign unfolded, racial resentment became Helms’ prime weapon. Helms fliers and mailers featured large photos of Hunt and Jesse Jackson and cast the black voter registration drive as a sinister effort to disenfranchise whites. Helms himself told audiences that Hunt was a racist because he was relying on black voters, and in the closing stretch, he reminded voters that Hunt needed “the bloc vote” to win. Asked what he meant by that, Helms didn’t mince words: “the black vote.”

On Election Day 1984, Helms did what had looked impossible just over a year earlier: He beat Hunt. Divide and conquer had worked brilliantly. Whites went for Helms by a 63-37 percent ratio (the spreads were much bigger in rural areas). Blacks went for Hunt 99 to 1 percent. Overall, the ratio was 52 to 48 percent for the incumbent. On that same day, Reagan was reelected in a resounding landslide, while Republicans held on to their Senate majority. When it came to 1984, the King fight, clearly, hadn’t hurt the GOP.

And yet it was a momentous occasion in the rise of the modern Republican Party. For a century after the Civil War, the GOP had been the progressive party when it came to race and civil rights. But it all changed, virtually overnight, when the burgeoning conservative movement succeeded in nominating Barry Goldwater — who had joined the Southern filibuster of the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1964 — to run against LBJ. This was the moment that white Southern conservatives like Helms, who had been Democrats their whole lives, began a steady, decades-long migration to the GOP. The King vote in ’83 demonstrated how far along that process was. Of the 22 “no” votes, 18 came from Republicans. Just two decades earlier, all but six of the 29 votes to filibuster Civil Rights had come from Democrats.

When the King holiday cleared the Senate, Dole called a press conference and heralded the fact that 37 Republicans had voted for it. It reflected, he claimed, his party’s inclusive spirit. But the scandal was that 18 of them hadn’t. And the message that most African Americans seemed to take from this was simple: The party that makes a home for Jesse Helms doesn’t deserve to be my home.