Virginia Prescott: It's
Georgia Today. I'm Virginia Prescott, in for Steve Fennessy. As the nation celebrates Black History Month, we're taking you back to an often-overlooked chapter in Georgia's civil rights history. Before the Selma to Montgomery march, before the “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was sentenced to four months of hard labor for an outstanding traffic violation. It's October 1960, just weeks before Election Day. Dr. King is arrested for taking part in a lunch counter sit-in at Rich's department store in Atlanta. He was then transferred to DeKalb County, sentenced, jailed and then taken in the dead of night to a Georgia state prison. Thanks to some back-channel, even rogue moves by the Kennedy campaign, Dr. King was released.