Pillar of Fire Taylor Branch New York Review of Books
January 18, 1998
Climbing the Mountain
The 2nd book of Taylor Branch'due south study of Martin Luther King Jr. runs from the March on Washington to Selma.By ALAN WOLFE
More on Martin Luther King Jr., from The New York Times Archives
PILLAR OF Burn
America in the King Years, 1963-65.
By Taylor Branch.
Illustrated. 746 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $30.
o recount the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. is to tell the story of how, more than 50 years after the century began, America finally became a modern gild. It did so literally kicking and screaming, when not clubbing and killing. Our century's destiny has been to insure that the ideal of civic equality announced to the world in 1776 would become a reality. Just to assist make that come up most, Male monarch had to overcome the determined resistance of terrorists without conscience, politicians without backbone, rivals without foresight and an F.B.I. managing director so malicious that he would stop at zero to destroy a human being who believed in justice.
Taylor Co-operative has been working on Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography for more years than King was active in the motility for ceremonious rights. ''Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63,'' the first volume in what is now planned every bit a trilogy, was published in 1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize for history. ''At Canaan'due south Border,'' the concluding volume, will appear sometime in the time to come. For the time beingness, readers fascinated by the story of King and his country can follow events through 1965 in ''Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65.'' And what events they were. Branch'south second volume begins and ends with violence: demonstrations in St. Augustine, Fla., and Selma, Ala. In between, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Usa became deeply involved in Vietnam, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam and paid for it with his life, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Ceremonious Rights Deed of 1964 and began furious lobbying for the even more than important Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As he did in ''Parting the Waters,'' Co-operative brings to these events both a passion for their detail and a recognition of their larger historical significance. By giving King such ballsy treatment, Branch implies that he was an epic hero. Was he? The great merit of Branch'due south stunning accomplishment is to prove definitively that he was.
Like Odysseus, King had to suspension with comforts of habitation to undergo afar, threatening and often barely comprehensible adventures beyond. Equally Co-operative tells the story in the trilogy'due south opening volume, Rex was built-in in 1929 into a world unfamiliar to nearly white Americans: the black elite of the pre-World War 2 Due south. Black Baptist preachers in the sometime Confederate states, typified by Male monarch's father, were usually Republican in their politics and entrepreneurial in their ministries. The younger King fought against his father's insularity all his life. He left the S for the predominantly white Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., then Boston University. When called to the ministry, King rejected the option of eventually becoming his father's successor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in favor of Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Unlike Odysseus, King showed no bully desire to return home. Indeed, one measure of his achievement was that at that place was no longer a home to which he could render. By leading the entrada to cancel segregation, Rex not simply destroyed the privileges Southern whites enjoyed through racism, he too toppled the conceited black isolationism in which his father had flourished.
All his life, King would be plagued by bottom black rivals who resented his success. One of the more fascinating stories told in Branch'southward outset volume involved the power struggle betwixt King and the Rev. J. H. Jackson of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, an associate of King Sr. who, as president of the National Baptist Convention, was the most powerful African-American of his fourth dimension. As effective as he may have been as a charismatic leader, King was no match for the wily Jackson, who non but defeated Rex's claiming to his leadership inside the National Baptist Convention but, equally Branch reports in this book, spent $50,000 after King's death to take the entrance of his Chicago church moved around the corner and then that information technology would no longer be on the newly named Martin Luther King Drive.
An underlying theme of ''Colonnade of Fire'' is King's move to the national stage, which intensified the bitterness of his potential rivals. Co-operative tells us that Adam Clayton Powell's response to the killing of four children in a Birmingham, Ala., church -- surely the most despicable event of the civil rights era -- was to predict publicly that a civil rights beak would never pass Congress (and then to offer Rex a job in his church in New York). At a later point Powell asked the House of Representatives to ''forget about Mississippi for a while'' in social club to concentrate on the tribulations of Adam Clayton Powell. Every time Rex was criticized equally too militant for the conservative blackness aristocracy, he would likewise be criticized equally likewise timid for the bloody taste of Malcolm 10, for whom the Mau Mau warrior -- ''He's not humble. He's not nonviolent. But he's free'' -- served as an advisable model of black protest. Even King's closest directorate immune their trivial jealousies to stand in the style of his leadership. When King was in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Abernathy, his designated successor, insisted on riding in the same auto, objecting, to the embarrassment of all, to the careful plans of the Norwegian protocol main. ''Ralph'southward estrangement was much more worrisome to Martin than anything he thought J. Edgar Hoover might do,'' Andrew Immature told Branch.
Had King actually known what Hoover was doing, he might take been more worried on that front. In Baronial 1963, the F.B.I., in an internal memo, designated King ''the near unsafe Negro of the futurity in this nation,'' and it began a campaign to tap his telephone and found bugs in his hotel rooms equally he traveled. The systematic grapheme of the F.B.I. vendetta astonishes to this mean solar day. After the agency learned of bump-off threats against a number of prominent Americans, each was notified -- except King. The F.B.I. persuaded Marquette University not to award an honorary degree to King. Under F.B.I. prodding, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York telephoned Pope Paul Vi's Secretary of State in a vain effort to prevent a papal audience for King.
''I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate,'' Hoover wrote after the meeting. Through his bugs, Hoover had picked up show of marital adultery on King'southward part. ''This will destroy the burrhead,'' Hoover gloated. Doing its best to bring this prophecy about, the F.B.I. sent some of its damaging cloth to Rex along with an anonymous suggestion that he do the honorable thing and take his own life. Rex, of course, did himself no favors past making himself so vulnerable. ''When a man travels like you and I do,'' he once said to James Farmer, ''there are bound to exist women,'' hardly a sufficient excuse for his deportment. Nevertheless, Co-operative, in one of the few times he loses his dispassionate tone in favor of sarcasm, is correct to remark that when the F.B.I. was chosen upon to investigate such things as bombings, it viewed those tasks ''every bit an irritating lark from the serious business of intercepting King's sexual activity life.''
During Male monarch'due south life, blackness Americans completed their passage from the Republican to the Democratic Party; 96 percent of the black vote went to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Withal the persistence of quasi-feudal political arrangements in the South gave disproportionate influence to racist politicians bent on obstructing King's goals. John F. Kennedy, e'er fearful of the power of Southern oligarchs, appointed outright segregationists to the Federal bench and shied abroad from whatsoever potent delivery to civil rights. Johnson's support for the passage of ceremonious rights legislation dominates the second volume of Branch's trilogy in the style that Kennedy's political cowardice dominates the kickoff. Still, King could never count on the backing of Democratic Party politicians. Branch reports Gov. Carl Sanders of Georgia as maxim, ''It looks like we're turning the Democratic Party over to the nigras,'' when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party demanded recognition at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Nor were Northern politicians welcoming of King. So new was the idea of massive black suffrage in American politics during the 1960'southward that King took care to campaign amidst blacks for Johnson in a way that would non agitate suspicion or resentment amidst whites.
Of all the obstacles to King'south leadership, none was equally paralyzing as the terror unleashed by racists in the Southward. As befits the time period he covers, Branch devotes considerable attention to the violence that took the lives of Lemuel Penn, James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Vernon Dahmer and others who were in the wrong place at their rightful fourth dimension. Segregation did not kill; people did. And just as we were made witness to the inhumanity of Mississippi'south Parchman penitentiary in ''Departing the Waters,'' then in ''Pillar of Burn down'' we larn through Co-operative's meticulous attention to particular who these murderers were, how they planned their deeds and how they besides often escaped the consequences of their acts. Terrorism relied for its effectiveness on the racism of genteel society. Senator George Smathers of Florida told President Johnson that Rex must have organized virtually of the violence against himself, because ''he loves the headlines.'' Caught near a violent mob in Neshoba County, Miss., Branch recounts, Claude Sitton, a reporter for The New York Times, ducked into a furniture store that he knew to be owned past the uncle of Turner Catledge, the managing editor of his newspaper. ''I wouldn't lift ane damn finger to aid you lot,'' Catledge'south uncle told him. Fifty-fifty after Male monarch won the Nobel Peace Prize, powerful white Atlantans tried unsuccessfully to cease a dinner in his honor. The South actually was another country. To enter its precincts in search of goals as conservative equally the right to vote or to drink a loving cup of coffee in a restaurant, individuals had to entertain the possibility that they would never come out alive. As horrible equally slavery was, slaveholders could at to the lowest degree claim that the Constitution gave them sanction. That was no longer possible afterward passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this one style was segregation worse than slavery, for its practitioners not just showed enormous disrespect for human being life merely in the procedure corrupted the supreme constabulary of the country.
Against all these forces, Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. managed to build upon America's religious and moral foundations to uphold the nobility of the individual. ''Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person,'' Male monarch declared, echoing Immanuel Kant. On another occasion, he said of ceremonious rights demonstrators: ''The patter of their feet every bit they walked through Jim Crow barriers in the great footstep toward freedom is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua. And the world rocks beneath their tread. My people, my people, listen, heed, the battle is in our hands.'' In the backwash of the Birmingham bombing, King spoke not of retribution but of redemption: ''Nosotros must non lose organized religion in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can larn to respect the nobility and worth of all human being personality.'' Words like these are rarely heard in American politics these days, considering so few have the moral stature to utter them.
But Rex's accomplishments moved well beyond words. Without him, the United States might non have got the legislation that enabled it to become the democracy information technology had always proclaimed itself to be. Afterward King, we argue how his dream can best be fulfilled. We forget how significant it is that we no longer argue about whether it should be fulfilled. Taylor Branch'due south handling of Rex's life raises no new problems of historical reinterpretation. It uncovers no new documentary evidence. It tells no story that has not been told before. But it does something more of import; it reminds usa that there once arose in our midst a man who, as Odysseus' son, Telemachus, said of his male parent, ''more all other men, was born for pain.'' America was lifted up because Rex would non lay his burden down. King's tragic sensibility was the direct opposite of today'due south feel-good therapeutics. ''If freedom is to exist a reality,'' he told the 1964 annual convention of the United Synagogues of America, ''the Negro must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice and to piece of work for it.'' For all the tribulations his enemies confronted him with, it is not those who heedlessly and vainly stood in his manner whom we remember, but Martin Luther Male monarch Jr., our century's epic hero.
Alan Wolfe, whose latest book is the forthcoming ''One Nation After All,'' is a Academy Professor at Boston University.
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