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| ISBN-13: | 9780684848099 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 01/20/1999 |
| Series: | America in the King Years |
| Pages: | 768 |
| Sales rank: | 289,809 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.50(d) |
Hometown:
Baltimore, MarylandDate of Birth:
January 14, 1947Place of Birth:
Atlanta, GeorgiaEducation:
A.B., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1968; M.P.A., Princeton University, 1970Website:
http://www.taylorbranch.com
From Chapter 2:Prophets in Chicago
To close the Chicago conference, King brought with him his standard sermon on the complacency of the church. "Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is still America's most segregated hour," he said, "and the Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week. The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man, like Lucifer, so repeatedly says, 'Evil be thou my good,' so consistently lives a lie, that he loses the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America's segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position." Behind his placid exterior, King concealed an impatience with religious institutions that far outran his text. In the past few days he had committed himself consciously to a life-threatening, watershed risk in Birmingham that neither relied nor waited upon the cooperation of his fellow clergymen.
Kings resolve to gamble alone was the result of frustrations that had built m phases since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. After the boycott's strategy of nonviolent withdrawal proved difficult to transplant or expand, he had followed his trained gifts as a pulpit orator to preach hundreds of sermons against segregation in a touring frenzy modeled on the crusades of Rev. Billy Graham, from whom King received quiet encouragement and occasional advice. Through the late 1950s, this conversion approach had brought King the orator's nectar -- applause, admiration, and credit for quite a few tearful if temporary changes of heartïbut in everyday life Negroes remained a segregated people, invisible or menial specimens except for celebrity aberrations such as King himself. When college students pioneered a fresh tactic of nonviolent confrontation in the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, King had acknowledged their point that race was too intractable to be repaired by the inspiration of any orator. Only by slow, wrenching concession could someone like King admit that eloquence was weak even when buttressed by rank and education. And although he was honest enough to praise the students' courage King repeatedly declined the drumbeat summons -- "Where is your body?" -- by which they made the first test of leadership not statements or seniority but a stark, primitive surrender to public witness.
Instead, King had clung to methods suited to his stature as a prince of the Negro church. While petitioning white leaders for change, he and his allies maneuvered to gain control of the National Baptist Convention. Their dream was to make of this largest voluntary body of Negroes in the world-upward of ten thousand preachers and some five million members -- a ready-made civil rights phalanx that upon command could descend upon segregated targets for protest or Christian revival. The prerequirements were seductively in line with ordinary ambitions in church politics, as King's group aimed to establish a base in the isolated world built by their fathers and grandfathers before seeking any new confrontations with white segregationists. Even so, their plans ran into disaster in the person of the incumbent "Negro Pope," Rev. J. H. Jackson. At two national conventions, the usual spectacle of sermons and massed choirs had descended into something more like soccer riots, in which the Jackson forces outshouted, outshowed, and finally, at Kansas City in 1961, outscrimmaged the forces supporting King's civil rights platform to secure physical control of the podium before the police arrived. Victorious, Jackson had accused King of being responsible for murdering one preacher who had been pushed to his death in a brawl, and excommunicated King from the National Baptist Convention. In what amounted to a major schism, some two thousand pastors, including Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn and Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, resigned with King, but others, including old family friends and eminent preachers such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., could not bear to tear away from the one place on the sparse landscape of Negro institutions that had anchored their identities in a national church.
Not until then, stripped of a reform agenda within the Negro church, did King throw himself into the escalating civil disobedience of the movement, most notably in the mass marches to jail at Albany, Georgia, beginning late in 1961. Hard experience there taught him that in any racial conflict large enough to draw the concentrated attention of the press, reporters inevitably would center their stories upon King as the character known to most readers, and generally, the focal issue of their stories would not be the moral worthiness of King's cause but the competitive outcome -- who's winning, King or segregation? Thus pitted against the legal and cultural standard of the entire South, King had left Albany in 1962 branded a loser because segregation still stood, and as an ugly bonus he took the festering resentment of overshadowed colleagues. Then, on January 1, 1963 -- exactly one century after the effective date of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation -- President Kennedy had dodged the last natural deadline for a scheme that King had pushed upon him privately but insistently for two years: a historic Kennedy proclamation to abolish at least some part of segregation by executive order.
Within days, King summoned his ten closest associates to a private retreat near Savannah, Georgia, to tell them in effect that there was no easy button to push, no executive alliance to be made. All the dignified routes had been closed off. The only paths he saw led either to retreat or forward over the cliff, and, haunted by fear that the integrationist mandate of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision and the energy of the Kennedy years soon would dissipate, King disclosed his resolve to take a calculated leap. Wyatt Walker, his chief assistant, presented a blueprint for a staged, nonviolent assault on Birmingham, the symbolic bastion of segregation -- a city that combined the plantation attitudes of the surrounding Alabama counties with the bare-knuckled politics of its steel mill economy, personified in both aspects by the local police commissioner, Eugene T. "Bull" Connor.
Instead of avoiding risks, or grumbling about moral obtuseness in the press, King's forces would embrace the public drama of a showdown between King and Bull Connor. Above all, King insisted, he would not again be drawn in as a "fireman" after someone else's campaign had gone awry. He would take the initiative for the first time, seeking to apply all the accumulated movement lessons since the bus boycott. One of these was stealth. King did not invite his father, Daddy King, to Savannah or seek the approval of his board at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), knowing that his dear but long-winded elders would filibuster against the idea with consummate skill. He would lay groundwork in stages, move by fiat, spring surprises. The lesson pressed upon him by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was that unmerited suffering was required to supplement reason in a selfish world, that in nonviolent wars no less than shooting ones, dramatic risk and suffering were the surest, swiftest messengers for breaking through to guarded or disinterested strangers. King believed, he warned his friends at the retreat, that "some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign." When they accepted the plan nevertheless, he left Savannah for the Conference on Religion and Race.
Copyright © 1998 by Taylor Branch
On Friday, January 16th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Taylor Branch to discuss PILLAR OF FIRE.
Taylor Branch: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's been a long time -- nine years -- and I'm glad to have the book finally done.
Taylor Branch: No. I never met Dr. King, although we lived in the same city -- Atlanta. I was a high school student at the time of the Birmingham demonstrations in 1963 and the Civil Rights Bill of '64. Something about them was so powerful that they changed the direction of my interests for my whole life. And when I became a writer in the 1970s, I retained a determination to discover someday what had made this movement so powerful that it could have such an effect on me as a teenager.
Taylor Branch: Upheaval can come from many causes. Depression, economic dislocation, war, unforeseen events. I hope we don't, but we may have one of these. The civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s was different. It was born of hope and conviction that struggled -- my word for it is percolated, like coffee -- for years before it built into a mass movement. There was no way for anyone to predict in the early 1950s that it would catch fire over where people sat on buses. There certainly wasn't any way of predicting in 1960 that college students would ignite a contagious phase at the sit-ins and lunch counters. My point is that this kind of social movement takes a long time to build, and I think we are just now getting to the point that people might be getting a first faith or confidence that they can accomplish things of that nature again. If so, there will probably be years of groping and percolation ahead before it can build into a similar mass movement.
Taylor Branch: That's an interesting question. It has many parts. It could be looked at as whether JFK himself could have passed the law. The answer is probably no. The question also could mean, Was the emotional trauma of the assassination necessary to shake the nation to pass the law? The answer is probably yes. And without the assassination, there wouldn't have been Lyndon Johnson as president, and I'm not sure the law could have been passed without his skill and commitment. I don't like second-guessing in history, but we are online, so I'd probably guess that it would have been very difficult to pass that law had Kennedy lived.
Taylor Branch: That's covered thoroughly in the book. I can summarize it here by saying that it comes from my conversations with people who listened to the tapes. It was one of my most painful and difficult judgments as an author about whether or not to include it in the book. Parenthetically, I thought it was interesting that Newsweek highlighted several of the salacious parts of the book and then stated accurately that they make up only a tiny portion of the material. That's journalism.
Taylor Branch: Thank you. I'm looking forward to coming to Nashville. Yes, there are still many categories of information that are classified with no good excuse really for material that's 35 years old. Still, there's an awful lot of material available in various libraries and archives. I have to say that the FBI wiretap records, while objectionable and unjust as a practice, are invaluable for the historical record. Another parenthetical comment: The phone recordings of President Kennedy and President Johnson are also an invaluable record that have been newly released. And I very much doubt that we will see that kind of record from more modern presidents. They are too paranoid. While it's questionable to record your telephone conversations, there's nothing like it to record a presidency. President Clinton today can't even keep a private diary for fear that it might be subpoenaed. This bodes ill for future history.
Taylor Branch: I hope volume three doesn't take nine years. My editor would have a heart attack. And I'm getting older. But if it does take nine years, I'm going to stick it out because I love the material. I'm optimistic that it won't because while the middle 1960s exploded with energy and political conflict, the movement, the portion of it that centered around the discipline and faith of the movement I'm following, steadily narrowed. And I think that will make the next book not so difficult to command in the writing. The difficulty in this book was that the movement was still constantly expanding, and everything was happening at once. As to titles, the first title I ever had for the book when I thought there were only going to be two was PILLAR OF FIRE, because I thought it was a strong metaphor for an epic movement that achieved freedom but then was consumed by its own energy, like a pillar of fire in the wilderness, and leaves us only its light to study years later. This of course is biblical, from the Exodus story. All three of these stories now are from Exodus. I came up with PARTING THE WATERS after PILLAR OF FIRE as a way of describing the early rise and success of the liberation movement. Because I already had PILLAR OF FIRE, you might notice that "pillar of fire" are the last three words of PARTING THE WATERS. Similarly, the phrase "at Canaan's edge" closes this new book. What I'm trying to suggest parallel to the Moses story is that in real life, like Moses and like King, we only get a glimpse over into Canaan. That's where I wanted to leave the story.
Taylor Branch: This opens up a lot of issues. First, having tried for years to get a film version of PARTING THE WATERS made to no avail so far, I greatly respect Spike Lee for the sheer tenacity that I know it took to get "Malcolm X" financed and made. Having said that, his film glossed over the entire last few years of Malcolm X and the dynamics of his struggle inside the nation of Islam. To a lesser degree, though, Malcolm's autobiography did the same thing. There are only hints of what I found to be a gripping and astonishing internal struggle somewhere between "The Godfather" and the Book of Joshua. Some of the material in PILLAR OF FIRE that is the most startling to me has to do with that struggle and the religious side of Malcolm, which is almost entirely overlooked. There's so much more to say on this. But a lot of it is new and a lot of it is in my book, so I hope people will be interested in that part of the story.
Taylor Branch: This is really a whole book's question, or really three books for me. I think I'll only mention one outstanding characteristic is that the private King had a fantastic sense of humor and was a gifted mimic. Other than that, I'd have to let the book speak, because even ideas of the "public" King are subject to wildly different interpretations and images.
Taylor Branch: That's a new subject in the sense that the bond between Heschel and King has not been widely developed or recognized. A lot of it was that Heschel was a very unusual man for his time who had tremendous effect not only on King but on Catholic and Protestant leaders of many kinds. Your question is a huge subject. I'll leave it with one comment: I think that the heart of their bond was a common devotion to the example of the Hebrew prophets and a belief that the Hebrew prophets -- not Greek or French philosophers -- invented some of the basic convictions of democratic belief as well as religious belief. Beyond that idea, the interaction between King and Heschel is an odyssey of marches, ordeals, and inspiration that was a privilege for me to research and write.
Taylor Branch: Very little. And I frankly think the animosity between the two has been a little bit overdone. I'm not denying that there was ferocious and for us entertaining animosity when the two of them imagined their highest ambitions to be threatened by the other. But that wasn't at every moment. There were, I believe, genuine moments of cooperation and even sympathy between them. And they were both genuinely devoted to the enormous and by no means assured task of passing the Civil Rights Bill. Even their wildest paranoid animosity toward each other never interfered with the common goal of passing that bill.
Taylor Branch: Not PILLAR OF FIRE yet. After all, the book technically isn't published yet and officially won't be so for a week or so. I did go see Mrs. King after PARTING THE WATERS and have seen her son Dexter more recently. They've both been very kind and complimentary. We have had differences about the access to research material and over the campaign to free James Earl Ray, but we try not to let those things interfere with the ongoing writing of the movement's history.
Taylor Branch: It is worse than that. It was originally supposed to be one volume. I made the decision that it wouldn't fit in one book in about 1986. The publisher made the decision this time that 1965 was a good cut-off point for a second volume. Frankly I was very reluctant at first, but now I'm glad they insisted. I know it won't be four volumes. [laughs] I'm sorry for taking so long, but I can only blame the fascination of the material and the courage of the people who made the history.
Taylor Branch: Yes. This is all new to me. My books take so long that technology changes between volumes. Here I am online talking to you, telling you that I didn't even know there was such a thing as audio books until last month when Simon and Schuster Audio Books, a new division, showed me the script for the audio version of PARTING THE WATERS, the first volume, which should be getting into the stores very soon. I'm reading on my desk right now the proposed script for the audio version of PILLAR OF FIRE, which they will record next week and hope to have in the stores in a month or so. Both audio versions are read by Joe Morton and CeCe H. Pounder. Joe Morton is the poor fellow who had to blow himself out in "Terminator 2" -- he's an actor. Pounder is an actress who played Dr. Angela Hicks on NBC's "ER." Anyway this is new to me, but these audio versions of both volumes should be available soon. They are substantially abridged versions of the book. Please be advised of that. But they give a very good sense of what the book is about.
Taylor Branch: Almost none.
Taylor Branch: I would put it more broadly that there was a virulent strain of antidemocratic covert practice in government through the entire cold war, beginning in the 1940s, that became more corrupt as decades passed and seemed even more corrupt than that as the actual cold war dangers faded.
Taylor Branch: It would be a treasured hour for me. I think I'd ask him mostly about the early period before 1960, because I think that's where most of his personal mysteries lie or were born. But it would take me a month to get prepared for such an encounter. I can scarcely organize my thoughts about that because I feel so close to his life and yet so amazed by the thought of being able to talk with him from this point in history. One thing that does come to mind as an afterthought is that I've always theorized that like most people in the '60s, he would have had some period of burnout or breakdown had he lived. And I wonder whether he himself would agree and would predict that he would have recovered to address the most difficult issues since, such as Africa, South Africa, abortion, and retreat of hope in American politics. I think he would, as long as we are speculating.
Taylor Branch: Absolutely it does. I think this history has widely and deeply affected our country's current politics today, to the extent that I don't think you can really understand contemporary politics without absorbing the dramatic changes from this era.
Taylor Branch: I just hope readers feel a portion of my wonderment at the reach and command and inspiration of these stories.
“I’m writing about group creativity, which is not something we often do … what’s interesting to me is what happens in the friction between people’s minds through conversations, through discussion, through the exchange of ideas, through debate, through sort of egging one another on … bringing about any idea that’s going to sort of undermine the nature of reality as […]
