Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 - Review

Taylor Branch, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 746 pp., $30.

Several critics have complained that these books are too long, and they are door stoppers at over 750 pages each. I can imagine the groans of college students required to read them, although they are both well-structured and well-written. The tragic failure of American education can be symbolized by the fact that these books, although they are written in jargonless plain English, are beyond the capabilities of a majority of contemporary high school students. The greatest American mass movement of this century is treated, in text books and the hagiographic biographies which most teachers use to supplement them, as if great reforms were brought about by a few charismatic leaders, with most of the people involved serving only as extras in crowd scenes. As anyone who was a part of the civil rights movement can tell you, this is not so.

Taylor Branch is a native Southerner capable of achieving unusual rapport with the people who made the movement, as well as an insightful historian. David Halberstam is a skilled journalist who was an eyewitness to many of the events he describes, and who has deepened his understanding by keeping up with what has happened to many of those he once chronicled for the daily press. His book The Children is meant to stand alone, while Branch's current volume is the middle panel in a three-volume series about the King years. Their contrasting and supplementary approaches to their material illustrate two good ways of dealing with the complexities of recent history.

Branch's first volume, Parting the Waters, was notable for the insight it gave into the politics of black Baptist churches, and the dogged and persistent efforts of community activists, which finally began to get national attention with the Montgomery bus boycott. Vernon Johns, King's most important predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the Pullman porter E.D. Nixon, who laid the groundwork for Rosa Parks' famous resistance, were major characters. Martin Luther King, Jr., was quite properly the central figure, but he was shown utilizing the contributions of thousands who were already in place and capable of independent action. It showed the strength of a people and their institutions, as well as the complexity of a time and place which does not easily fit into the schematic diagrams of social scientists.

The current volume, which deals with the impact of the Kennedy assassination; St. Augustine; the 1964 Civil Rights Act; Mississippi Freedom Summer; the growing shadow of Vietnam; and the eve of the Selma march, follows the same strategy. Malcolm X's rise to challenge King's vision, the notable contributions of the college students who began the sit-ins and took over the freedom rides, the contributions of Amzie Moore and the incredibly brilliant Robert P. Moses in the most resistant state of Mississippi, as well as hundreds of others, are given due coverage. The startling mixture of cold-war liberalism (which Branch mistakes for greatness) and vulgar egotism which characterized Lyndon Johnson is chronicled and analyzed. Use of the FBI files show that J. Edgar Hoover was even more malevolent than most of us realized at the time. However, the completeness of his files gives us a much more thorough picture of King's spiritual growth and his interaction with theologians like Rabbi Abraham Heschel than we would otherwise have.

Pillar of Fire contains a number of insights that previous historians of this era have failed to make. When Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he correctly prophesied that he was delivering the South into the hands of the Republican Party for his lifetime. Many have been aware of the impact of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Missippi Freedom Democratic Party on the Democratic convention in Atlantic City in 1964, but few before Branch have underscored the Republican decertification of black Southern delegates at their San Francisco convention a few weeks earlier. Johnson defeated Goldwater in what amounted to a referendum on civil rights in 1964, but the Republican embrace of racism laid the groundwork for the eventual triumph of Nixon and Reagan in later elections.

Both of Branch's volumes, and Halberstam's book too, contain wonderful stories. Indeed, stories are the essence of movement history, and the movement was staffed largely by Southerners who are heirs to one of the world's great story-telling traditions. Anyone who has ever heard C.T. Vivian's account of his confrontation with Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, which ended with Clark breaking a bone in his hand on Vivian's skull, or E.D. Nixon's account of Dr. King's choice to head the Montgomery Improvement Association with its punchline, "We picked a number out of a hat and got Moses," knows what a valuable archive these stories are. The best of it is that there are lots more of them that have yet to be written down - all true, with no need of stretchers. Clark's blow to Vivian's head, for instance, made the evening news on television.

Halberstam organizes The Children around the eight students who staged the first Nashville sit-in on February 14, 1960: Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, and Rodney Powell. They came from a variety of backgrounds, and their fates over the last four decades encompass a vivid cross-section of the African-American experience. Diane Nash, probably the most brilliant of the group, raised her two children (fathered by James Bevel) as a single mother after her divorce, and has lived to see her great contribution publicly acknowledged. Bevel, the most intense of the lot, is still a prickly personality recently associated with Lyndon LaRouche and Louis Farrakhan, but still as stubborn and independent as when he was goading Dr. King to speak out about Vietnam.

The marriage of Gloria Johnson and Rodney Powell did not last either, but both have had successful medical and teaching careers, and Powell has come to terms with his homosexuality. Curtis Murphy has had an unpublicized but successful career as a teacher and administrator in a Chicago high school, in the same part of the city where I taught for many years. John Lewis is a quietly effective congressman, and Marion Barry is a noisy scamp as mayor of Washington. Barry always was looking out for himself first, but his heroic earlier career deserves the account that Halberstam and Branch have given it. Bernard Lafayette eventually got two advanced degrees from Harvard and has had a varied and useful career as a minister and school administrator.

The American civil rights movement of the 1960s was one of the rare occasions when progressive forces made great progress in a relatively short time, and have been able to defend a major portion of those gains. These gains were achieved with remarkably little violence, although there were murders, beatings, and jailings. Compare the two dozen or so names on Maya Lin's monument in Montgomery, to a movement which accomplished great and permanent social change, with the 60,000 names on her Washington monument commemorating a tragic and criminal war. Studying the civil rights movement in even greater detail than Branch or Halberstam provide is one of the best ways to make a repetition of it, as many people in all parts of the world have already learned. When I attended the 30th reunion of the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1994, we learned a new song whose chorus went:

And who'd have thought long years ago When we fought for freedom here They'd be singing "We Shall Overcome" In Tiananmen square.

J. Quinn Brisben taught in inner-city Chicago high schools for many decades and has participated in most progressive social movements of the last four decades, including the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

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