1989 Book Prize Winner: Current Interest : On the Hard Road to Beloved Community

Of the growing number of books about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, none is so sweeping, so moving, so lyrical as Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters.” Only David Garrow’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Bearing The Cross” (1986) approaches it in scope, but the difference between the two works is marked.

By focusing exclusively on King and his stepchild, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Garrow is able to chronicle King’s life in a single volume. Branch’s chronology, in contrast, is far less expansive, taking the Movement’s saga only up to 1963. His focus is much broader, however, weaving anecdote and history into a 922-page tapestry that depicts not only the making of King the public man but also America and its struggle with race, equity and the realization that, for too many of its citizens, the “dream” was a nightmare. Such a wealth of detail would clutter lesser works. But Branch’s portrait remains moving for all its immensity, capturing what Branch has called “the fugitive realities of an entire era.”

Branch’s vignettes of King’s boyhood and schooling in Atlanta depict a gifted, somewhat unfocused youth under tremendous parental pressure to join his powerful father in the Baptist ministry. Exceptionally responsive to ideas, King comes under the powerful influence of President Benjamin Mays at Morehouse College, is enthralled by the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr while at Crozer Seminary and adopts major strands of the thought of German idealist philosophers and theologians while at Boston University.

Branch so deftly depicts the setting and substance of the young Martin Luther King’s intellectual pilgrimage that by the time King arrives in Montgomery to assume his first full-time pastorate, we not only have a sense of his philosophy but also a palpable feeling for America in the mid-1950s: the songs playing on car radios, the ideas debated in college dorms, the sexual mores of the Eisenhower era. Vietnam, drugs and the subculture of greed had yet to wound us deeply, though America was unmistakably beginning its years of struggle.

It was the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott that propelled the young minister into prominence. King’s emergence that year as acknowledged leader--in a situation laden with local politics, big egos and conflicting factions--is a parable of the kind of contention he would encounter and conquer throughout his career. “Nothing is achieved,” he observed, “without struggle.”

During the next five years, the SCLC would be formed, the Kings would return to Atlanta and to the co-pastorate with Daddy King of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, southern black students would form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Freedom Rides would be launched, and John Kennedy would be elected on the strength of the black vote (responding to the Kennedys’ intercession during the last week of the campaign on behalf of King, incarcerated in the DeKalb, Ga., county jail).

By 1961, two young leaders--Kennedy and King--had become incipient masters of the dominant new reality in American life: television. Both were aware that they were now actors on a national and world stage, directly addressing the people. King was clear that the enacted dramas of direct nonviolent action could reach Americans’ living rooms and touch their consciences. In the last year of his life, he would note--near despair--that the images on the nightly news of burning Vietnamese babies, maimed adults and devastated villages were blunting and searing the American conscience. Television, had, ironically, become a medium for deadening, not touching, the heart; for reducing, not enlivening, the capacity for moral indignation. “To what other human faculty have we finally to appeal?” he asked.

But that was later. In 1961 and ‘62, King painfully learned, through a hopelessly mired, inconclusive, would-be omnibus campaign in Albany, to attack one bastion of segregation at a time, not every aspect at once. It was a lesson he followed the rest of his life: employment in Birmingham (‘63), public accommodation in St. Augustine (‘64), voting rights in Selma (‘65). It was a time when he personally experienced the pain as well as the passion of a prophet “without honor in his own country.” It was a time when he experienced the first of his periodic bouts with doubt, sensing how deep and intransigent bigotry and race-hatred are in the American psyche. He began to “see feelingly.”

“Parting the Waters” reminds us that the struggle for racial justice was going on elsewhere in the nation at the same time, on stages not dominated by the drama of King and his followers. The ugliest, least likely spot for reversing racial bigotry and pain-inflicting prejudice was the heart of the Old South. Mississippi, rarely visited by King, is made symbolic by Branch of all those bloody, near-intractable settings in which mostly unheralded acts of daily heroism were taking place. And Robert Moses--six years King’s junior, bookish, northern-trained, Quaker, quiet, gentle but immovable--becomes throughout Branch’s volume the symbol of another approach: off-stage, uncelebrated, one-place, one-issue (the vote). Moses repeatedly is beaten, jailed, shot at, reviled, but he stays in that one place--”the mole hills of Mississippi”--year after year, leading and inspiring black-voter registration. If King is justifiably the symbol of the sung--those whose news-making public actions arouse a nation and change its laws--Robert Moses in Mississippi is the symbol of the unsung, that vast army of mostly students, black and white, who from 1962 onward risked martyrdom to transform communities, one by one, in Mississippi and throughout the south, into fairer, more decent, more equitable places.

During the years covered by “Parting the Waters,” King’s travails with the FBI had begun, initiated with wiretaps justified by allegations that King’s associates Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison were Communists. Branch’s account makes clear that King was the most spied-upon American of the postwar period. Few telephone calls that he made after 1962, few rooms outside his home in which he met or slept, were private. Later, J. Edgar Hoover was to send tapes of King’s trysts to wife Coretta King, slip pieces of recorded conversations to southern senators and tickle the prurient interests of Lyndon Johnson with these tapes. Knowing that he was under constant surveillance, King somehow continued to maintain his life with dignity and integrity.

Convinced that his colleagues were not Communists, King concluded that his friendship with his counselor Stan Levison was so important that he determined to sustain it, FBI intrusions and allegations notwithstanding. What shines through Branch’s account is King’s capacity for rich, intimate, sustained friendship--with Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker, Andrew Young, Clarence Jones, Bernard Lee and a few others, and especially with the FBI-reviled Stan Levison. While his associates revered King, his loyalty in turn--to his friends, through thick and thin--shines through as one of his most compelling virtues.

From early in his public career, Martin Luther King called for the realization of a “beloved community,” where wealth and political power were more equitably distributed so that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, jobs, education and hope are available to those who need them. Branch makes clear that during this period, this concept, this yearned-for vision, began undergoing a process of annealment--a testing and toughening as of steel by fire.

Only weeks after ground-breaking economic agreements were reached in Birmingham and King’s incarceration had prompted his incandescent, permanently poignant “Letter From The Birmingham Jail,” the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church--headquarters for the men’s, women’s, and especially children’s crusades that brought success to his efforts--was bombed and four little girls were killed. “How long? How long?” King asked, privately and publicly. How much suffering would be exacted before the beloved community could be realized?

Branch’s portrait captures and celebrates the light: the successful completion of the Montgomery bus boycott, King’s early lionization by the SNCC students, the Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington. It also depicts the darkness: his brush with death when stabbed by a demented woman in 1958, frustration in his attempt to reform the National Baptist Convention, failed efforts in Albany, and the never-ending self-questioning: “Am I worthy to lead this Movement?”

“Parting the Waters” concludes with the events of the late summer (the March on Washington) and fall (the assassination of John F. Kennedy) of 1963, with King beginning to see that racism, the affliction that initially had drawn him into action, was inextricably related to poverty and a propensity of America for making war. His critique became sharper, his vision more global, his perspective more radical. He himself was gaining certainty and strength. The Nobel Peace Prize lay just ahead. He was becoming a “pillar of fire” (the title of Branch’s second volume). America was less than five years away from the watershed events of 1968, and King, at 34, was less than five years from his death. He’d come a long way; he had a long way still to go.

Now, 26 years later, one is reminded, reading “Parting the Waters,” that the work King led--healing the nation’s wounds by establishing justice in the land--has only just begun, making ever more urgent the vision of a poem/prayer he often quoted:

May our loving be extended for the whole creation’s good; Banish hunger, end all warfare, all the earth a neighborhood. Branch’s magnificent, monumental volume allows us the comfort as well as the challenge of recalling, remembering a life as deep and clear as Martin Luther King’s, and the changing America in which it was luminously lived.

Current Interest Nominess From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman (Farrar Straus Giroud) The Great Plains by Ian Frazier (Farrar Straus Giorux) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster) The Enigma of Japanese Power by Karel von Wolferen (Alfred A. Knopf) The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by Amy Wilentz (Simon & Schuster)