Courage, conviction, and the better world we dream of

On March 9, 1949, the newly elected junior senator from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, took the Senate floor to deliver his maiden speech. Running to thirty-five single-spaced pages, it argued vigorously against President Truman's proposed civil rights bill designed to end employment discrimination, ease voter registration, and offer federal protection against lynching. Robert Caro, in Master of the Senate, the third volume of his four-volume-and-counting biography of Johnson, offers a quote-heavy summary:

First, he defended the use of the filibuster. The strategy of civil rights advocates, he said, "calls for depriving one minority of its rights in order to extend rights to other minorities." The minority that would be deprived, he explained, was the South.

"We of the South who speak here are accused of prejudice," Lyndon Johnson said. "We are labeled in the folklore of American tradition as a prejudiced minority." But, he said, "prejudice is not a minority affliction: prejudice is most wicked and most harmful as a majority ailment, directed against minority groups." The present debate proved that, he said. "Prejudice, I think, has inflamed a majority outside the Senate against those of us who speak now, exaggerating the evil and intent of the filibuster. Until we are free of prejudice there will be a place in our system for the filibuster--for the filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities who might be victimized by prejudice." "Unlimited debate is a check on rash action," he said, "an essential safeguard against executive authority"--"the keystone of all other freedoms." And therefore cloture--this cloture which "we of the South" were fighting--is "the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of parliamentary procedures." By using it, a majority can do as it wishes--"against this, a minority has no defense."

It's hard to read this, to read Johnson's perversions of the concepts of "minority," "majority," "freedom," and--against the background of the 5,000 lynchings of black men and women that happened between the Civil War and 1960--"deadliest weapon" and not feel your stomach turn. This is one of the definitions of evil: to turn values on their head and enlist them in support of the opposite of their meaning, then to stand on pointless principle and thus condemn actual people to violence and death.

The greatest achievement of Caro's biography is that it allows us to simultaneously grasp that Johnson--seemingly irreedemable--and the Johnson who would, through his pushing through of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first successful civil rights bill in nearly a century, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, do more for black Americans, and for America's ideal of equality in general, than any elected official other than Lincoln. Caro makes a convincing case that no one but LBJ could have gotten those bills passed. Does the latter achievement outweigh the former disgrace? Yes, in my book, but good god, how that early speech burns despite.

By contrast, let's look at Caro's account of Hubert Humphrey's impassioned speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention that won a civil rights plank in the party platform (and, in the process, had the salutary effect of driving out part of the segregationist old guard to form the short-lived Dixiecrat party):

For once his speech was short--only eight minutes long, in fact, only thirty-seven sentences.

And by the time Hubert Humphrey was halfway through those sentences, his head tilted back, his jaw thrust out, his upraised right hand clenched into a fist, the audience was cheering every one--even before he reached the climax, and said, his voice ringing across the hall, "To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights--I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy-two years late.

"To those who say this bill is an infringement on states' rights, I say this--the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

"People," Hubert Humphrey cried, in a phrase that just burst out of him; it was not in the written text. "People! Human beings!--this is the issue of the twentieth century." "In these times of world economic, political and spiritual--above all, spiritual--crisis, we cannot and we must not turn back from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadows of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on the path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can--know that we shall--begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope--that promise--of a land where men are truly free and equal."

Humphrey's speech took conviction and courage, unquestionably, and he should be honored for that--but they were mere political conviction, political courage. Political courage gets praised frequently, in part because of its rarity, in part because we want to encourage it, and in part because reporters and columnists, enmeshed in a world where defeat in an election equates to death, confuse it with the real thing.

For the real thing, we'll turn to Montgomery, Alabama on the night of January 30, 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. Reverend Martin Luther King was speaking at that evening's mass meeting at a church when word was brought to him that his house had been bombed. Taylor Branch, in Parting the Waters, describes King's response:

"Are Coretta and the baby all right?"

"We are checking on that now," said a miserable [Ralph] Abernathy, who had wanted to have the answer before telling King.

In shock, King remained calm, coasting almost automatically on the emotional overload of the past few days. Nodding to Abernathy and [S. S.] Seay, he walked back to the center of the church, told the crowd what had happened, told them he had to leave and that they should all go home quietly and peacefully, and then, leaving a few shrieks and a thousand gasps behind, walked swiftly out a side door of the church.

Caro describes the scene outside King's house when he arrived:

In front of King's home was a barricade of white policemen shouting to a huge crowd, a black crowd, to disperse, but the men in the crowd, yelling in rage, were brandishing guns and knives, and teenage boys were breaking bottles so that they would have weapons in their hands.

Inside, King found his wife and daughter alive and unharmed. Then he returned to his broken front porch, and, Branch writes,

Holding up his hand for silence, he tried to still the anger by speaking with an exaggerated peacefulness in his voice. Everything was all right, he said. "Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love." By then the crowd of several hundred people had quieted to silence, and feeling welled up in King to an oration. "I did not start this boycott," he said. "I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us."

In the just world that King envisioned, and worked so hard and gave his life trying to bring into being, he would have been eighty-three now.

In the just world that King envisioned, Emmett Till would have been seventy-one today.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Every year on this holiday, I feel I should recommend Taylor Branch's truly amazing three-volume biography-and-history, America in the King Years. I've written about it before, and those posts probably tell you all you need to hear from me about it. Suffice it to say that it's as dramatic and well-told as it is important, and I have trouble imagining attempting to understand American life and culture from the 1950s on without it.

Rest in peace, Dr. King.

Overwhelmed

Martin Luther King Jr., from "Where Do We Go From Here?", a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967:

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. . . . When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I've been having a hard time today finding words to describe the stream of emotions provoked by last night's party in Grant Park. Hope. Love. Relief. Pride. Kinship. Towering patriotism.

Really, nothing captures it so well as the two photos below, taken by my friend Sandy at the moment when CNN called the race.





{Photos by santheo, used under a Creative Commons license.}

As Barack Obama emphasized in his speech, last night marked the beginning more than the end. It was the end of a campaign that began, for a lot of us, in the shadows of November 3rd, 2005, but it was just the start of the incredibly long to-do list facing us as a nation. The lolObama that my friend Jeremy made today says it all:



At the same time, the events of yesterday deserve a couple of days of heartfelt celebration--so I think it's only right that this post end on a lighter, more cheerful note, supplied by rocketlass. Great patriot that she is, she chose not only to wear her red, white, and blue dress to the rally last night, but to spend her L ride down there reading some of Roosevelt's fireside chats. When I met up with her on my return from canvassing in Indianapolis, almost the first thing she did was point out the following passage from the chat of May 7, 1933:

In addition to all this, the Congress also passed legislation as you know authorizing the sale of beer in such states as desired it. That has already resulted in considerable reemployment, and incidentally it has provided for the federal government and for the states a much-needed tax revenue.

So in the spirit of FDR, and in the full appreciation of the public works funded by my liquor taxes, I raise a glass tonight to Barack Obama--along with, always and forever, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and all the brave souls who came between them--and of course to the United States of America.

"Some great truth stands before the door of his life."

From At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (2005), by Taylor Branch

King delivered a tribute to Sunday's march. He mingled an apology for missing it with a reminder of the travails that buffeted him, too, quoting poet Langston Hughes ("Life for me ain't been no crystal stair"), and vowing that the threat of death could not stop them now. "If a man is 36 years old, as I happen to be," he said," and some great truth stands before the door of his life . . . and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer and he's afraid that his home will get bombed or he's afraid that he will lose his job, he's afraid that he will get shot or beaten down by State Troopers, he may go on and live until he's 80, but he's just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the state of breathing in his life is merely the announcement of an earlier death of the spirit."

For the third straight year, I'm spending Martin Luther King Jr. Day reading Taylor Branch's history of King and the Civil Rights movement. Previous volumes tracked the genesis of the movement and its quick spread, and Branch displayed remarkable skill in marshaling disparate sources to present the multifaceted movement--from the SCLC to SNCC to the Freedom Riders to unplanned individual actions--without simplifying or reducing the story to just King and some hangers-on. In this third and final volume, the movement works to consolidate the gains that led to the 1964 Civil Act while continuing to pursue actual change--such as voter registration--in the still violently resistant South. Vietnam complicates the story as well, as Lyndon Johnson reluctantly (and at first secretly) ramps up American involvement despite being advised that there's little hope of victory, while King quickly comes to view protests against the war as a natural extension of his nonviolent ethos.

It would be hard to overpraise Branch's portrayal of all these events. He's as good with the large effect and the major players--Johnson privately browbeating George Wallace, for example, or King's deliberations with his inner circle--as with the small moment, such as the following one, from the days before the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. As King addressed a crowd in a Selma church, he was informed that a judge had just authorized them to march to the courthouse, a march that in previous days had been greeted by officially sanctioned violence. Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox church, who had just arrived in Selma to support the movement, found himself unexpectedly swept up by the crowd into the instantly formed march as grown men cried in wonder:

Iakovos wore a frozen look. A small Negro girl took him by the hand and said not to worry.

The most dramatic moments--such as the violent suppression of the first attempt to march to Montgomery and the ultimately successful later march--are as gripping as any novel, serving to demonstrate the astonishing courage of all those, so many of them just ordinary citizens, who put their lives on the line for the cause.

A couple of weeks ago, Hillary Clinton caught flak for criticizing Barack Obama's rhetoric by saying, "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done.” While Clinton definitely could have expressed herself on this topic with more care (and in addition deserves heaping opprobrium for allowing her surrogates to spend a week tossing out poorly veiled racist comments), reading Branch makes clear what she was trying to say. It doesn't lessen the bravery or vision or sacrifice of King--or his co-leaders and co-marchers--to admit that without the support of his sometime ally, sometime antagonist Johnson, the movement would have faced a far greater challenge. When Johnson responded to the violence in Selma with a nationally televised speech calling voting rights fundamental (in language consciously adapted from King), he was committing himself to a truer vision of justice not yet fully shared by all Americans--and he immediately began putting that vision into practice through the Justice Department.

That commitment and its execution weren't perfect, and the risks that Johnson and his staff ran were nothing compared to the risks run by those on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement, but their support made a significant difference nonetheless. A simple exercise is sufficient to make clear the importance of the federal government's role as partner--however fitful--in the quest for justice: imagine the Civil Rights movement occurring against the backdrop of the Bush administration, in which the concept of impartial justice is sneered at and the Civil Rights division has taken as its primary task the disenfranchising of African Americans. The thought is enough to make you sick.

Though I've stressed Branch's unrelenting efforts to make clear that the era was about more than just King--and his accounts of figures such as James Bevel, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, and Diane Nash are unforgettable--ultimately the story does swirl around King, who in his unrelenting determination embodies the concept of leadership. Bone-weary, uncertain, frustrated, deliberative, King never stops moving, never stops planning, never flinches from his commitment to change through nonviolent action. When he takes the pulpit or the podium, his words sweep away all other alternatives; nonviolence is the only option, and it will--it must--carry all before it. Even forty years later, on the page, his speech from the end of the Selma-Montgomery march brings chills.

In his introduction, Branch sounds almost wistful for this creed that links Jesus to Tolstoy to Gandhi to King to, we hope, ourselves:

Nonviolence is an orphan among democratic ideas. It has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government--the vote--has no other meaning. Every ballot is a piece of nonviolence, signifying hard-won consent to raise politics above firepower and bloody conquest.

Justice, nonviolence, commitment, bravery. We may not be able to live them as completely or as reliably as King, but in a sense that's how ideals should always be: just a little further down the road, leading us on and challenging us to get better, to do better, to be better.

America in the King Years

As I wrote just last week, I'm not usually inclined to recommend books generally, to all readers, instead hedging my recommendations with caveats and explanations, rooting everything fully in my own sensibility. Part of what I enjoy about reading good critics--James Wood and Michael Dirda, for example--is learning, over time, what they like and dislike and where their tastes and mine overlap; learning their sensibilities means both that I gain some appreciation for books I might otherwise not have noticed or liked and that I learn when and how far to trust their recommendations.

I've also written on this blog about how personal reading decisions are, how people read for different reasons and in different ways. I don't really believe that people should be reading a certain type of book in a certain way or that reading those books will make you a better person. Will serious reading of Tolstoy make you think deeply about how people live their lives? Sure, but so, in a different way, will reading Watership Down. If I had a book-related motto, it would be read what you want to read; take those minutes or hours to simply be, separate from the world and concentrating deeply on something that requires your active participation, your collaboration, your bringing to bear your lifetime of thoughts and experience Do that, and I'll call it good.

So if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll realize how unusual it is that I'm saying the following: Every American who wants to understand this country should read Taylor Branch's America in the King Years. I read the first volume, Parting the Waters (1988) last January and it was so utterly involving that I had to take a break. I spent my Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday this year reading the second volume, Pillar of Fire (1997), and I'm going to have to take another break before I tackle the similarly acclaimed third volume, At Canaan's Edge (2006).

In the first two books, Branch performs the seemingly superhuman feat of covering every aspect of the civil rights movement from 1955-1963, with all its successes and failures, dramatic moments and dull meetings, charismatic leaders and brave followers--and making it spellbinding. The cast of characters is tremendous; King himself, at the center through the first volume, by the second volume is only the most important voice of many, disappearing from the narrative for pages at a time. Branch gives us real insight into countless figures, including the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Lyndon Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, Adam Clayton Powell, James Bevel, John Doar, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Without ever sacrificing the tone of a serious historian, Branch makes moments of high drama such as James Meredith's integration of Ole Miss as gripping as any thriller, and he's equally good at explaining the intricate political maneuvering, both high- and low-level, that underlay every bit of forward progress. Somehow, he makes it easy to keep track of the movement's proliferation of acronym-named organizations and their leaders, as well as dozens of different protest actions in cities across the United States. There truly is never a dull moment.

Branch accomplishes both of what I see as the historian's highest goals, fully bringing the period and its people to life and making clear the very real possibility that these events, many of them completely familiar to us by now, could easily have happened in a different way, or not at all. The two goals are deeply interconnected: placing us so firmly in the time constantly (if indirectly) reminds us that progress is not inexorable and that history is the product of individual decisions, in this case often ones of jaw-dropping bravery at great personal cost. It's a stunning achievement, and it makes America in the King Years the best history writing I've ever read, hands down.

At the same time, by bringing to life the complexity underlying the simplistic national narrative of progress in civil rights, Branch points the way to an understanding of the following forty years of politics, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, from the crumbling of the Solid South to the continuing (but nearly finished) realignment of the Republicans and Democrats into Southern vs. Northern, Rural vs. Urban, lily-White vs. multi-racial parties. If I were to teach a class in contemporary politics (for which I'd be astonishingly unqualified), I'd start my syllabus with this trilogy, Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), and Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes (1970); from them alone, I think even a novice student of American history could gain a working understanding of how we've ended up where we are as a nation.

But start with Taylor Branch. It will make you think in complicated ways about race, rights, American history, personal responsibility, bravery, non-violence, organization, power, and an uncountable host of other topics. In other words, I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Two more volumes to go

I'm going to take a break between volumes of Taylor Branch's America in the King Years, if only because the intensity of the events described is wearing. There are times in Parting the Waters—the siege at Ole Miss and the first of the Freedom Rides in particular—when Branch's narrative is so immediate and compelling that the tension is almost too much to bear. Such sections make clear the value of the many interviews of participants that Branch weaves into the story: they give not only weight and corroboration to other sources, but also nuance. They let us understand what being in the heart of these events felt like.

As an example, here's Branch's account of a dramatic moment at the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention:

King’s convention was dull by comparison, as the three hundred SCLC delegates passed resolutions at a closing session late that Friday afternoon. One called upon the Justice Department to correct lapses in the protection of constitutional rights around Albany, George. Another commended James Meredith for courage in seeking to enroll at Ole Miss. King, in the lolling drone of closing announcements, was reminding the audience of major SCLC events ahead—such as Mrs. William Kunstler’s gala December fund-raiser in suburban New York, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford—when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King’s left cheek. He staggered backward and spun half around.

The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham’s first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back. Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd, which, as one delegate wrote, “surged for a moment as one person” toward the stage. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence—from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium.

The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backwards by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands .It wa the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King’s transcendent calm. King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby, “she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts. This impression struck a number of others, including perhaps the assailant himself, who stared at King long enough for Wyatt Walker and some of the others to jump between them.

“Don’t touch him!” cried King. “Don’t touch him. We have to pray for him."

We see nonviolence in breathtaking action, nonviolence bred in the bone, nonviolence taken farther than I, certainly, can imagine being able to take it. King truly acted in the spirit of Matthew 5:39:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And the image of King on stage facing down his accuser with love is, in a nutshell, King's understanding of Gandhi and his break with Reinhold Niebuhr's literal interpretation of "resist not evil." King argued that one must resist not evil with violence, but with love. It's so counterintuitive as to beggar understanding—but so is the injunction to resist not evil itself.

Yet King lived it, worked through it, created change with it.

America in the King Years

Friday night, I started reading the first volume, Parting the Waters, of Taylor Branch's enormous three-volume life-and-times biography of Martin Luther King, American in the King Years. After reading the 26-page introductory chapter about King's predecessor at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, I called Bob, ecstatic, and told him that if he never read another word of the biography, he needed to at least read that part.

After a weekend of almost nothing but reading, I'm 600 pages into the book—two-thirds of the way through volume one, in other words—and my enthusiasm hasn't flagged a bit. This is some of the best history I've read. Branch manages to tell a compelling story that doesn't just focus on King, but, rather, manages to encompass seemingly all civil rights activity in the entire United States. He juggles hundreds of characters and dozens of locations while still keeping everything clear and compelling. He explores the ideas and forces that shaped King's thought and his life, and he shows both the strong, eloquent public King and the care-worn, questioning private King.

But despite King's centrality to the story, the progress of civil rights in the period encompassed far more than just King, and Branch gives everyone his due. He brings the reader right into the thoughts and words and actions of everyone from Bayard Rustin to Harry Belafonte to Bobby Kennedy. The nuanced portrait he draws of Kennedy alone would be worth reading the book. King leaves the scene for dozens of pages at a time, and his absence does nothing to slow the book's momentum. The movement was too big for one man, and Branch presents facet after facet, event after event, and he makes us understand how the pieces fit, pushing and pulling with and against one another, making up a whole.

In the midst of all this, there's horror and drama, honor and dishonor. Reading about the all-night meetings of black activists in Montgomery after Rosa Parks was arrested, I could feel the energy and fearful excitement. And reading later about the firebombing of King's house, I felt the astonishing calming power of the words he spoke from his porch to a worried, angry crowd:

Holding up his hand for silence, he tried to still the anger by speaking with an exaggerated peacefulness in his voice. Everything was all right, he said. "Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love." By then the crowd of several hundred people had quieted to silence, and feeling welled up in King to an oration. "I did not start this boycott," he said. "I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. I f I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us."

Branch reveals people engaging in repeated acts of bravery and integrity in situations where none of us should be confident we'd be willing and able to do the same. Over and over, people acted on their beliefs in the face of hardened, violent opposition. That staggering courage means that, despite all the depravity and hatred on display, the overwhelming effect of the book is one of awe at human capacity to persevere and struggle towards the good. I don't expect I'll read a more astonishing or inspiring book this year.