Pillar Of Fire: America In The King Years 1963-65 (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
This is the second installment of Taylor Branch's trilogy of "America in the King Years", encompassing 1963 to 1965. I don't usually pay attention to the hyperbole of book blurbs, but I related to the one listed in this edition, which declares this book, and its companions, as a "masterwork" comparable to Carl Sandburg's "Lincoln" or Shelby Foote's "Civil War". Time will tell how much these Branch volumes endure in defining our collective images of our heroic struggles, but these books are unparalleled in their ability to describe America in the middle of the twentieth century.The subtitle of the books of course pinpoint Martin Luther King Jr. as the focus of the pivotal events which were changing the country. Certainly from 1954 to 1963, King was the single most visible leader of the Civil Rights struggle. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) set the tone for nonviolent confrontation of segregation practices in the South. Non-violence would be also adopted by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which moved from lunchroom and public transportation challenges to joining SCLC in the main Civil Rights battle at this time, voter enfranchisement. These organizations would often be united in purpose when they were recruiting and training volunteers, and planning and mobilizing to participate in campaigns in targeted cities, along with other organizations such as CORE. Their structures differed markedly, however. SCLC, formed in the late 1950's, sprang from the efforts of Ella Baker and a group of southern preachers who would lead the organization's top-down machinery as well as facing dangers as demonstration marchers, including Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, C.K. Steele and the group's president, Martin Luther King Jr. SCLC, especially Ella Baker, inspired SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was not a branch of SCLC, however. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Brenard Lafayette, James Bevel and Marion Barry would form the organization in 1960; all of these individuals, as well as the legendary Robert Parris Moses, would routinely, almost daily risk their lives in the anti-discrimimnation fight, notably in confronting local southern authorities while trying to get blacks registered to vote. By 1965, there would be increasing self-reflection and dissatisfaction within each organization as they assessed their accomplishments, and growing impatience between them regarding their respective tactics. The turmoil within SNCC, after the rejection of its efforts to have black representatives credentialed in the Mississippi delegation by the 1964 Democratic Convention, led to its expulsion of white members and volunteers, while many of its members would look to violence as a means of empowerment as they split into new organizations.Branch's chronicling of the wide-ranging Southern grass-roots movements shows how deeply and far-reaching they impacted the traditional alignment of power politics in America. One of the affected areas was the relationship between the White House and civil rights. Even the Kennedys, Jack and his consigliere brother, Robert, tried to hold King and his movement at arms length. The White House under Kennedy would continually underestimate the depth and importance of the movement that King represented. Media coverage of movement clashes in the south, plus first-hand reports from Justice Department employees (under the direction of Robert Kennedy), working with increasing frustration to challenge southern voter discrimination practices in the courts, informed the president of the intimidations, beatings and killings taking place daily. Nevertheless, a meeting with King at the White House was watered down by forcing King to share his time with labor leader Walter Reuther and others. Worse, King had to subject himself to a "serial bushwhacking" (p. 114) running from Burke Marshall of Justice to Robert and then Jack Kennedy, deflecting any administration-sponsored law enforcement protection under the pretense that King must clean his house of communist sympathizers. This last point was generated by the fact that King's close advisor, Stanley Levison, had been a communist. Levison would soon insist that his ties to SCLC and King be severed, in order to protect the organization and its programs. King would later lament the loss of this close advisor and literary agent, who guided so much of SCLC's activities. Meanwhile, the president acted to weaken or reverse executive actions designed to fight segregation. Another highly valued advisor previously forced to quit his formal ties with SCLC was Bayard Rustin. He could be called the organizers' organizer. He had been fighting for civil rights since the 1940's, and had provided guidance to Martin Luther King in adopting the Ghandi-style of nonviolence during the Montgomery Boycotts. He was a co-founder of SCLC and was a key influence in the March on Washington. His past communist, and socialist, connections, and his homosexual orientation, were used by J. Edgar Hoover to butress the accusation of King as a danger to the country's security byway of his choice of associates. The Birmingham civil rights campaign of Spring, 1963 would have a lasting impact on the way business as usual was practiced in the south regarding racial minorities. This was an intense campaign, in which SNCC would initiate the use of younger people, ranging from college to high school down to elementary students to march into the maelstrom of police resistance. The news reportage of marchers, especially the very young, being subjected to fire hoses and police dog attacks repulsed many people who would not have ordinarily cared much about events happening in other states. One of the affected was Jack Kennedy, who would later be described by MLK as a different person in 1963 than in the first two years of his presidency, a person who understood the moral impact of race on the nation, and who initiated a Civil Rights Bill before his death.Malcom X was another protagonist affecting change at this time. He vehemently resisted what he labeled as the accommodation of leaders like King to the government, arguing that fighting violence with violence, not talk, was the only way to win rights for blacks. His "avenging swagger" (p. 257) made the established civil rights leaders seem ponderous in comparison, according to Branch, but his words about armed defense became fodder for the mainstream media to concentrate on him as a racist and demagogue. The Greek Tragedy of his life unfolds on these pages. He was the most vocal of the Nation of Islam as the book's chronology begins, but his high profile within the movement led to resentments from other ministers as well as the leader, Elijah Muhammad. He was censured for drawing too much negative attention to the Nation with his rhetoric and left the movement as pressure to conform to Elijah Muhammad's demands became intolerable to him. He would start out in his new ex-Nation life trying to find middle ground with his former leader, but over time felt compelled to become a critic. He tried especially hard, for instance, to bring public condemnation upon Elijah Muhammad by spreading the word about his ex-leader having sexual relations with his various secretaries, and fathering numerous children with them. Malcom X spent the latter part of 1964 out of the country, being treated as a visiting dignitary in several countries, while living like a person with a target on his back when he was in the USA. The "aura of violence" (p. 368) that he cultivated would eventually be turned on him, when he was assassinated in early 1965.Civil Rights always had to come second to politics as far as the government, and media coverage, was concerned at this time. Branch shows how presidential politics was transformed. This is when the traditional alignment between the Democratic Party and the South broke down, with the Republican Party picking up the pieces in the wake of its candidate's defeat in 1964. Central to all of this was Lyndon Johnson, who seems to have never had a good night's sleep during his entire administration, even when things were going reasonably well in his favor. That would be in 1964, after he shepherded the Civil Rights Act into law, eliminating racial segregation in schools, public places and employment. He was riding a wave of good will from the voters, in the wake of the tragic circumstances of John Kennedy's assassination. An important factor affecting his peace of mind was his inability to see how to stop the increasing American military commitment to Vietnam. Johnson therefore had many daily distractions, but he could not ignore the impact of news emanating from Mississippi of the disappearance, during the "Freedom Summer" campaign, of three civil rights workers. He ran into the same brick wall the Kennedy's experienced, when he tried to persuade FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to open an office in that state, and involve the Bureau's investigative staff and expertise to solving this crime and others occurring daily, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Hoover favored focusing his agency on finding communist spies more than in law enforcement, and solving crimes against civil rights workers ranked very low in his list of priorities. This was especially true of anything concerning King and his organization. Hoover had earlier convinced Robert Kennedy to give him the go-ahead to wiretap hotel rooms and offices of Martin Luther King. His agents taped tons of telephone conversations and interactions between King and others. The wide net of his information-gathering ultimately reaped a good deal of recordings of King and his close associates carousing with women. Hoover went to great lengths to poison everyone against King, calling him a degenerate as well as a communist sympathizer. He especially seemed to enjoy providing transcripts of the most scatological moments to politicians, including two presidents.Nevertheless, Johnson was able, through what Branch called an "adroit, relentlessly unabashed application of raw personal chemistry to politics", (p. 369) to finesse both Hoover and the segregationist Mississippi Governor to accept the influx into the state of a substantial FBI presence. Through thousands of hours of on-the-ground work, questioning witnesses and working with informants, the FBI was able to solve some high-profile crimes, including the deaths of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County. As Branch notes in the Epilogue, the prosecutions of many of these cases occurred for years after the events in this book. Even successful prosecutions had a double edge, occurring by necessity in states where many people in power sympathized with the convicted. One notorious case involved the arrest of Charles Wilson, a prominent businessman from Laurel, Mississippi who also was the shotgunner on a Klan murder squad which shot up and burned down the home of activist Vernon Dahmer. Dahmer's family had escaped but Dahmer was killed in the attack. Wilson was convicted, along with other co-defendants in all-white trials, receiving life sentences which were upheld on appeal. Still, Wilson was granted work-release to his home within a year of starting his sentence, then had his life sentence commuted to time served in 1976, by Governor Waller. Waller had earlier served as Wilson's attorney at one of his trials.By FBI estimates, a five-year toll of investigations at the end of the 1960's included nine murders, seventy-five church bombings and over three hundred bombings and assaults, most connected to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Public opinion in the country was generally in favor of justice being served in many of these egregious crimes. Branch offers an example of a 1964 public opinion poll in New York state, where heavy majorities supported the civil rights bill. However, the same poll also found the same majorities feeling that the civil rights movement had "gone too far." (p. 502) This seeming contradiction speaks volumes about how the 1964 election started a process of defining political conservative identities which continues today. The Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, was successfully represented as a dangerous person to give the nuclear launch codes to, by the opposition. There was an underlying Goldwater theme that things were shifting too far in the country against the white majority, and for the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican candidate was embraced in the South. This was not nearly enough to blunt the Johnson juggernaut. Johnson's victory was won by the greatest popular majority in history; Goldwater carried only five Deep South states and, barely, his home state of Arizona. The Republican party was left in tatters. Many moderates in the party blamed Goldwater's conservative ideology for fracturing the party. Johnson received an unbelievable ninety-six percent Negro majority. From this time, the Democratic party would supplant the Party of Lincoln as the representative of the majority of blacks. The election of Republicans to the House in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Alabama for the first time in modern times was downplayed as insignificant by pundits, who perceived no lasting white backlash to the minority defection to the Democrats. Branch points out that we now know that a warning sign was overlooked in these election reviews. California voters voted for Lyndon Johnson and also passed Proposition 14, promoted by Ronald Reagan and the real estate industry, which legalized segregated neighborhoods. No one then believed that party realignment and strong national leadership were being formed to oppose racial progress in the wake of the recent drubbing of the national Republican party, but, as Branch points out, "A slow incoming tide was mistaken for an ebbing ripple." (p. 523).
Not much of a review here. More of a celebration with a dash of self-critique: I'm finally done! This might be the book it took me the longest to read ever. I even posted this on March 1 (almost three months ago):I really can't get into this book. The first section was such a slog, in part because it is more cluttered and devoid of the seamlessness of Parting the Waters. Or maybe it is a retread? Part 2 hasn't been going very well either, and it's not holding my interest. I'm surprised, considering how much I loved Parting the Waters, one of my favorite all-time books. Not quite sure why my stomach drops before I pick this up. Anyway it's been since January 21st and I'm probably 1/3 of the way through. It's going to take some time, and I divert time - clearly - to other books in the interim. I hear things pick up at At Canaan's Edge, so I'm going to do my best to plow through it. But man, it's a hard, and it's such a shame that, well, it's hard.After that I took another break around Chapter 20 - "Mary Peabody Meets the Klan," and then another at the beginning of Part Three. I have plowed through it since taking a vacation over Memorial Day weekend. I do not know why - for the first 400 pages - this was such a slog for me. A four-month slog. I loved the first one. Why did the second sometimes feel so unpleasant and frustrating to pick up? Here are some theories: the small, episodic chapters; the lack of critical analysis for the sake of full-throttle summary and exposition; the sometimes unclear phrasing and unclear modifiers of who did what to whom; general incoherence; shoddy editing; oscillating rapidly back and forth between places; run-ons; lower stakes...I don't know. But at some point I gave up trying to parse out all the different yarns and awkward pacing and convoluted writing and just pushed forward for the sake of just completing the thing. Up until about page 400, this book is all over the place. Sometimes I had to let the organizational hodgepodge wash over me like a warm bowl of alphabet soup.But why? What is the X factor, considering I loved Parting the Waters so much. I could not put that book down. This one I was more than happy to put down, take a break, step away from it until eventually drudging my way through it out of obligation. I wish I could find a more legitimate critical analysis here, and I wish I could articulate it. But I'm having trouble seeing through my own guilt: Did I not show up? Is it all my fault? Am I just too stupid for this book? But all I know is I'd be reading (and re-reading) for thirty minutes to see I'd barely made a dent in one chapter. No other book gave me this sinking, wrenching feeling of endlessness quite like this one. Parting the Waters never made me think "Wait...what?" Or "Come again?" And after a diligent hour of reading I'd still have 500 pages to go. To paraphrase Lewis Black, it was like flying to New Zealand trying to read this thing. Fifteen hours in, and there's still eight hours to go. Parting the Waters is 300 pages longer and has a narrative magic to it that is simply unparalleled.But once you get to the Malcolm X assassination plot and the Democratic Convention, things really take off from there. While the first 2/3rds of the book were a slog, I read the last 1/3 or so in a week and a half. From there on out until the close of the book, things are pretty spectacular. Bob Moses's story arc gets rather heartbreaking. The moment that SNCC coordinator James Bevel actually commits an act of violence against his wife is similarly staggering. The material on Elijah Muhammad is eye-opening. The book starts to coalesce quite nicely, and it casts a rosier light on the previous 2/3 of the book.I can't figure out why my reaction to this one was so markedly different from my wall-to-wall admiration of the first in the series. I didn't want that to be the case. But - whether it was me or Branch, or a combination of both - I don't know. This one felt rushed and slipshod early on: the writing definitely wasn't as clear, and it bounced back and forth and re-treaded some things. But when it kicks off, it reaches the same heights.So while I do recall the difficulty of its beginning, I also look back on it fondly as an accomplishment, and ultimately a pretty exhilarating marathon run. I learned a lot, and really, it was glad to be back in the world Branch created, even if it was more opaque and a bit more frustrating this time around. Even though it's got more balls in the air compared to the first book, there's still plenty of greatness to salvage here. And Branch's installment ends up looking good in retrospect. What else can you ask for?
What do You think about Pillar Of Fire: America In The King Years 1963-65 (1999)?
This is the second book in the 3 book series and follows what may be my favorite history of all time--Parting the Waters. I'll admit this book confused me at first because it was repeating events from the first book but not an actual duplicate. As a result it jumped around for slightly more than the first hundred pages. My patience was rewarded. When he got to the new part this book covers, it was every bit as remarkable as the first book. One of Branch's greatest strengths is letting us know what else is going on in our country--simultaneously with the Civil Rights movement. It is easy to see why there was so much I didn't know--because the newspapers weren't picking it up--and I wasn't smart enough to put things together. Branch tells about the war between Elijah Mohammed (founder of the Black Muslims)and his former lieutenant Malcolm X. Yes, it's relevant to the movement even though it didn't take place in the South. We also begin to see how incredible Lyndon Johnson was. I know he gets a bum rap because he was ugly and charmless especially next to the glittering Kennedys. The truth is that the Voting Rights Act and many other positive things would not have happened had Kennedy been able to complete his term. Kennedy was all about keeping on good terms with everyone so he could win re-election. Johnson was the master at whipping Congress into shape. The tragedy is he got stuck with Vietnam and couldn't figure a way out. As he pointed out, the American people would never accept a withdrawal. So against his better judgement he felt compelled to go for a win he knew was impossible. One final word--J. Edgar Hoover was either crazy or the most evil person within our borders. He tried to sink King on a daily basis but, fortunately, he kept striking out.
—judy
This book is the second volume in a three-volume history of the American Civil Rights Movement. While Martin Luther King is the focal point around which much of the story is told, in this volume particularly he is less of a motivating actor than many of the others involved in this Movement.Parallel to the Civil Rights Movement, another movement in the African American community was rising, namely the Nation of Islam and its break-away member, Malcolm X. Malcolm appears in this volume almost as much as King and argues that the time for nonviolence has passed...until he is gunned down in the winter of 1965. Also, there is much information on the beginning of the American involvement in Vietnam. King will make the peace movement an equal concern in his last years.The key Civil Rights events in this book are Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney murders, the Mississippi Freedom Democrats and the 1964 Democratic Party Convention, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the beginning of the Alabama voter registration movement in Selma which is the outgrowth of the Birmingham movement in 1963. While this is an important work, it is somewhat of a transition piece between the more famous events in volumes one and three. This is the only volume of the three which did not win the Pulitzer Prize, perhaps deservedly, because the narrative is choppy at times.Again, I stand in awe of those who risked beatings, jail, and even death to establish the rights of all to exercise their basic rights as humans and citizens in this country. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.
—Donna
The second in Taylor Branch's authoritative trilogy America In The King Years has a broader scope than Parting The Waters because so much happened in the country from the time of LBJ's swearing in on Air Force One to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We learn about the deceit which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and thus to the Vietnam War, the charismatic but troubled Malcolm X and his assassination ordered by the corrupt and immoral Elijah Mohammed, LBJ's masterful shepherding of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act through Congress, SNCC and the brutal murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney during Mississippi Freedom Summer, the railroading of the the heroic Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic Convention, all this and more Martin Luther King was involved in but we haven't even focused on him yet. Despite being wiretapped and vilified by the aging and vindictive J. Edgar Hoover, these three years show MLK triumphant. Following an exhausting schedule (he was hospitalized more than once) Martin deftly handles difficulties in organizing and ultimate success in St. Augustine, Florida, whirlwind fund raising, sermons and speeches all across the country and in Europe, where he has an audience with the Pope (despite Hoover's best efforts), organizing for the 3 Marches from Selma to Montgomery (including Bloody Sunday) and a second trip to Norway to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Branch describes the difficulties and successes of organizing and we meet some the unsung heroes: Bob Moses, Rep. John Lewis, Vernon Dahmer, Fannie Lou Hamer but the real heroes of the civil rights movement are the ministers and black students who went into the little towns in the south and the farmers, mechanics and teachers who responded to them, suffered and sometimes died in the great struggle for equality. A struggle we are still engaged in today, 50 years later.
—Mary
