Book Review : Why This Fascination With King?

Martin Luther King and the civil rights campaign are the subject of a massive and widely admired new book, Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” excerpted in View over the past week. Derrick Bell, who discusses the book below, is a distinguished black professor of law at Harvard University, mentioned often as a possible next dean of the Harvard Law School. Bell, who enters a quiet dissent about Branch’s book, is the author of a number of influential books on race relations in the United States, including “And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice” (Basic Books).

Race in America may well be the ultimate puzzle. It defies resolution because so much of its essence is illogical and absurd. The publication of Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963” (Simon & Schuster: $24.95) illustrates the unpredictable character of American racial thinking.

Consider the book itself. A well-written, very detailed narrative history of the early years of the civil rights movement, it is published only two years after “Bearing the Cross,” David Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, and covers ground well cultivated even before the Garrow book appeared.

Substantial Investment Made

And yet, reviewers have hailed Branch’s more exhaustive coverage of many of the same events as if it were a long-awaited, pioneering event. Even more surprising, the publisher’s full-page ads in national publications and the book’s choice as a “main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club” suggest that substantial investments are being made on the assumption that American readers can hardly wait to devour this detailed 1,064-page recitation of three-decades-old civil rights events.

Why this current fascination with King and his cohorts of major and minor activists? After all, while the movement accomplished more than many expected, it achieved far less than was needed to eliminate the racism that today is as pervasive as then. Moreover, Taylor Branch’s new addition to an already healthy literature appears in a year when the society’s attitude of benign neglect is causing decimation among urban poor blacks that is assuming genocidal proportions.

Again this year, civil rights losses have far outstripped civil rights gains. And in what may well portend a future for which 1988 was prelude, we have witnessed a presidential campaign in which the Democratic Party rejected Jesse Jackson, by far the most charismatic of the presidential candidates, because he is black, while the Republicans retained the White House through a campaign that relied heavily on racist appeals that were as effective as they were blatant.

Branch challenges this barren landscape without a biblical miracle like the one that his title, “Parting the Waters,” calls to mind. Rather he relies on a commitment, honed in long years of research and writing, to produce this first of a planned two-volume work. In addition, he is a fine storyteller with a thousand characters that blossom and shine under his skilled pen.

King is the star, the main attraction, but the author uses the drama of King’s life to bring on stage a host of courageous figures who truly believed that racial justice could be achieved through forthright action taken at personal risk.

‘Safe to Murder Negroes’

The book opens with a memorable portrait of Vernon Johns, King’s predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Remarkably, Johns is as heroic a figure as King. Much to his congregation’s dismay, he preached and practiced rebellion against the racism that constricted his life and that of his parishioners.

Brought before a white judge in the late 1940s to explain why he planned to preach a sermon titled, “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery,” the Rev. Johns replied: “Because everywhere I go in the South the Negro is forced to choose between his hide and his soul. . . . Mostly, he chooses his hide. I’m going to tell him that his hide is not worth it.”

Worth it or not, the decade detailed in “Parting the Waters” brings to public attention an impressive number of blacks and whites who risked and sometimes lost their lives in what seemed in those days the final struggle for freedom. Branch portrays high drama that sometimes included high humor, as when then Sen. John F. Kennedy, speaking to a Harlem audience, declared that racial freedom was an American idea, and not a Russian one. Carried away with his rhetoric, he opined that Harlem’s children were not named for Lenin or Marx, but for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. “There may be,” he added, “a couple called Adam Clayton Powell!”

Leisure to Read Book

“Careful, Jack,” Powell called out devilishly from his seat on the platform as “a peal of laughter went up in tribute to Powell’s playboy reputation.” The anecdote illustrates the close focus “Parting the Waters” brings to even mundane events.

Indeed, its richness suggests--and may ensure--that only those with much leisure will find time to read this book from cover to cover. A 51-page index, however, makes it easy to sample and savor familiar stories and new tales, all told with skill and--there is no other word--devotion.

The question remains: Who are the market multitudes the publisher expects to buy this book? Can the dedication to racial justice that Branch has resurrected in his book serve to warn his readers that the racial justice millennium we once thought was inevitable is now a fast-fading dream? Or, is it rather that the little folks who challenged the system are, like Dr. King, gone and thus they and their deeds are safe to salvage--for purposes of reminiscence only?