Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: American in the King Years, 1963-
65. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. 619pp + notes and index.
When Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King
Years, 1951-63 (1988) first appeared, the historiography of the
civil rights movement was already in full swing. Since then, the
proliferation of studies has proceeded apace. In the interim,
Branch has also had access to the tapes made in Lyndon Johnson's
White House and has made use of the FBI wiretappings not only of
King and his circle but also of Nation of Islam personnel,
including Malcolm X. All this helps explain why Branch has
limited Pillar of Fire to roughly two years (including
considerable recapitulation of material covered in volume one). A
third volume is now planned to conclude his history of the King
Years.
"Branch's failure
to analyze or to explain the contents of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, much less to consider the arguments over its
constitutionality, is a very strange omission indeed."
Pillar of Fire continues
the approach adopted in Branch's
first volume--history as the interaction of individual public
lives as they grapple with historical events. The three central
figures in Pillar of Fire are President Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X
and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., with J. Edgar Hoover and
his lieutenants, Cartha "Deke" DeLoach and William Sullivan,
constantly intervening to sow discord. As before, Branch weaves
the life histories and current actions of important, but less
prominent figures such as Allard Lowenstein, Robert Moses, Fannie
Lou Hamer and Abraham Heschel into the rich, even overcrowded,
tapestry of the mid-1960s. Nor are the Kennedys and their
entourage entirely forgotten once John Kennedy is assassinated.
Before focusing
on the place Branch makes for religion in
his story, some evaluation of the book's strengths and weaknesses
are in order. The strengths of Pillar of Fire are several. First,
Branch expands the story beyond the dual focus on the southern
campaigns between 1963 and 1965 and the responses to those
campaigns within the federal government. Now Malcolm X and the
Black Muslims are seen as major players in the urban North and
West. Second, Branch's account reminds us how important a role
red-baiting, initiated by the egregious Hoover, played in the
evaluation of King and the civil rights movement in government
circles. In addition, Branch very effectively conveys the
physical and psychological terror that black southerners in much
of the Deep South endured during these years. Whether it was in
Jacksonville, Florida or in Philadelphia, Mississippi or in
Selma, Alabama, neither public authorities (from governor down to
the local sheriff) nor the institutions of white civil
society (such as the Protestant churches) cared or dared enough to
defend the rights of black southerners against the rankest sort
of discrimination and intimidation. Finally, Branch effectively
exposes the gangland-style thuggery of the Nation of Islam. On
several occasions, Malcolm X barely escaped with his life before
his assassination in February, 1965 by a hit squad. Everyone knew
it was coming. Elijah Muhammad and his minions, including Louis
X (now Farrakhan), hardly needed government provocateurs to
encourage them in their plotting against their former star,
though Branch does fail to address the charge that Malcolm's
death was aided and abetted by white authorities.
But the triumph
of narrative over analysis in Pillar of Fire
means that many readers will miss the probing of action, motive,
and implication which an historian of the movement--and a
biographer of King-- must occasionally hazard. Part of the
problem is that Branch's first volume, Parting the Waters,
already introduced most of the major players, sketched in and
explained their backgrounds, and then set them in motion. Thus in
Pillar of Fire, a relatively fresh figure such as Lyndon Johnson
emerges as more important (and more compelling) than either Dr.
King or Malcolm X. Indeed, King seems to recede in importance,
while Malcolm emerges as a figure of pathos, even despair and
ineffectuality, rather than a commanding hero of black
consciousness. Death captured Malcolm X somewhere between his old
identity and something as yet unknown, and this eerily
anticipates King's own wilderness years after 1965 and before he
was shot down in Memphis. Put another way, Branch's claim in
volume one that "King's life is the best and most important
metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years" is
not argued for very strongly in volume two.
Perhaps the
third volume will make good certain other
shortcomings such as the almost total absence of the New Left
from the story. More seriously for this volume, Branch's failure
to analyze or to explain the contents of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, much less to consider the arguments over its
constitutionality, is a very strange omission indeed. And, unlike
Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire is carelessly and at times
awkwardly written.
Finally,
religion is everywhere in Pillar of Fire; not,
however, as theology or faith but as an institutional force.
Indeed, Branch's treats the struggle for racial equality in these
years as a moral-religious as much as a political-ideological
phenomenon. The overall effect is to remind the reader of
President Lincoln's observation in his Second Inaugural Address
that both the North and the South read the same Bible and prayed
to the same God. Martin Luther King's grounding in black southern
Protestantism and his more abstract religious humanism, along
with what Branch refers to as the "confrontational
Christianity" (p.55) of black student activists from Nashville,
stand at the center of the history of the civil rights movement.
But the religious plot thickens in Pillar of Fire with the
presence of Malcolm X and the Muslims, a challenge both to the
secular political culture and to Martin Luther King's
Christianity. In fact, the central moral-religious tension within
the Nation of Islam was generated by Malcolm X's increasing
desire to involve himself in the political struggles of his time,
something which went against the non-political orientation of
Elijah Muhammad's sect. The central ethical-religions tension
between the Muslims and King's forces (and within the movement
itself) was the role of violence in self-defense.
Beyond that,
Branch makes clear that one of the crucial
factors in the passage of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964
came from pressure exerted by white Protestants in the midwest
and mountain states upon their overwhelmingly Republican
congressional delegations. And during the debate over the Civil
Rights Act, over one hundred clergy, mainly Protestant and
organized by Rev. Robert Spike of the National Council of
Churches, descended on Washington to lobby the Congress to
support the pending bill.
Finally, of course,
the segregationist white South had its
own theological and biblical self-justification. Branch notes
that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVa), filibustering against the bill
that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act, claimed that he had
searched the scriptures in vain for its justification. Branch
describes Medgar Evers's convicted murderer, Byron de la
Beckwith, as a "kind of lay theologian for white
segregation" (p.113). The Klan of course fought in the name of
racial Christianity against "Satanism" and "the Communist
yoke" (p.240), while J.R. Stoner and Connie Lynch asserted that
"God's with the white man in this struggle for racial
purity!" (p.378). The moderate white South is, in Branch's
account, largely silent, hardly a factor in the controversy
except by its silence.
This of course is
not the whole story. A good number of
white ministers supported integration of their churches and, as a
result, lost their pulpits. Their story remains to be told. The
governing bodies of the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians
did grapple with the "race problem" all throughout the 1950s and
1960s. Thus religion is an issue--or cluster of issues--which
Branch's third volume might engage more explicitly. Not least
among those issues should be the historical irony that African
American religion became a political force in and through the
civil rights movement; yet only a decade after King's death,
southern-led white fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals
had become politicized to a degree hardly imaginable without the
precedent of their African American counterparts in the 1960s.
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