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The Critics the Mission this far, but he briskly relates how John- THE CRITICS sonSelma moved to outright from annoyedcollaboration doubt within about a were ideal-studio-cast thugs &an- BOOKS teed to provoke national outrage and in- stigate federal intervention. The march from Selma to Mont- THE MISSION gomery is one of America's grandest sagas, a racial, regional, and constitu- Martin Luther King, Jr.,'sjnaIchapter. tional crisis whose flash points illuminate the country's path to social democracy. BY DAVID LEVERING LEWIS In his earlier volumes, Brartch followed King's first steps d~ngthas path. "Part- n one of his more bizarre Oval Office grams for Medicare, Medicaid, edu- ing the Waters; ArnericaZn the King Iconfidences, Lyndon Johnson said cation, and poverty were pending, and Years, 1954-$9" went firnithe Mont- that he didn't want to "follow Hider" the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had al- o the March on but that Hider had the right idea: Tust ready depleted congressional good will. sad?& refused take a simple thing and repeat it often King was by then expert at telling John- enough, even ifit wasn't true, why, peo- son what Johnson wanted to hear, and ple accept it." Johnson was speaking by managed to interrupt the Presidential telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in monologue long enough to tell Johnson Selma, Alabama, about how to convince what he felt Johnson needed to know. Southern whites that Southern blacks He pointed out that, in the five South- deserved the franchise. The curious ern states that Johnson lost to Goldwa- political-science tutorial came on the after- ter in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of rates in Atlanta and noon of January 15,1965, King's thii- eligible African-Americans were regis- sixth birthday. Whatever he may have tered to vote. A voting-rights act would thought of Johnson's inaccurate anal- produce a coalition of blacks and white ogy, King had already begun repeating, moderates, changing the electoral map Mples in India, he developed a phi- on television, in the press, and from of the South. Johnson liked that. It , losophy of nonviolent passive resistance church pulpits, the moral necessity of a could be his greatest achievement, he out of what had been, back in Mont- guaranteed vote for every American, re- said-"It will do things that even that gomery, a commonsense tactic. But it gardless of color. Two weeks earlier, '64 Act couldn't do." was the March on Washington, on Au- King had publicly announced that the gust 28,1963, that projected King indeli- Southern Christian Leadership Confer- t Canaan's Edgey'(Simon &Schus- bly into the national consciousness. ence, the alliance of Baptist preachers he "Ater; $39, the third and final vol- "Parting the Waters" ended with led, would launch voter-registration ume of Taylor Branch's monumental King at the head of a civil-rights move- protests in Selma, where fourteen thou- chronicle, "America in the King Years," ment that had long been dominated by sand four hundred whites had, by legal covers the ~eriod&om 1965 to 1968, and the National Association for the Ad- ruse and naked force, limited fifteen charts civil-rights history as the parallel vancement of Colored People and the thousand blacks to one per cent of the National Urban League, and faced with biographies of two tragic titans-Martin 5 registration rolls. Luther &ng, Jr., the modem Moses, and a pending civil-rights bill that Congress 2 Johnson, as recorded by the secret Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be seemed unlikely to pass. But John F. 2 Oval Office taping system, both com- Lincoln. The tape of Johnson's phone Kennedy's assassination assured its pas- mended and cautioned King on his call to King has inspired speculation sage, and it became the Civil Rights Act $ Selma strategy. He was, he said, com- about their collusion in the design and of 1964. Branch's second volume, "Pillar 3 mitted to getting federal voting legisla- execution of the Selma-Montgomery of Fire: America in the King Years, Q tion enacted, but he implied that King's campaign; one student of the period re- 1963-65," followed the civil-rights pa& 0 timing and his tactics were dangerously cently called it the Johnson-King voting- through an arena of white-supremacist precipitate. Johnson's Great Society pro- rights "pas de deux." Branch doesn't go violence in Birmingham, Alabama, and @ The wary alliance between Lyndon Johnson andmarfin Luther King may have been the high point of each man? career. in Mississippi during the Freedom Sum- not even the Nazis had been more sav- life" for the c~untry'~Negroes. "Because mer, and culminated in King's receiving age. Branch says, "The Nuremberg inter- it is not just Negroes, but it is all the Nobel Peace Prize. On January 18, ruption struck with the force of instant ofus, who must overcome the crip- 1965,he registered as a guest at the Hotel historical icon." pling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And Albert, in Selma, the first black man ever King and Abernathy were not at we-shall--overcome." Liberal whites to enter the front door of this antebellum the Pettus Bridge on March 7th; they were electrified; whites in the Deep South replica of the Doge's Palace, in Venice. were preaching to their respective con- were stupefied.Johnson was indeed on The civil-rights bill behind him, Martin gregations in Atlanta, something that the verge of altering the South's Luther King had gone to Selma to launch Branch is more prepared to excuse than landscape, but not in the way that he and a voter-registration drive. It escalated other commentators have been. Two King had discussed on the phone. The into a virtual replay of Reconstruction. days later, King led a second attempt withdrawal of Southern whites' alle- In the engrossing narration of Branch's to march across the bridge, but with giance from the Democrats-the Great final volume, events seem to unfold al- dangerously equivocal results. Gover- White Switch, as it has been called- most in real time. On a late January nor George Wallace, segregation's last gathered speed soon after Johnson's morning, in two proud waves, more best hope, ordered Alabama officials to speech. On the other side-for in- than a hundred teachers, the backbone hold the line at all costs while he and stance, in the SNCC leader James For- of Selma's black middle class, shook off King sought injunctions against each man's sneering comment "That cracker more than two generations of diffidence other. Forbidden to conduct a second was talkin' shit"-was the voice of rising and gathered at the county courthouse, march toward Montgomery, King faced black nationalism. demanding to be registered, while Jim an. unprecedented dilemma: defjr a fed- Branch's panoptic approach exposes Clark barked orders to disperse them. eral court order and jeopardize Presi- telling juxtapositions: we see Johnson Two weeks later, he arrested King and dential good will, or cancel the march approving the reluctant recommen- Abernathy as they led a demonstration across Pettus Bridge, demoralize thou- dation of Attorney General Nicho- of more than seven hundred local citi- sands of ordinary men and women, and zens. National newspapers carried pic- risk vindicating the deep mistrust of the tures of scores of black youngsters being movement's more radical factions, such pursued by police cars and pickup trucks as the Student Nonviolent Coordinat- with electric cattle prods dangling from ing Committee. Branch calls this chap- the windows. ter "Devil's Choice." King, having prom- On March lst, King preached at the ised the Brown Chapel audience that he Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in would "rather die on the highways of Selma, and proclaimed, 'We are going to Alabama than make a butchery of my bhga voting bi into being in the streets conscience," ended up doing the latter of Selma." These challenging words in the eyes of young militants. He or- raised the stakes for a procrastinating dered a retreat from the bridge just as Administration, as did the events at the the blocking phalanx ofAlabama troop- Edmund Pettus Bridge the following ers stepped aside. Sunday. Branch's description of Bloody Still, it was probably the right choice Sunday, one of this booKs many effective for history. Eight days after Pettus set pieces, vividly captures the exact hour Bridge, Lyndon Johnson delivered his when the political order of the Deep 'We Shall Overcome" speech to Con- South finally invalidated itselfin the eyes gress, an example of Presidential ora- of mainstream America. The carnage tory arguably unsurpassed in idealism inflicted by municipal and state police at and emotional impact. The reworked the bridge and along the marchers' route phrases of the speechwriter Richard of retreat accomplished for voting rights Goodwin fell upon a hushed chamber. what song, prayer, and marching had Speaking that night "for the dignity of not. That evening, ABC was broadcast- man and the destiny of democracy," the ing the television premikre of "Judgment President pledged the Administration at Nuremberg." Suddenly, forty-eight to secure "the fill blessings of American million Americans who had been watch- ing an elderly German couple protesting their innocence of the Holocaust were thousand pilgrims were exhilarated by contionted with scenes of people chok- King's preaching. His sermon was a ing on tear gas, snarling dogs tearing at stem-winder, beginning with an encap- flesh, baton-wielding troopers on horse- sulation of Reconstruction history and back, and bruised and traumatized men, ending in a riff of magnificent call and women, and children.
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