Story: When Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus, Montgomery, Alabama’s civil rights community settles on a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. as its main spokesman and leader. The lengthy boycott eventually pushes King to national prominence. King and other activists formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to promote nonviolent protest against segregation. While protests in Birmingham and Selma helped motivate reluctant politicians to pass important legislation, and the 1963 march on Washington produced one of the twentieth century’s most famous speeches, SCLC was almost always underfunded and understaffed, swept along by events as much as it initiated action. Caught between politicians who wanted to move more slowly and radical activists who felt he wasn’t moving nearly fast enough, King pursued a breakneck schedule of speaking engagements, meetings, and protests while the FBI sought to use his private life and friendships with suspected Communists to turn the country against him. Even as the Vietnam War distracted the country from the civil rights movement, King worked to call attention to the economic and social inequities inherent in American society, until an assassin’s bullet ended his life.
Review: David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is a fascinating read for those who might know only the most basic details of the civil rights movement. I myself was often struck by how the movement often asked for relatively small concessions, which communities would resist with seeming disproportionate force. During the initial Montgomery bus boycott, for example, King and the rest of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) were not asking for an end to bus segregation – they merely asked that blacks and whites be segregated in such a way that blacks would not have to give up their seats or stand while seats reserved for whites went unused. The bus company itself, damaged by the boycott, was more than willing to go along with this compromise, but it took a year before the local government would make any concessions. (Thus the boycott provides an early example not only of how economic interests could put pressure on political centers of power, but on how long it might take that pressure to work.) While looking back, such resistance appears hopelessly misguided, in truth it was also a boon for the civil rights movement. Garrow describes a number of incidents like SCLC’s failed protests in Albany, Georgia, where the local law enforcement showed restraint, allowed blacks to march, and never allowed the galvanizing moment that would motivate blacks and whites against segregation to occur.
In his focus on King, Garrow is going somewhat against the grain in contemporary history, as many historians have turned their attention to the grass-roots organizations, local leaders, and overall social trends that helped make the movement what it was. While that effort is commendable and much-needed, there is also a place for Garrow’s focus on a smaller group of prominent national leaders. The stature and influence of a Martin Luther King has a ripple effect throughout those local communities and grass roots; Garrow describes numerous instances where King’s presence helped increase turnout at local mass meetings, or where his ability to mediate between rival groups helped keep civil rights efforts moving forward. The interaction between centers of power and the everyday individual is hard to pin down, and probably requires looking at any significant historical moment from several perspectives.
Garrow’s writing is clear and well-researched, drawing on interviews, newspaper and media accounts, speech transcripts, meeting notes, FBI wiretap records, and more. The book focuses somewhat on King’s own thoughts and motivations, but almost entirely in the context of his civil rights work. You get a sense of the burden King felt himself under, his longstanding fear and expectation of death, and his gradual resolve to speak out against Vietnam and economic injustice. Garrow often refers back to an early incident where King believed he experienced a calling from God to endure the hardships that his efforts required, arguing that King drew strength from that moment throughout the rest of his life. But King’s family and personal life are dealt with only obliquely, and usually in the context of the FBI’s efforts to dig up sufficient dirt to discredit him. The book also ends rather abruptly with the assassination in Memphis, with Garrow spending almost no time exploring the reactions of others to his life or offering any conclusions of his own. One gets a clearer understanding of King’s work than one does of King as a person.
The later sections of the book, which focus on the civil rights movement’s efforts to refocus itself after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, are very telling on a number of levels. The drop off in enthusiasm for the movement, especially among whites, illustrates how many felt that once segregation and denying blacks the right to register and vote itself was illegal, the mission was accomplished. Discrimination and economic disparities – the results of hundreds of years of institutionalized prejudice – were not matters of concern, because the laws had been changed and the playing field was now supposedly equal. And King’s efforts to call attention to economic injustice in Chicago’s slums, including a ridiculously discriminatory real estate market, demonstrate that civil rights are far from merely a southern issue. In fact, the chapters on Chicago may well be the most distressing in the book. At the least, I felt that they showed most clearly how much work is left to do.
Year: 1986
Author: David J. Garrow
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 800
