This. Book. Is. SO. Good. Wow.
It spans the decade of 1954-1963 and tells the epic tale of Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights struggles. It is not your snapshot version: clocking in at over 900 pages, you get the real meat of the story. You live through that decade as you read.
This means you get all the nitty gritty details of each 1950′s-era news cycle. An altercation occurs! King comments on it… People disparage him! He feels stuck… But just weeks later, the comments are forgotten and the next battle is at hand. It gives you great a perspective on all of today’s political controversies, and it exposes their silliness.
Amazingly, you don’t get lost in the details. The book is truly an American Epic – the struggle of a people for their rights and freedom with some fascinating larger-than-life leaders grappling with each other publicly and privately. Lord of the Rings is good and all, but this is an astounding tale of the grandest scale, and real at that.
The story starts when Republicans were still the most favorable party to blacks, a vestige of Lincoln’s emancipation. But both parties include civil rights elements in the presidential election of 1960 – blacks are a demographic worth courting. Then Kennedy’s win is aided partly because he and RFK made two phone calls about King being in jail (it wasn’t just Daley in Chicago delivering votes!), which the black community responds to with a drastic shift in support. But! Kennedy heads a party full of viscously ardent segregationists in the south. That tension permeates the interactions between the racist southern governors and RFK at the Justice Department as the movement’s confrontations with segregated institutions ignite in conflict.
J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t make anything easier, since he is always hunting for some (nonexistent and absurd) communist threat and influence. His dirt on JFK’s affairs secures his power at the FBI, and he insists that a couple of King’s friends are such a threat that he gets RFK to approve wiretaps. (For historians, I imagine those wiretaps are a treasure.) Exasperatingly, Hoover does not enthusiastically commit his FBI resources to investigating crimes in the south, more because of his own bureaucratic motives than segregationist ones. It certainly does not help King, the movement, or the poor people who were persecuted to have an unhelpful FBI.
Then there is the baptist church! One fascinating angle I had not heard before is how King wished to have the national baptist church organization help lead his civil rights efforts. But doing so meant the church’s national leadership needed to change. The stories of the National Baptist Conventions are as full of conflict as any events that decade, with a large swatch of preachers trying to unseat the president of the organization, J.H. Jackson, who tyrannically outmaneuvers them and holds onto power. He even dramatically rebukes King, demoting him within the organization and accusing him of something close to murder. Don’t forget, these are preachers doing a bunch of fighting!
Plus you have the global conflict of the US vs the USSR. Some of the civil rights stories make it into the international press, casting a bad light on the US, which pressures Kennedy from another side.
For flavor, peppered throughout are little mentions of celebrities like Frank Sinatra, who had gangster friends which caused issues for Kennedy at one point, plus Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr.
And the whole struggle (the point of it all, really) is this radically nonviolent movement against a very deeply rooted and violent racism in the south, with all kinds of enablers, intimidation, habits, and fears. It is not a war where the other side surrenders and it is over. It is a whole swath of institutions that King and the movement must continuously chip away, from segregation laws and business practices to intimidations against blacks registering to vote, all across several states.
Most perplexing is that the book ends before many policies really change. Brown v. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 are ruled and passed in the book, true, but their implementation was not easy nor immediate: two big stories of the movement are when James Meredith tries to register at the University of Mississippi and all of Robert Moses’s efforts with voting registration in Mississippi. The results of Civil Rights Act of 1964 are not in the scope of the book. Plus, even if policies had changed immediately, it would not drive racism out of peoples’ hearts.
Because essentially, that is the long-tail ending of the story, and it has not even ended yet. Sure we have elected a black president and ended blatant lawful segregation, but there is definitely still a distinct community of black americans who are not respected or understood by much of white america. Political struggles have concrete endpoints. But social struggles exist in hearts and minds, and cannot be changed quickly by policy. But that’s a discussion left to several more essays…
Anyway, my summaries do little justice to the book. It is truly an experience to immerse yourself in the story. Thankfully, the terrors are mostly history so the reader can excitedly see how the events play out and be spared the emotional damage. The violence at times is utterly terrifying and Branch, an excellent storyteller, turns some of the famous photographs into real life on the page. After reading it, you very much appreciate the struggles our nation has gone through to overcome its original sin.
I highly highly recommend this book. It is incredibly well written and the story is a supremely important part of our nation’s history.
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On a much more personal note, the book intrigued me also because I was interested in learning about this era that my dad’s side of the family was a part of, albeit in the periphery:
My dad and my pacifist grandfather had lunch with King in (I think) 1959 at some church event somewhere. My dad remembers King appearing very tired (and when Branch spoke at my church a few years ago, my dad mentioned this memory to him, to which Branch said it was probably because King was traveling all the time, giving speeches). My grandfather was a Democratic congressman from Colorado for one term, 1959-1961, and he attended the 1960 DNC in Los Angeles. And my grandmother was somehow friends with Harry Belafonte, who she had a crush on (we still have his records – also, he’s still alive?!). Plus, they were living in DC during the march on washington, and attended it. And, my parents have a poster of Bayard Rustin hanging in their office.
So as I read, all of these family stories gained another dimension of clarity.
My enthusiasm about the book also brought something out of my dad that I did not expect. He started college in 1960 when he was seventeen and soon wound up in radical student politics, joining an early version of SDS. So he came of age during the whole national upheaval chronicled so eloquently by Branch.
Anyways, there I am, sitting in my parents’ study, gushing to my dad about how good the book is, having just read the fascinating account of the Montgomery bus boycott. “There were other people who had gotten into altercations on the buses! But some organizers knew they wouldn’t be good examples to use if they wanted to make a statement out of it! But then Rosa Parks got arrested! And SHE was this really sweet, upstanding citizen, so they instantly rallied around her and then-”
As I’m raving on about Rosa Parks, to my prodigious surprise, my dad starts tearing up a little bit.
He remarks huskily, while he blinks at his computer screen, “to think, that she would then lie in state at the US capitol… simply amazing…”
Now, I’ve sat in that study and talked to my father about all sorts of things – politics, economics, policy, family, the neighbor’s dog, whatever.
But I’ve never before in my life, in that study or elsewhere, seen my father come close to crying.
