Vortex

Surprisingly, Taylor Branch begins “Pillar of Fire,” the middle volume of his magisterial trilogy-in-progress, “America in the King Years,” by describing a 1962 gunfight at a Black Muslim mosque in Los Angeles, during which an LAPD officer shot in the heart an unarmed Muslim holding his hands in the air. The killer was subsequently freed (“justifiable homicide”) by an all-white coroner’s jury. Malcolm X went to Los Angeles to help organize a defense for the 13 Muslims arrested in the brawl and shortly thereafter greeted news of a plane crash that killed more than a hundred leading whites of Atlanta with these words: “We hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.” Given that the Deep South was the focus of the struggle for civil rights, a struggle that was nonviolent at its core, this is a curious way to continue what Branch calls his “narrative history of the civil rights movement.” But when Branch writes in his preface, “[M]y thesis is that King’s life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years,” he means that the metaphor is at work even when it stands offstage. The middle ‘60s belong to what Branch calls the King years, but they do not belong to Martin Luther King Jr. alone. King is the vortex, the pillar around which a fire is burning: a fire made from the civil rights movement and the terrorist countermovement. Malcolm X and the Muslims are the counter-Kings, standing for vengefulness and against redemptive love; the weaving dialectic of King and the counter-Kings is the core of Branch’s story line.

The story is intrinsically scorching. Dreams deferred curdled, murderous nightmares continued, political accommodations broke down, old bills came due. The best of times was readying the worst of times, or is it the other way around? The grueling years of heroic civil rights action, lynchings and religion-based counter-mobilizations did not culminate simply in the Mississippi Summer of 1964, the searing anticlimax of the Atlantic City Democratic convention or the rejection of Barry Goldwater in favor of the anti-poverty warrior Lyndon Johnson. They were also the years in which triumphs were prologues to tragedies. Johnson, whose Civil Rights Act passed by large margins after a long Dixiecrat filibuster, anticipated that the once-solid Democratic South was on its way into the Republican Party. The civil rights movement, in the midst of monumental achievements, was crashing into its limits, and from the shadows, with a vivid if not always lucid idea about the destiny of African Americans, emerged the harsh Malcolm X, who would grow more potent in death than he ever was in life.

In Branch’s rightly acclaimed first volume, “Parting the Waters,” King’s nonviolent campaign compose the soul of the story. Branch tells the story ingeniously, miraculously evoking the abundant worlds that shaped, and were shaped by, King. In masterful capsules, he evokes huge swaths of America’s life and times: the likes of Vernon Johns, King’s brilliant, flamboyant predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.; the Rockefeller family who endowed Spelman College in Atlanta; Reinhold Niebuhr, whom King read and admired; Bob Moses of Harvard, of Harlem and of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that cracked open the terrorist state of Mississippi; and many others. As in the great Russian novels, Branch, never for long losing sight of the principal characters, brings lesser players to equivalent life.

In “Pillar of Fire,” King is still vivid and troubled but is less central and less distinct, less the protagonist than the flash point of immense forces. The civil rights movement goes on, drawing local heroes and courageous supporters into its whirlwind, leaving century-old political institutions in rubble. The civil rights movement remade American politics, breaking down the accommodations that President John F. Kennedy was loath to forgo. King now finds himself at the center of what Branch calls (and he does not exaggerate) “Shakespearean” maneuvers and deals involving the emboldened President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedys and the grotesque race-baiting Communist-obsessed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who, with Robert F. Kennedy’s collusion, started wiretapping King in 1963 and, a year later, mailed him anonymously a tape of scandalous excerpts from their taps and a letter aiming to convince him to commit suicide. (“You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”)

The sheer intensity and scope of Hoover’s venomous obsession is stupendous. In 1964, he leaked some of the dirt to Marquette University to keep them from granting King an honorary degree (he succeeded), and (via New York’s Cardinal Spellman) to the Vatican to try to stop the pope from supporting King for the Nobel Prize (he failed). Hoover later made this note to himself: “I am amazed that the pope gave an audience to such a degenerate.” A supine press knew or suspected some of Hoover’s maneuvers, but as Branch writes, “it scarcely occurred to any of them that they could or should write from firsthand evidence the facts about FBI habits beneath constitutional grade.” Hoover only let some of the dirt out of the bag in 1964, when he called King “the most notorious liar in the country” in front of reporters: a fateful gaffe he let himself commit, Branch believes, because the reporters were women and he didn’t take women seriously.

The Hoover saga is Branch at his best--with revelatory details, artfully chosen, few of them original but all amply credited, grotesque and poignant revelations of the American underside. The book teems with them: Slave practices on the American continent launched by Spanish colonists at St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565, before the English arrived; the arduous process of getting bail-bond money for activists into Mississippi, showing just how intricate and extensive the networks of a mass movement must be; the racially fueled murder of a black Army officer, Lemuel Penn, in Georgia in 1964, resulting in an acquittal. (To an abundance of FBI evidence against the Klan, a defense lawyer said: “There’s no crime [sic] in Georgia against intimidating colored people.”) One might not have thought it possible to tell the story of the 1964 Mississippi lynchings and the discovery of the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner freshly, yet Branch does that. He neither demonizes the FBI nor coats it with Technicolor glory.

Branch is strongest outside the South in this volume. His treatment of the reverend and New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is exemplary. Using wiretap records and personal interviews, Branch collects important stories about the Nation of Islam’s gangster-style war (car chases and all) against Malcolm X, who dared expose their leader, Elijah Muhammad, as a serial impregnator of secretaries and in other ways someone rather less than the living God. Branch’s Malcolm is no Technicolor idol either, but the depredations of his enemies were ferocious. With black nationalism back in fashion today, nothing could be more timely than these chilling revolutions of absolutists with guns in their hands.

Many of the stories of King, SNCC, the Congress on Racial Equality and their allies stretching nonviolent civil disobedience to--or past--the point of saintly forbearance have been told before, but no one has told them more vividly or with greater fidelity to the truth. Details matter with Branch: small things about the texture of life, such as the newborn baby of Justice Department official John Doar going unnamed for six weeks in 1963 while Doar crisscrossed the South tending to civil rights emergencies. The saga of the NAACP leader and dentist Robert Hayling leading the movement in St. Augustine is finely worked; so too, are that of the brave Mississippi activist Vernon Dahmer, eventually murdered by terrorists, and that of King’s allies James and Diane Nash Bevel, whose plan for a mass movement in Alabama would eventually bear fruit in the Selma campaign of 1965. Branch’s motto might be: Let us now praise famous men and women.

Unfortunately, as the movement triumphs and fragments, Branch’s writerly energy often flags--or perhaps he rushes, wearied a bit in his vast research labors. The Faulknerian brio evident throughout “Parting the Waters” frays in “Pillar of Fire,” producing a surprising number of clumsy or clotted phrases--including these from the first quarter of the text: “a tension that was shockingly external”; “he hesitated over complications of sovereign appearance”; “what seized King was the day’s precedent for collective strategy . . . “; “under pregnant daytime scrutiny”; President Kennedy “touch[es] the splendor of his standing among nations. . . .”; “against lingering inhibition”; “frontiers on edge.” Even his paragraphs on the larger political and cultural context are frequently flatter, more scattered and less pointed than in “Parting the Waters,” although on more important surrounding matters, like Jewish-Vatican relations and Johnson’s Vietnam maneuvers, Branch is thorough and revealing.

“Pillar of Fire,” almost in passing, speaks volumes about the splendors and miseries of a history so recent that it barely deserves to be called over and makes clear (though it is not Branch’s style to say so in so many words) that what is splendid would be unimaginable without King. King remains America’s indispensable pillar of fire, his reputation intact for all the years’ abrasions and the FBI’s surveillance. Although his inner life looms smaller in this volume, and the story becomes more chaotic as the movement accomplishes more, Branch offers touches that go to the heart of King’s nature: the coupling of exaltations with all-too-human uncertainties. King lurched from jail to the White House, Branch writes, with “his distinctive mix of despair and inspiration.” “I am not yet discouraged,” he said, with amazing modesty, on receiving the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, also noting that many people around the world greeted the American civil rights movement “with a certain amount of hope.” King’s modesty could be overwhelming. We should only be animated by such a spirit today.

This is no hagiography. Branch does not skimp on King’s feuds with colleagues or his now-notorious sexual adventures. All the better. An immense and complex figure, King deserves nothing less. However frequently his transgressions are retold, King only looks more impressive with every year’s commemoration of his achievements. Rescuing King from mythology, Branch, paradoxically, reveals his greatness among the greatness of others--others in all colors. Like the saints, King had the gift and the will to help a whole people overcome evil as he struggled to overcome his own weaknesses. He declared not “You shall overcome,” but “We.”