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Martin Luther King Jr. is as close to a secular saint as America has. Every child learns the outlines of the story, the non-violent activist with a dream who was martyred for the sins of a racist nation. Garrow has written a deeply researched account of King's career with the SCLC, but in an effort to avoid drama or grandiosity, I think this book misses the forest for the trees.
King was thrust into leadership when he just 25, with the Montgomery bus boycott prompted by Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white person. Parks was selected as a test case for Brown v Board of education by the local NAACP, and King as a newcomer to the city was thought to be less influenced by city fathers. The boycott, a combination of non-violent activism and organizing, proved effective over more than a year of effort, bringing King to national attention, and leading to his calling as a civil rights leader.
King and the SCLC was at the center of the civil rights movement, a central front between the more conservative NAACP and firebrands of the SNCC. And King showed energy, fortitude, and moral courage. Yet its interesting that the account of the book reveals a much more desperate and hardscrabble movement popular history. Civil rights was always unpopular, always fighting uphill. King's moral center worked best against overt brutal segregationists like Birmingham Police Chief 'Bull' Connor, who could be counted on to do something stupid in front of the cameras. Yet the SCLC had perennial organizational problems and conflicts with local activists, rarely building something new. Garrow skims lightly over King's personal problems, his serial infidelity, exhaustion, and likely abuse of prescription stimulants, the last being common in the 1960s. The man was a man, not an angel, and had human appetites, though Garrow does not dive into salacious detail.
King had a reputation as moderate, and compared to the rising Black Power activists he was, but he also had a keen sense of universal justice that drew him to take unpopular stances against the Vietnam War in 1967, at immense cost to political alliances with President Johnson and much of the Democratic establishment. His last effort was a multiracial Poor Person's March, to demand a much more robust social safety net, including what in 2020 would be called universal basic income, before he was assassinated.
So about that forest, it's a counter-intuitive judgement, but King wasn't actually much of an organizer or politician. What he had was an absolute moral clarity about the fundamental injustice of America, and about the possibility for national redemption. I think that's the real story of King, not where he traveled and when he gave a speech. The book is at it's best when Garrow quotes King at length, or reveals a personal anecdote; King was a talented mimic and enjoyed teasing impressions of close friends, contentious late night meetings devolving into pillow fights, the perennially late King pausing on his way to a board meeting to ask a church janitor about his wife's back.
This is a key reference for the facts, or at least one interpretation of the facts, given the fallibility of human memory, but Bearing the Cross is a door stopper of a book, and I'm still looking for a volume on King I love.
King was thrust into leadership when he just 25, with the Montgomery bus boycott prompted by Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white person. Parks was selected as a test case for Brown v Board of education by the local NAACP, and King as a newcomer to the city was thought to be less influenced by city fathers. The boycott, a combination of non-violent activism and organizing, proved effective over more than a year of effort, bringing King to national attention, and leading to his calling as a civil rights leader.
King and the SCLC was at the center of the civil rights movement, a central front between the more conservative NAACP and firebrands of the SNCC. And King showed energy, fortitude, and moral courage. Yet its interesting that the account of the book reveals a much more desperate and hardscrabble movement popular history. Civil rights was always unpopular, always fighting uphill. King's moral center worked best against overt brutal segregationists like Birmingham Police Chief 'Bull' Connor, who could be counted on to do something stupid in front of the cameras. Yet the SCLC had perennial organizational problems and conflicts with local activists, rarely building something new. Garrow skims lightly over King's personal problems, his serial infidelity, exhaustion, and likely abuse of prescription stimulants, the last being common in the 1960s. The man was a man, not an angel, and had human appetites, though Garrow does not dive into salacious detail.
King had a reputation as moderate, and compared to the rising Black Power activists he was, but he also had a keen sense of universal justice that drew him to take unpopular stances against the Vietnam War in 1967, at immense cost to political alliances with President Johnson and much of the Democratic establishment. His last effort was a multiracial Poor Person's March, to demand a much more robust social safety net, including what in 2020 would be called universal basic income, before he was assassinated.
So about that forest, it's a counter-intuitive judgement, but King wasn't actually much of an organizer or politician. What he had was an absolute moral clarity about the fundamental injustice of America, and about the possibility for national redemption. I think that's the real story of King, not where he traveled and when he gave a speech. The book is at it's best when Garrow quotes King at length, or reveals a personal anecdote; King was a talented mimic and enjoyed teasing impressions of close friends, contentious late night meetings devolving into pillow fights, the perennially late King pausing on his way to a board meeting to ask a church janitor about his wife's back.
This is a key reference for the facts, or at least one interpretation of the facts, given the fallibility of human memory, but Bearing the Cross is a door stopper of a book, and I'm still looking for a volume on King I love.