Parting the Country

REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
Pillar of Fire:America in the King Years, 1963 65 by Taylor Branch Simon & Schuster, 1998 746 pp $30

Taylor branch's new volume is a major achievement a product of prodigious research and a gift for storytelling on an epic scale. Taken together with his earlier Pulitzer Prize winning Parting the Waters and his projected third volume, At Canaan s Edge, Branch s attempt to write "a narrative history of the civil rights movement" promises to be the most lucid and comprehensive account of the modern African-American freedom struggle that we will have for many years. Few historians can equal his narrative skills especially his ability to dramatize events and delineate personalities. "I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of the American epoch," he explains.

Pillar of Fire recounts the end of one era of American politics and the beginning of another. Branch s title places Martin Luther King, Jr., at the center of an American political ra, but it does not reflect a Great Man theory of history. Instead, it is a rebuke against the tendency of some historians not to mention most white political leaders to relegate modern African-American leaders and freedom struggles to the margins of the nation s political life. Branch recognizes that the issue of black-white relations has always shaped American political life, even when national leaders wanted to believe otherwise. For a brief period in the middle of the 1960s, he recounts, brave and determined civil rights activists made the issue impossible for white political leaders to ignore. These activists won the battle for historic civil rights legislation, but their victory, achieved at great cost, was not decisive in the long-term war for control of the American state.

Although Branch draws attention to King s unique role, he is too knowledgeable about the African-American struggle to depict him as a general ordering obedient foot soldiers into battle. Indeed, after the Montgomery bus boycott ended in 1956, his involvement in local movements was only sporadic. Branch demonstrates that King s unique contribution was not as a grassroots organizer but as a source of inspiration and moral guidance for local civil rights campaigns initiated and sustained by others. His oratory convinced protesters that they were making history and that their unmerited suffering was not only redemptive but politically potent. King was also a bridge between local activism and national politics. He accomplished the daunting task of working cooperatively with strong-minded grassroots leaders such as Robert Hayling and Fred Shuttlesworth, who welcomed King s support but had their own notions regarding how the struggle could be won. He also worked with prickly and often envious national civil rights leaders, such as NAACP head Roy Wilkins. Finally, and most important, King understood better than any other leader of his generation the unfulfilled potential of the nation s broad, interracial liberal reform coalition, which, since its beginnings in the 1930s, had avoided confronting the potentially divisive issues of segregation and racial discrimination.

King and other civil rights activists called upon liberal Democratic leaders to live up to their egalitarian ideals rather than continue to compromise with the party s Dixiecrat wing. They discovered, however, that the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson weighed their commitment to civil rights reform against their desire to retain southern white support and to combat communist subversion at home and abroad. Branch s depiction of how the two presidents confronted (or failed to confront) the nation s racial problems is hardly flattering.

Kennedy s primary identity as a cold warrior was far more significant than his belated conversion to the civil rights cause. As Branch pointed out in his first volume, Kennedy s highly publicized intervention in 1960 to gain King s release from jail an action that attracted the black votes that made possible his razor-thin election victory resulted from the initiative of his staff rather than from deeply felt convictions of his own. Kennedy s famous speech in June 1963 announcing the introduction of omnibus civil rights legislation was spurred less by his professed belief that civil rights was a "moral issue as old as the scriptures" and "as clear as the American Constitution" than by the need to respond to the Birmingham demonstrations and George Wallace s challenge to his authority. He offered the nation moral prescriptions that his own administration had never followed.

Johnson, for his part, came to the presidency with a sincere commitment to civil rights reform. Whereas Kennedy came of age politically during World War II and the cold war, Johnson was the offspring of the New Deal. Kennedy saw civil rights legislation as an impediment to his reform agenda; Johnson came to see it as a necessary precondition for his. He saw the alliance of southern racism and southern conservatism as an obstacle that had to be overcome in order to make possible the New Deal type social-welfare programs that he favored. According to Branch, Johnson restrained his advcacy of civil rights while serving as Kennedy s vice president, but his emerging views were expressed in a May 1963 address at Gettsyburg: "While not as cogent or nearly as poetic as Lincoln, Johnson stuck single-mindedly to his theme that American democracy must rise above the divisions of race to survive," Branch reports.

In depicting Johnson, Branch makes good use of the recently released tape recordings of Johnson s meetings and phone calls that have been compiled in Michael R. Beschloss s fascinating book and audiobook, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963 1964. Johnson s private conversations reveal him to be a larger-than-life figure: both a determined racial reformer and a boorish leader given to bigoted language; both a fervent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and a crony of southern segregationist politicians. Though there is much in the recordings that confirms Johnson s negative image as a politician with crude habits, few scruples, and residual racial prejudices, he took a forceful stand in favor of civil rights reform. He adopted Kennedy s civil rights proposals and pushed for their passage with greater tenacity and effectiveness than his predecessor, even while recognizing that this course involved political risks. Branch observes that soon after taking office Johnson bluntly informed his close friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell, of his determination to enact the civil rights bill: "I m going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I m going to run you down. I just want you to know that, because I care about you." Johnson doubtless also took seriously Russell s response: "Mr. President, you may be right, but if you do run over me, it will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election."

Russell s dire prediction proved only slightly premature: the Democratic Party survived the white backlash of 1964 but was harmed by the racial divisions that followed. Johnson was unable or unwilling to follow through on a strategy of building sufficient black electoral support to counteract white desertions. Such a strategy would have required Johnson to give at least as much attention to the cause of racial equality as he gave to the primary concern of his presidency: the war in Vietnam. Despite the fact that he was initially less concerned with foreign affairs than Kennedy, Johnson was tragically willing to risk his domestic agenda in order to combat communism in Vietnam. Moreover, although he was prepared to take political risks on behalf of black advancement, Johnson was caught between two inexorable forces: on one side, impatient and embittered black militants, who had become increasingly skeptical about Democratic liberalism, and on the other side, conservative Republicans eager to capitalize on the white backlash against black militancy.

The highlight of Branch s volume is his account of the August 1964 Democratic convention. Johnson s objective on the eve of the convention was to outflank a feared challenge from Robert Kennedy by selecting a vice presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who would be even more closely tied than Kennedy to New Deal liberalism. Johnson believed that Humphrey would allay the lingering suspicions of civil rights and labor leaders that the new president was not a reliable ally. He also expected that Humphrey and other liberals would prove their loyalty by resolving the single controversy that seemed capable of disrupting the convention: the attempt of the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to take the seats of the state s all-white regular delegation.

He told Senator Humphrey that "if we mess with the group of Negroes . . . we will lose fifteen states without even campaigning." Saying he did not want to be "panicky or desperate," he told Roy Wilkins that "the cause you fought for all your life is likely to be reversed and go right down the drain if you don t . . . find some possible solution."

In retrospect, Johnson s concerns about the MFDP can be dismissed as paranoia his nomination was never really in question. Nevertheless, the MFDP challenge to the credentials of the regular delegates suggested thelarger difficulties he faced in trying to hold together a Democratic Party that included both civil rights activists and southern segregationists. Since the late 1940s, the party had faced the danger of fracture along racial lines. Fearing that the MFDP challenge could stimulate a southern white walkout and a Kennedy putsch, Johnson combated the MFDP supporters with a degree of desperation and viciousness that seems, at least in retrospect, totally out of proportion to the danger. In addition to heavy-handed attempts to dissuade Democratic delegates from supporting the challenge, he accepted the help of J. Edgar Hoover s FBI in securing information about the plans not only of the MFDP but also of his own attorney general, Robert Kennedy.

No words could cure Johnson s fears of racial emotion in combination with the Kennedy myth. He had already arranged to postpone until safely past the close of major convention business two much anticipated events a film tribute to the slain president and Jacqueline Kennedy s appearance at a marathon reception to shake the hand of each Democratic delegate. To guard against schemes to set loose floods of mourning that might sweep away normal arrangements, including his nomination, Johnson tasked Deke DeLoach and his undercover FBI squad to mount surveillance of Robert Kennedy, their nominal boss, in tandem with King and the Negro challengers.

Highlighted by Fannie Lou Hamer s emotional testimony before the credentials committee, the MFDP effort embarrassed Johnson by demonstrating that the challengers, rather than the regular Democrats, best reflected the president s own principles (most of Mississippi s regular Democrats went on to support Barry Goldwater in the election). More important, the response of the Johnson forces to the MFDP also exposed the habitual willingness of the liberal wing of the Democratic party to compromise on the issue of black civil rights in order to gain and retain political office.

Johnson succeeded in scaring off support for the MFDP, but at the terrible cost of fostering distrust that would poison the racial reform coalition for the next generation. He was elected by a landslide over the hapless Goldwater, but his untrustworthy leadership provided a ready target for Black Power advocates and for Republican conservatives who combined Goldwater s ideology with the political acumen of Nixon and Reagan. Johnson s Great Society foundered on the dilemmas that had troubled Democratic liberals since the New Deal: how could liberal Democrats attract black support without alienating white voters unwilling to abandon southern Jim Crow and northern de facto segregation? How could they enact major social reform programs that would ameliorate racial discord without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of being too pro-black or socialistic?

Johnson was willing to take on the Jim Crow system, but he was not willing to challenge the underlying assumptions of Democratic Party liberalism. He secured passage of major civil rights legislation but would not abandon the racial paternalism that assumed that white liberals would determine the pace and direction of racial reform. His Great Society was a hodgepodge of programs that lacked ideological coherence or consistent class implications. Underfunded and burdened with the enormous inefficiencies caused by payoffs for local Democratic leaders as well as salaries for antipoverty bureaucrats, Johnson s War on Poverty became a minor skirmish followed by quick retreat.

Branch ends his account in the winter of 1965, soon after Malcolm X s assassination and on the eve of King s march from Selma to Montgomery. This is a somewhat odd narrative choice, apparently driven by the author s decision to devote considerable attention to the last year of Malcolm X s life. Malcolm s fateful break with the Nation of Islam is a fascinating story, but his effort to build an independent Pan-African movement actually attracted negligible support before his assassination in February 1965. Indeed, it was Malcolm s marginality from the mainstream of American politics that spurred his disenchantment with Elijah Muhammad s apolitical version of Islam. Malcolm s posthumous influence far eceeded that which he achieved during his lifetime. His literary collaborator, Alex Haley, is as responsible as Malcolm himself for the black nationalist leader s accession to icon status comparable to King s. Nevertheless, the attention given to Malcolm may make sense in the overall design of Branch s trilogy, for the resurgence of African-American racial consciousness during the mid-1960s was among the many indications that, despite Johnson s landslide victory, a historic rightward drift of American politics had begun. On one side, Malcolm-inspired black militancy moved away from King s coalition politics toward psychologically rewarding yet often politically inert identity politics. On the other side, millions of white voters adopted their own form of racial identity politics. Branch notes, for example, that "California voters embraced both Johnson and a constitutional right to segregated neighborhoods, as promoted by Ronald Reagan and the real estate industry. Proposition 14 carried California nearly two to one, winning fifty-seven of fight-eight counties and nearly half a million votes more than Johnson." Both sides of the racially divided electorate increasingly distrusted government and doubted its ability to improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

Johnson saw his landslide as a mandate, but the reform coalition that brought him to office had already begun to disintegrate. Many northern Democratic liberals lost enthusiasm for racial reform once the target of black militance shifted from the southern Jim Crow system to de facto segregation in northern schools, housing, and employment. After the Goldwater debacle, Republican politicians exploited the Democratic Party s festering racial, gender, and ethnic divisions by promising to maintain New Deal and Great Society programs that benefited middle-class whites while condemning "big government" efforts to deal with racial and class inequality. The 1964 election would be the last presidential election of the century in which a majority of white voters supported a Democratic candidate. It would also be the last in which a majority of white voters and black voters supported the same presidential candidate. America was leaving behind the King years and entering the Reagan years.

Clayborne Carson