“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight.”
—Jean Cocteau

Magisterial works of history are almost always informed by a tragic sense of life. Some recall epochal transformations that were as lamentable as they were inescapable. Still others dramatize the clash of two valid, but irreconcilable, principles. Among the latter, certainly, are the best recreations of our own Civil War, and especially the slavery controversy. The peculiar institution was indeed a moral evil, but that does not nullify the counter assertion that Allen Tate made in his biography of Stonewall Jackson. “The institution of slavery was a positive good only in the sense that Calhoun had argued that it was: it had become a necessary element in a stable society.” In the end, we know, the imperative proved to be categorical, but the consequent social dislocation was a bitter harvest for all Americans, Northern and Southern, white and black.

I can only regret that Taylor Branch, the author of this impressively researched and gracefully written history of the early civil rights movement, lacks the tragic sense. A latter-day abolitionist, he recognizes no difficulties in the crusade to end segregation. Nowhere in a long narrative does he make the slightest effort to understand those whose fears and warnings cannot easily be dismissed as the spoiled fruits of dishonor. Nor does he display any patience for those who counseled prudence and a measured pace of change. For him, white moderates were cynical bigots, while older “Negroes” and leaders of the NAACP were pusillanimous quislings. “Hierarchical,” “timid,” and “inert” are only some of the adjectives Branch trots out to discredit that venerable organization and its director, Roy Wilkins. Indeed, he sees little practical difference between Wilkins, a man of dignity and intelligence, and the vilest of segregationists.

And make no mistake about it, many defenders of Jim Crow were barefaced. Branch rehearses in unsparing detail their unspeakable actions: intimidation, beatings, murders. In the accompanying photographs, one can see hatred and mockery staring out from behind the eyes of those caught at the very moment they were tormenting their passive and defenseless fellow citizens. State and local officials were, if possible, even worse, and Branch calls them back to play their ignoble roles once more: Ross Barnett blocking James Meredith from the door to Ole Miss; George Wallace appealing to the baser instincts of Alabamans; Bull Connor creating an atmosphere in which the bombing of a church filled with women and children could be mistaken for a heroic deed. No Christian, no decent American, can condone or excuse such outrages.

Nor, of course, should anyone condone the inciting of such violence to further a cause, a strategy that Wilkins deplored and Branch implicitly endorses. This is not surprising when one remembers that Branch is more interested in reinvigorating the spirit of activism than he is in deepening our understanding of a necessary but painful transformation. To accomplish his goal, he set out to uncover the roots of New Left radicalism. Once these roots were severed, he knew, radicalism would wither and die. That is why, in a recent interview, he showed himself able to recall the precise moment in 1963 when, as a high school student in Atlanta, he put down his own radical roots. It was the day he opened a newspaper and saw the infamous photograph of a Birmingham police officer setting an attack dog on a young black, man. “Until those dogs in Birmingham, which penetrated my little world of high school sports and chasing girls, I thought that everything in America was wonderful. I had the rosy view that all of the authority figures were doing the right thing.”

By the time he came to write this book, the former magazine editor and ghostwriter had convinced himself that all authority figures were doing the wrong thing. In the apparent belief that America is a “sexist” country, for example, he consciously places women activists—Septima Clark (to whom he dedicates the book), Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, Ella Baker—on an equal footing with men. To be sure, Coretta Scott King constitutes an exception, but that may be because Branch takes a benign view of Martin Luther King Jr.’s infidelities. Not only did King’s close friends tolerate his “demon delights,” they (and Branch) “even applauded” them. “They saw sexual adventure as a natural condition of manhood, or of great preachers obsessed by love, or of success, or of Negroes otherwise constrained by the White World. . . . Some of them grew tired of King’s insistence that it was a sin. . . . ” What, one wonders, would Branch say about Jim Bakker’s similar insistence?

That is not the only example of Branch’s double standard, however. He discourages as irrelevant and unenlightened any criticism of Bayard Rustin’s open homosexuality, while leaving the distinct impression that J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged closet variety was utterly contemptible, of a piece with the director’s secretive mentality. For Hoover and the FBI, in fact. Branch betrays a particular animosity. In part, I suspect, that is because he lost a court battle to gain access to Bureau documents pertaining to King’s closest white friend and advisor, Stanley Levison. Then, too, he regards it as a scandal that the FBI should have suspected Levison, Levison’s friend Jack O’Dell, and King himself of harboring Communist sympathies.

Now I do not dispute for a moment that Hoover was an obsessive and vindictive man or that government officials and the American public generally have often exaggerated the dangers of internal Communist subversion. It is clear, I believe, that King was no part of a Communist. Still, it is curious that Branch wants to have it both ways. He speaks more than once about the Communists’ commitment to civil rights, concedes that Levison lent financial support to Communist organizations, and quotes O’Dell to the effect that he was proud of his Communist associations. Why then is he so certain that the FBI’s charge that Communists had infiltrated King’s inner circle was groundless?

Evidently the answer is that he considers the CPUSA to be nothing more than a “protest group,” one limb of the radical tree, the roots of which are planted deeply in the fertile soil of the civil rights movement. In the movement, not in King himself Parting the Waters is anything but an uncritical celebration of the revered leader. Rather, it is a critique from the left, dramatized as the struggle for his soul, or “identity.” For Branch, King serves as a symbol of liberal America in the postwar years, torn between the old, cautious, religiously-framed, anticommunist, respectable, white world, and the new, activist, secular, anti-anticommunist, “disreputable,” black world; between, as he suggests in more than one place, the prim popular music of the 1950’s and the uninhibited rock beat of the 1960’s.

It is this struggle that Branch makes his principal theme. He begins by introducing us to the young King, dominated by a crusty, conservative father, burdened by an exaggerated sense of sin, and preoccupied with his own salvation. Intelligent and ambitious, he matriculates at white schools and eventually earns a Ph.D. Having in that way entered the white man’s world, he is reluctant to rock society’s boat. At his best, he is a mere “fireman,” who comes to the aid of his racial brothers and sisters but who initiates nothing, a man whom others must pressure to act. Simple folk such as Rosa Parks push him, by the force of their example, to take up the cause of civil rights. And even after he achieves national prominence following the Montgomery bus boycott, he prefers “safe, prestige politics over . . . gritty, dangerous protest.”

In particular. King looks to liberal leaders. President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to carry out the civil rights revolution from above, peacefully and without personal risk to himself. Branch makes it clear on virtually every page that he considers that ambition to be unworthy and futile, a sign of King’s failure of nerve. He draws exceedingly unflattering, and quite unconvincing, portraits of the Kennedy brothers. They are unscrupulous and unreliable, more interested in their careers than in the plight of Negroes, whom they regard as politically embarrassing nuisances. We watch with Branch as they cut deals with segregationist officials, place wire taps on King’s phones, and wax hot and cold about the extension of civil rights.

There was, however, another, and more radical, side to King. It was precisely the infidelities of which he was so ashamed. Branch hints, that awakened the civil rights leader to the fact that he could act recklessly, with less thought for his person and reputation. His personal demons, his study of liberal theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, his friendship with Riverside Baptist’s Harry Emerson Fosdick, and his fascination with Mahatma Gandhi combined to lead King slowly to set aside his distracting interest in the next world and to fix his gaze steadily on this one; henceforth, “social justice” would be the sum and the substance of his religion. A Unitarian, Branch heartily approves.

That was still not enough, however, for King continued to temporize. Why? Because “the idea that nonadults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone”—including him. Thus he, and liberal America, would have reached an impasse had it not been for Branch’s heroes, the black students who organized themselves as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. These students. Branch insists, won the battle for King’s soul. He describes them in the most effusive, yet paradoxical. terms: human but somehow superhuman, sinners yet saints. Before our eyes, even their apparent vices transform themselves dialectically into revolutionary virtues. If they repudiate their parents and abandon their spouses and children, they do so in order to be free to serve a higher purpose. Some of them achieved fame: Marion Barry (the present, beleaguered, mayor of Washington, DC), John Lewis, Robert Moses. Most, however, remained invisible, nameless foot soldiers in a “grass roots” army.

Impatient with waiting, these young people poured contempt on such adult notions as thoughtful reflection and conciliation. When challenged to defend his views, John Lewis would simply chant, “We’re gonna march tonight.” And so they did. Furthermore, they sat in at segregated lunch counters in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, labored against overwhelming odds to register Negro voters in Mississippi, took “Freedom Rides” on interstate buses, went to jail, and refused bail. The more they suffered for their actions, the more eager they were to assume greater risks and to absorb worse punishment.

To King’s distinct discomfort, they demanded to know, “Where is your body?” At first, he could only stammer, “I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha,” an identification with Christ that the students found naive and embarrassing. Was the famous leader a mere clone of “Daddy King,” a respected preacher who knew his place in a white man’s world? Once, when the family patriarch counseled patience and boasted that he had moved in reform circles for 30 years, an exasperated student shouted, “That’s what’s wrong.”

Slowly, but surely, King Jr. began to come around. Impressed by the national attention that “confrontational witness” achieved, he defended the SNCC students against Wilkins and the NAACP, and took to the streets himself In their company he learned what it meant to be put behind bars. Before long he was urging the election of “young people” to the board of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the critical juncture in Branch’s melodrama, King achieves a mystical union with students who, only minutes before, had subjected him to withering criticism. Recognizing at last the superior wisdom of the young, the leader marshals newly-discovered inner resources and prepares to launch a SNCC-style campaign against segregation in Birmingham. The centerpiece of that campaign Branch calls “the children’s miracle”: the sending of young children, some not yet in their teens, into the streets and jails. James Bevel, one of the most militant of the Birmingham organizers, bristles when parents object: “Against your Mama,” he advises the sacrificial lambs, “you have a right to make this witness.” Can there have been any more cynical and unconscionable exploitation of innocents?

Branch interrupts his narrative—to be taken up again in a second volume, Pillar of Fire—in 1963, after the March on Washington, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and the assassination of President Kennedy. We may be sure that he will find ways to justify SNCC’s subsequent history, dominated as it was by such violent and unsavory spokesmen as Stokely Carmichael and H. “Rap” Brown. Indeed, he provides us with a preview of his concluding study’s theme in a revealing aside: “As [Robert] Moses relentlessly pursued the difficulties of universal suffrage, the enemy no longer appeared to be ignorant rednecks so much as universal forces of politics, and the purpose of the civil rights movement not so much Christian enlightenment—teaching people to be charitable and fair—as political revolution.”

But even if Carmichael and Brown had never appeared on the scene, SNCC and the radicalized King would have much for which to answer. The New York Times, which regularly expressed sympathy for the civil rights movement, put it plainly in 1961: “Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.” Worse, it is a historical contradiction, for once summoned, violence has proved to be all but impossible to contain. That was as true in the civil rights movement as it was in Gandhi’s much vaunted “nonviolent” movement in India. During their last years. King and Gandhi brought violence with them wherever they went; that, after all, was the point.

If any of this disturbs Branch, he does not let on. In a tragic way, of course, King’s martyrdom surrounded him with a still greater aura. In recent years he has seemed to some to be a deity, criticism of whom is a form of blasphemy. To liberals and neoconservatives he appears responsible, democratic, and nonviolent, less abrasive than Jesse Jackson—and safely buried; to the radical left he is the incarnation of the entire civil rights movement, which itself gives life to a much more encompassing radicalism. As a friend of radical causes. Branch knows that the revolutionary spirit of SNCC, compromised by its association with the violence of the late 1960’s, can live on only by filling the fallen leader’s memory. 

[Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, by Taylor Branch (New York: Simon & Schuster) 1064 pp., $24.95]