King's lost dream

The first attempt at a march, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, resulted in the notorious scenes of Gov. George Wallace's Alabama state troopers and reserves on horseback ramming through marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ABC showed footage of the carnage that night, interrupting its broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremberg." (At the point ABC cut into the film, a German couple was explaining they knew nothing about the treatment of Jews under Hitler.) A second attempt was made during which King turned back so as not to defy a court order barring the march. Hours later, the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who had come from Boston to join the march, was clubbed outside a cafe and later died of his injuries. The third -- and finally successful -- march was begun on March 21. The marchers, their ranks victoriously swollen, reached Montgomery on March 24. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a white marcher from Detroit, was shot to death as she began the long drive home to Michigan. (It was later revealed that one of the passengers in the shooter's car, Gary Thomas Rowe, was an FBI informant who almost certainly had knowledge of what was going to happen.)

The Selma to Montgomery march takes up almost the first 200 pages of "At Canaan's Edge." It needs to, because it was the last great march of the civil rights movement. It was also the moment when the coalition formed between church groups like King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and student groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others like the Congress of Racial Equality, began to fray. The deaths of Jackson, Reeb and Liuzzo, the 1964 murders of the Freedom Summer volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, and the constant threats and danger civil rights workers faced in the rural South were starting to grind down the commitment to nonviolent change. To people who had seen their co-workers beaten or had themselves suffered in jails, King's unwavering insistence on nonviolence came to seem almost suicidal.

Branch understands the almost inhuman effort required of people not to react violently when they live in constant fear for their lives. Reading "At Canaan's Edge," you understand exactly why Stokely Carmichael, arrested 27 times during his work with SNCC, finally came to the point where he yelled at a crowd of demonstrators about to be tear-gassed by state troopers, "You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!" You see why Carmichael and movement figures like SNCC's James Forman came to conclude that nonviolence would not help American blacks. More profoundly, you understand just how foolhardy a conclusion that was.

What is frequently branded radical politics in America is often just romantic fantasy, a childish impatience with anything that produces less than immediate results, mistakenly equating the compromises that politics entails with corruption. One of King's favorite quotations, often used in his speeches, was the abolitionist Theodore Parker's "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." That was not a means of mollifying people who had given and suffered so much -- it was a way of honoring that suffering and sacrifice. It would be wrong to discount the sacrifices that the members of SNCC made. It's not exaggerating to say that attempting to register black voters in the South at that time was an invitation to being murdered. But as SNCC became increasingly radicalized, it, along with the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers -- who, with their uniform of leather and sunglasses and proudly displayed weapons, had made themselves the stars of the vigilante movie playing in their heads -- came to be certain that working toward equality through the mechanisms of representative democracy was the same thing as making yourself a whipping boy for the Man.

One of the few places in the book where Branch betrays his own impatience is when he writes of SNCC, "They were no longer students or nonviolent. They no longer coordinated sacrifice beyond the wisdom and courage of the nation's elders, nor operated by egalitarian grassroots committee. Instead, they competed for celebrity attention while reverting to youthful disputes as tawdry as snipes at their clothes." Having given them the respect they are due, Branch is, I think, saying that finally they did not have the moral courage to live up to the meaning of their sacrifice, and that their rhetoric was less articulate than the unspoken faith shown by others who were confident that the courage they had shown and the violence they had endured would pay off in profound change. Those people understood, as a friend of mine put it, no real revolutionary ever hated his own country.

Lost in the fantasy that the system was so rotten it could not be changed, SNCC ceded the moral high ground to, among others, the president it despised, Lyndon Johnson. In Johnson's March 1965 address to Congress on the moral necessity of passing the Voting Rights Act -- along with Lincoln's second inaugural address, it remains the greatest of all presidential oratory -- Johnson showed both verbal and moral eloquence: "It is not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." Mayor Joseph Smitherman of Selma said that hearing a white Southern president say those words was like "a dagger in your heart." James Forman's response: "That cracker was just talkin' shit."

One of the things Branch brings back so vividly is how unfashionable Martin Luther King became in the last years of his life. I choose the adjective deliberately. There were plenty of people willing to groove on the same fantasies of rebellion. Branch records a debate in New York City where Hannah Arendt, who was shortly after to formulate her own response to the revolutionary perfume in the air in "On Violence," argued that "violence always arises out of impotence." From the floor Arendt was challenged by Tom Hayden, who claimed democratic means had been exhausted for ending the war in Vietnam and racism at home (especially when you give up on the democratic process), and Susan Sontag, who said that arguments about the nature of violence dodged the question of action, "whether we in this room, and the people we know, are going to be engaged in violence."

By 1966, Andrew Kopkind, writing in the New York Review of Books, said haughtily of King, "Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen." Shortly after, in the same pages, Kopkind was extolling as the true movement the National Conference for New Politics, at which H. Rap Brown had said, "We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky [Richard Speck] who killed the eight nurses is white."

Next page: Why King's ideas deserve to be called radical