King's lost dream

Feb. 1, 2006 | Consciously or unconsciously, great storytellers have a way of tipping us off to their concerns right upfront. On the first page of "At Canaan's Edge," the concluding third volume of his magisterial "America in the King Years," Taylor Branch writes about J.T. Haynes, a high-school agriculture teacher in Alabama's Lowndes County, the region that in the '60s would see some of the worst Klan violence against the civil rights movement and would also give rise to the Black Panther Party. "Haynes," Branch writes, "a teacher of practical agriculture, tried to harmonize his scientific college methods with the survival lore of students three or four generations removed from Africa -- that hens would not lay eggs properly if their feet were cold, that corn grew only in the silence of night, when trained country ears could hear it crackling up from the magic soil of Black Belt Alabama."

You could argue that Haynes, being black himself, had a built-in kinship to the black sons and daughters of Lowndes County. But seen from the midst of our current national division, one that's less dramatic though perhaps just as poisonous as the divisions of the '60s, it's hard not to read Haynes' faith that he could reach his students -- not to overwhelm them or argue them down but, in Branch's exquisitely chosen word, "to harmonize" -- as a belief in the transformative power of discourse, a belief that America, both right and left, has largely abandoned.

And if that faith is abandoned, Branch would likely argue, then Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision is a dream that has no hope of being realized.

Every year, Dr. King's birthday brings editorials extolling how far we've come from the days of legal segregation (true) or lamenting how far we've fallen short of his example (also true). Writers complain that a day devoted to nothing more than shopping is no way to honor his legacy. The far more insidious debasement of King's legacy can be seen every day in what passes for political engagement in America right now. In 2003, in the left political journal Dissent, Queens College history professor Michael Wreszin inadvertently exemplified that debasement when, responding to co-editor Michael Walzer's assertion that the left needs to enter a dialogue with the people most set against it, he asked if King should have been expected "to communicate with the average white citizen in racist Mississippi and Cicero, Illinois." And, of course, the answer is yes. King knew that if he didn't communicate with those people, there was no hope of eroding racism. That doesn't mean that he took a gentle line with them, or hesitated to name ignorance and brutality when he encountered it. But King's approach depended on reaching reasonable people, people who may not have been ready to welcome black people into their homes but who, ashamed by the more repellent racism around them, were finally able to see the legal and moral arguments for admitting blacks to lunch counters and public facilities and, the toughest stretch of all, to their schools and neighborhoods.

That's a rapprochement Wreszin can't imagine. He writes from the blinkered depths of a culture war where the most notorious phrase of a despised president, "You're either with us or you're against us," fits the mind-set of both his fiercest adherents and his most vociferous opponents. Just as politics is not possible if you're not willing to say what people don't want to hear, it's not possible if you're willing to listen only to what you want to hear.

In "At Canaan's Edge," which deals with 1965-68 -- the years spanning the Selma to Montgomery march to King's assassination in Memphis -- Branch sticks to the facts, following the story (not just of King but of "America in the King Years") into Vietnam, tracking J. Edgar Hoover's campaign against King, charting the divide between the civil rights movement and the emerging black power movement, and almost never interpreting. There is a vision that comes through, though, a vision that is an implicit rebuke to the divisiveness of what currently passes for politics.

For Branch, nonviolence represents the highest form of political engagement because it must be employed at the moments when it's most tempting to abandon the idea that engagement is even possible. Branch wants to demonstrate the political viability of nonviolence as both moral stance and practical strategy -- even though he calls nonviolence "an orphan among democratic ideas" that "has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government -- the vote -- has no other meaning." What's been orphaned, in Branch's view, is an expansive vision of what it means to be a citizen.

"America's founders centered political responsibility in the citizens themselves, but, nearly two centuries later, no one expected a largely invisible and dependent racial minority to ignite protests of steadfast courage -- boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, jail marches -- dramatized by stunning forbearance and equilibrium into the jaws of hatred." In other words, Branch is saying, people who were not even allowed the rights granted them by the Constitution acted, not simply for their own freedom, but as if the very fate of the republic depended on their actions. In order to do that, they had to have faith that the potential and the possibility of America far surpassed the worst of its governance and its people.

Branch does not need to underline the irony that some in the civil rights movement, like J.T. Haynes, were World War II vets, and returned from combat only to face a homegrown fascism. Haynes was in the congregation of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Lowndes County on the night of Feb. 28, 1965, when Klansmen surrounded the church with rifles. (The congregation was able to leave when the Klansmen inexplicably withdrew.) Incidents like this, and the earlier murder of a 26-year-old pulpwood worker named Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot twice in the stomach by police during a night march from Zion's Chapel Methodist Church, galvanized the response to Rev. James Bevel's proposal for a 54-mile march from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery. The march would take participants right through the heart of Lowndes County. The violence began before the marchers even made it out of Selma.

Next page: King's commitment to nonviolence came to seem almost suicidal to some activists