Pillar of Fire

Pillar of Fire, America in the King Years 1963-65
By Taylor Branch

Category: History Grade: A-

This is the second volume in Branch's history of the civil rights movement that focuses on Martin Luther King. As you might remember the first volume was my non-fiction "book-of-the-summer" a few months ago. While the second volume isn't quite as good as the first, its still a terrific read. In the first volume, frankly, there weren't a lot of things of interest going on in the United States during the period covered. That let Branch really focus on the civil rights movement and move at a fairly leisurely pace through the 900 page book. He's got two things working against him in the second volume -- first, his editor obviously balked at a second book the same length so this book is "only" about 600 pages long. Second, the 3 year period he's writing about is jam packed with events both inside the civil rights movement and out. These were the years of the Kennedy administration and the assassination; Johnson's push for both civil rights and voting rights legislation and, of course, the creep in to the Vietnam War. Inside the civil rights movement, there are major developments all over - Selma, St Augustine, Birmingham, the death of Medgar Evers and so on. This leads to a much more frenetic pace for this book. Branch frequently switches topics from page to page and, occasionally from paragraph to paragraph. Its harder to keep up, but worth it.

There are three dominating themes that carry through the whole book. The scary one, as always in reading about this period, is the overwhelming control that J Edgar Hoover had over the country, including its leaders. Unbeknownst to anybody except Bobby Kennedy and a few other Justice Department people, Hoover bugged King and his entourage constantly and engaged in a pretty intense effort to discredit King. I guess with this week's groundbreaking for the new MLK memorial on the Washington mall, we know who history gives the win to, but at the time, it was in serious doubt.

The second big theme is the internal warfare within the black community. The battles with the most impact were between the various "mainstream" civil rights groups - NAACP, SNCC, SCLC. Differences in attitudes and power struggles had a major impact on what got done and how. The tiptoeing that King did to keep to keep his second in command, Ralph Abernathy, happy was amazing. But, of course, the most interesting warfare was within the Black Muslim community - essentially, the story of Malcolm X. This book ends with his assassination and leaves you wondering what would have been different if the growing relationship between Malcolm and the mainstream community hadn't been cut short.

The final theme, and maybe the most interesting, is the constant battle between politics and morality reflected by both the state/federal battle and the inside looks at the White House. As you probably know if you've read a lot about the two of them, everything indicates that Kennedy was the hardcore politician while Johnson pursued the moral goals (other than Vietnam) out of conviction, rather than politics. Just backwards from the uninformed conventional wisdom.

Even though it wasn't quite as good as the first volume, it still has me anxious to start the third. Any writer that can keep you interested in a single subject through some 2000+ pages definitely has something going.