December 2008 Archives

From Kenny Ellis . . .

. . . to Adam Sandler

Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Standing in front of the smoking ruins of the bombed dwelling lately occupied by your wife and newborn daughter before a seething mob crying out to avenge you is a powerful test of a man's character. On January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King's house was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott; his wife Coretta and daughter Yolanda barely escaped the blast. After the bombing, the house was ringed by a thin line of white policemen in imminent fear of attack by a much larger African American crowd. Appearing before the crowd, King had first to show them that Coretta and Yoki were unharmed before they would let him speak. Addressing the crowd, King reminded them that his movement was founded upon nonviolence, urged them to disband, go home, and pray, and told them that he would see them at the next mass meeting to support the boycott.

For me, that is the defining moment of Taylor Branch's first thousand pages on the history of Dr. King and his movement: Parting the Waters. The entirely human response would have been to order the summary execution of any white person in sight after one's house had been bombed and one's family nearly killed. To our benefit and his everlasting credit, Dr. King was able to rise above the normal human response and live up to the true meaning of his creed.


Branch's book is by no means a hagiography, however. As it gallops through a thousand pages of burnings, bombings, knifings, shootings, hangings, and mass protests met by police attack dogs and high-powered fire hoses, Branch's book also captures the very human side of King the icon. How many people realize, after all, that the great civil rights leader was born "Mike King, Jr.," a name he retained among his closest associates, that he had a passion for soul food, or that he was an accomplished pool player? From the intrigue within the Baptist Church to the fundraising problems of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Branch effectively conveys a picture not only of the dramatic highlights but also of the tumultuous inner life of the movement.

King is by no means the only luminous figure in this first volume of Branch's trilogy, which sharply limns the generosity of Harry Belafonte, who virtually bankrolled the movement, the quixotic idealism and complicated personal life of Bayard Rustin, the quiet courage of Bob Moses, the fiery sermons of James Bevel, and the unflinching courage of John Lewis. At the same time, it also paints the vacillation and political calculation of the Kennedys and the monomania of J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, even Eugene "Bull" Connor seems to have human qualities compared to the demonic intensity and Machiavellian scheming of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose anti-Communist fantasies not only led him to persecute the Civil Rights movement but also to ignore the real dangers of organized crime.

As the book closes with the March on Washington and the assassination of JFK, one looks forward to climbing the mountaintop at an ever accelerating pace in the two subsequent volumes.

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A recent conversation broached the topic whether it is possible to heal the rift between the American military and America's elite universities. Despite our different perspectives on the issue, our common conclusion was: not likely. Many of the disciplines with the most to offer the military have been compromised in the past. For example, anthropologists who spied on indigenous populations for the CIA have left the field with an international reputation as intelligence agents. See, e.g., Inside Higher Ed. Not only do anthropologists in such situations potentially betray indigenous populations who are subsequently attacked or exploited, but they also taint the discipline and undermine the trust upon which further research depends.

Psychologists and medical doctors, suspected of being complicit in engineering the Bush Administration's torture program, are in an equally awkward position. It is hard to square the Hippocratic oath with facilitating torture by calibrating the maximum physical and mental pain an individual can suffer before he dies or goes permanently insane.

Finally, so long as the military thumbs its nose at academia on issues such as gay rights, in an effort to placate the crackers in the Corps, there is unlikely to be much reconciliation. The same people who oppose gay rights now and the integration of gays into the military were just as insistent that the introduction of blacks, Asians, and even -- women! -- would prove fatal to morale and military effectiveness. In fact, without the participation of all of those groups, the modern all-volunteer force probably could not exist. The response that it was Congress who passed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is no answer: anyone can see that on this kind of personnel issue, the Congress would fall all over itself to do whatever the military asked. As it was, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was a universally unpopular compromise that was rammed down the military's protesting throat.

My ancestor, Kenneth MacLeish, was one of the founding member of the First Yale Aviation Unit, which he and a group of other Yale student volunteers formed to fight in World War I. MacLeish died a death at once heroic and tragic in aerial combat against superior German forces over the fields of France. In more recent times, the prevailing sentiment at Yale is not likely to lead to comparable volunteer effort on the part of the school's leading students. In this respect, I do not believe that Yale is any different from any other elite American University.

The difference, I suspect, stems at least in part from a fundamental distrust of the ends to which the military is put. At least initially, MacLeish in his letters reflects a belief that joining the cause is morally necessary. Today, despite the occasional apparently altruistic mission in places such as Kosovo, I believe that the common assumption is that the military is simply a another means of advancing American economic interests and, in some cases, imperial ambitions. Catastrophic blunders such as the war in Iraq and the immoral means employed in its prosecution only serve to reinforce such an impression. While the economic interests of the United States are important, relatively few people are eager to risk dying to improve Exxon's balance sheet. More people might want to join the military if they believed it was truly acting primarily to ensure our safety and to promote peace. In light of the fact that the repeated actions of the United States government belie these goals, it seems hard to expect that America's educated population will respond to an Abrahamic injunction from the local recruiter to sacrifice their sons and daughters.