As the mostly mournful parade of 60s anniversaries continues down our nation’s broad media avenues, 25-year commemorations are beginning to bump into the remaining 20-year observances. We seem to be cursed to relive those years forever–a generation doomed to slip into senescence while arguing about the real meaning of Woodstock. Will the rehashing ever end? Is there really anything new to be mined from that exhausted lode of cultural memory we call “the 60s”?
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“The antiwar movement and others would be child’s play compared with the politics of lifting a despised minority from oblivion,” Branch concludes near the end of his book. “Newcomers to derivative freedom movements programmed themselves to run amok, because they grossly underestimated the complexity, the restraint, and the grounding respect for opponents that had sustained King . . . and countless others through those difficult years.”
Everything else that was accomplished in the 60s may well have been child’s play, but those doing the playing have not exactly noticed. Take Todd Gitlin. In his recently reissued (by Bantam) reprise and analysis of the decade, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Gitlin devotes only 10 of his book’s more than 400 pages to the events Branch requires nearly 1,000 pages to detail. Though his brief section is cogently presented, it is clear that Gitlin regards the early civil rights movement as being little more important to what he calls the “zeitgeist” of the 60s than, say, the beat movement in literature (to which he devotes a roughly equal amount of space). A check of the name Rosa Parks in the index of Gitlin’s book, for instance, leads one to an early passage in which he notes that the year Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus (1955) was the same year that saw the arrival of such rock ‘n’ roll hits as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline.” “The parallels between rock and civil rights were far from exact,” Gitlin writes, “but imperfect coincidences are the updrafts on which the zeitgeist spreads its wings.” Perhaps so, but the Montgomery bus boycott unleashed far more powerful winds. It was the boycott that introduced the nation to the novel and vaguely eastern idea that a “movement” of people could come together dedicated to a strategy of nonviolent direct action as a means of achieving fundamental social change. In the mass meetings that night after night sustained the Montgomery boycotters’ resolve we can, perhaps, see the whole idea of a resistance-based counterculture taking shape. There were, as Gitlin points out, many events that can be seen as precursors to the 60s, but it is hard to imagine–especially after reading Branch’s harrowing account–any that were more important than those that took place in Montgomery in 1955 and 1956. Yet with the exception of the passage quoted above, the boycott is not mentioned in Gitlin’s account.
Branch spends a lot of time documenting the peculiarly influential position held by black preachers–the only white-collar occupation open to blacks during slavery and one of the very few available to them even by the middle of this century. “The black preacher,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, “is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.” He was a teacher, politician, ruler, prophet–even, on occasion, judge and jury. It was no accident, then, that when the civil rights movement needed a leader, it chose a preacher.
Unfortunately, it must also be said that the King at the center of events is the only King we get to know in this book. As fascinated as Branch is with the public man, the private King does not seem to interest him much. His family appears only rarely in the text. There’s a description of King’s courtship of Coretta Scott, and an account of presidential candidate John Kennedy’s famous phone call to her when her husband was remanded to the DeKalb County Jail (Branch convincingly argues that the flood of black votes this phone call generated probably won Kennedy the election); but otherwise we hear almost nothing of King’s wife or–aside from occasional notations of their births–his children. Branch has some fun with King’s elitist pretensions, the silk pajamas he wore even in jail, the Caribbean vacations he was always trying to make time for. He makes reference to King’s extramarital affairs–which were so exhaustively investigated by that tireless watchdog J. Edgar Hoover–but the reference is brief and obligatory, shedding no light on King’s motives or on the painful cost his public stature must have had on his private life.
“[The southern movement has] turned itself into the revolution we hoped for,” he added wonderingly, “and we didn’t have much to do with its turning at all.”
