This is my second post on At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch's book on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. The first post is here.
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
Look closely at the photo of Martin Luther King Jr. above.
This is the morning of September 20, 1966, in Grenada, Mississippi. King was unable to get out of bed earlier that morning.
To put a finer point on it, King refused to get out of bed. King was overcome with exhaustion and depression, and Joan Baez had to be summoned to sing him out of his stupor.
“Extreme rousting measures for exhaustion had failed, which meant King was despondent beyond tired, and [Andrew] Young pushed Baez past an anxious household to be a siren of revival. She sang ‘Pilgrim of Sorrow’ in a cappella soprano until King smiled faintly by the second or third verse,” (529) Branch writes.
We all can picture in our minds the images of King giving his “I have a dream” speech, or of marchers going over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But this moment with Baez is not a scene we are as familiar with.
This is not Washington DC in 1963 or Selma in 1965. This is Mississippi in 1966. It is not a story with a happy ending, as we will see more closely in next week’s post.
King had less than two years to live, and the civil rights movement was losing momentum. In fact, 10 days after this photo was taken, King would tell reporters that the quest for civil rights had entered a “valley.”
“I do think we stand in one of those valley moments, rather than at the peak of united activity and at the peak of noble achievement that we’ve seen over the last few years, in civil rights, and in our nation, and [in] the whole thrust towards a more democratic society,” (536) King told reporters September 30 in Chicago.
Lady Bird Johnson, the president’s wife, would use the same imagery to describe the dark turn of that year a few months later.
"Now is indeed 'The Valley of the Black Pig,' [she] told her diary, recalling an apocalyptic poem by William Butler Yeats. "A miasma of trouble hangs over everything" (552).
A significant portion of At Canaans Edge chronicles how King's historic movement hit a high point in 1965, but then was quickly pushed backward.
That's the part of our American history many of us don't know as well. But how did it happen?
The role of the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War is one very big reason. And Branch, early in the book, skillfully foreshadows the role that Vietnam will play in the civil rights movement's demise. I wasn't sure why Branch was interposing these two events in those first 100-200 pages. But by the time I got two-thirds of the way through the book, it was all too obvious.
"The realignment of 1966 was at once both blatant and subliminal," Branch wrote (559).
The particularities of history, how events can be related or significant in ways we don't understand in the moment, are often staggering in retrospect. In this case: hours after civil rights marchers were bloodied and beaten on Bloody Sunday in Alabama, a group of 3,500 U.S. Marines went ashore in Vietnam, the first ground troops of what would be a prolonged and intractable conflict.
The events of Bloody Sunday led to the high water mark of the civil rights movement. President Johnson gave a stunning State of the Union speech in which he voiced full support for their cause, and by August, the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been passed through Congress, with overwhelming majorities in support.
At the same time, U.S. involvement in Vietnam quickly escalated. In just a few months, by July, LBJ had committed 125,000 U.S. ground troops to the war. (By 1969, troop levels would reach a peak of around 540,000). Similarly, the U.S. lost 1,928 soldiers in Vietnam in 1965. By 1966, that number was 6,350. Then it was over 11,000 in 1967, and hit a high of 16,899 U.S. deaths in 1968.
So by 1966, the nation's attention had shifted away from the heroism of civil rights activists facing down brutal racism in the South, and toward the war. And correspondingly, the country's mood had changed as well.
"The Vietnamese War is increasingly seizing the emotions of people," (468) wrote King adviser Stanley Levison.
White Backlash and the Abandonment of Non-Violence
But there was also white backlash.
After victories in the South, King took the movement to Chicago to focus on fair housing. The explosion of racist hatred and violence by whites in a northern city was both shocking and revelatory. The U.S. could no longer relegate the problem of racism to the retrograde South. It was a much bigger, deeper problem than the nation had understood or acknowledged. In addition, the right to vote was one thing. The right to fair housing, to live alongside whites, that was another.
"We must never forget that the roots of racism are very deep in America," (554) King said.
This, in turn, prompted many in the civil rights movement to give up on King’s philosophy of non-violence, and to embrace Stokely Carmichael’s message of black power.
"I have simply stopped telling people that they should remain non-violent," (411) Carmichael said as early as January 1966, even as he and King continued to work together.
"The movement's most distinctive tenet — nonviolent witness for democracy — nearly vanished ... from public discourse ... King would grow ever more lonely in his conviction that the [non-violent] movement offered superior leadership discipline for the whole country" (558-559).
Branch writes that King's "meditation came to a bleak turn ... the non-violent movement was menaced on both flanks by the violent tones of white backlash and black power" (555).
We Are Ill-Served by Hollywood Versions of History
Why focus on this period? I think overlooked parts of history like this fill in key gaps in our collective understanding. It helps us reform our imagination to a place more in tune with reality.
I understand the need for victory stories. We need inspiration from stories that rehearse the triumphs of the past and urge us onward. But this can go too far, and slide into mental anesthesia that insulates us from the more complicated truths of our past, and our present.
Is it to say no progress has been made? No. Major laws such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act remain the law today. And in next week's post I'll share some of the details of the 1966 backlash — of shocking and horrific mob violence in Mississippi and Chicago — which leave no doubt that things were far worse then than they are now.
Things are better in America than they were in the 1960's. But not everything is better. It’s not a straight line of progress. And civil rights have lost ground in some areas. The Voting Rights Act, in fact, has been diminished in bits and pieces in recent years.
We have not solved everything. Nor will we ever. The middle ground — between those who pretend there is nothing to fix and those who despair that there is no point in trying — lies in acknowledging our progress, and maturely assessing how we can continue it, deliberately and with an urgency grounded in sobriety.
It seems important to have an understanding of history that acknowledges that many of the gains for justice were met, immediately and forcefully, with backlash that pushed things backwards. It's a cause for reflection on how some things may not have moved forward then as much as we thought, and on how discrimination and inequity may have evolved, taking on new forms and strategies.
It's also a lesson for our current moment. Progress in anything worth doing is often slow, hard, and halting, and history teaches us that we shouldn't be surprised when successes are followed by setbacks.
This is such a well written and important post with indeed implications for today. Thank you, and eager to read your follow up post.