Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Book

It's a bit difficult to know quite what to say about this book. It won the Pulitzer prize, undoubtedly because it was a very well chronicled and researched exploration of one of the most influential men of the 20th century in America, Martin Luther King, and probably the first real look at the man in such a format.

On one hand, this book lives up to what it promises. It is incredibly well documented and detailed, they had their research lined up perfectly. And it is about a great man during difficult times so it's hard not to find much of it enthralling. Particularly in the beginning, you can almost feel a young MLK getting swept up in a cause much bigger than himself, and choosing to bear the cross he was given, more with a hallowed resolve than great enthusiasm. Indeed, the book makes clear that MLK saw his mission with a certain sense of fatalism of which he was willing to endure for God than something he planned or would have chosen for himself. But that's just what reinforces his greatness. Unlike many who have followed (I won't name names, but your guesses are probably correct), he was not someone looking to make a name for himself or create an industry based around his person. He was someone willing to be a name if it was necessary to achieve an end he knew to be right.

Yet the book stumbles somewhat, as it goes on, particularly toward the last quarter or so. In a certain sense, it reflects reality. MLK's life became one of drudgery in a sense, of one speech after the next, of one march after the next, and for a cause that, instead of becoming clearer, became only more muddled after substantial victories. While this might be accurate, it certainly became less fascinating toward the end. Garrow might have been able to circumvent this if he'd wanted to explain the larger context of what was happening and discuss what MLK's and the greater civil rights movements victories meant, but he stays focused on MLK. Perhaps this is best for what he was trying to do. None-the-less, I feel that while this might be the first and certainly an important take, there is more to the story that could have been added (I'm interested in checking out Taylor Branch's take).

As for MLK himself, this is definitely a "warts and all" take. It doesn't shy away from discussing his serial adultery, those few advisers around him who genuinely did have communist ties (which the FBI used to justify their surveillance), his occasional self-pitying moments, his seeming passiveness in resolving important problems within SCLC, and his occasional rhetorical lapses and misjudgments of character. All of this is not to mention the actions of the past two or so years of his life, where he moved from being focused on a more traditional civil rights agenda to a full on push for socialism (although not communism), and his horrible misjudgment of Vietnam, or at least of the intentions of the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minn. For all but the far left, his ideas here seem quite clearly ill formed, at best a distraction and at worst a betrayal of some of the things he had stood for (although he never gave in to full-on anti-Americanism the way much of the left did in the late 60's). Of course, some of his followers, even those close to him, saw it as the best in him.

All this is only to say that this isn't a book that chronicles a saint. It chronicles a real man in history doing a difficult job during difficult times under difficult circumstances. Very, very few emerge from these situations unscathed, and MLK is not an exception. The book is stronger for it.

It's very interesting to see the gradual development of black history that I've unintentionally read about this past year (reading Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, as well as a book by Stephen Carter and now this). It's fascinating and frustrating. There are no easy answers, even still, to the remnants of America's "original sin" of slavery, which are with us to this day. All I can say is that it's something I want to continue to learn more about.