Reviews for Language, identity & power

The average rating for Language, identity & power based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-06 00:00:00 Welton Barker “The crowd retreated into stunned silence as [Martin Luther King, Jr.] stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few seconds passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him. Dexter members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that. [Ralph] Abernathy remained behind, reading negotiating demands from the pulpit. The boycott was on. King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live…” - Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters is a true rarity. It is a book that is vitally important to our national understanding, but reading it does not feel like a duty or a chore. It dwells in some extremely dark valleys, but also manages to be uplifting, finding those parts of humanity that glitter through the doom. It takes on a complex, under-presented chunk of American history, and gives it the treatment it so richly deserves. This is an extremely well-researched and wide-ranging book that also happens to read with the vitality of a great novel. This is, in other words, an exceptional intersection of scholarship and narrative. Parting the Waters is the first mammoth volume of a monumental trilogy. It consists of 922-pages of text, and once you’ve finished, you’ve still got around 2,000 pages to go. The fact that this makes me happy, rather than daunted, is a testament to Branch’s accomplishment. First published in 1988, Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and has been justly celebrated ever since. It begins in 1954, with the emergence of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the public stage, and ends in 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before his proposed Civil Rights Act could come to a vote. Between those two bookends is an epic struggle of righteousness and racism, of courage and cowardliness, and of a dream worth life itself. The chief focus of Parting the Waters, unsurprisingly, is Dr. King himself. However, though he definitely provides the through-line, Parting the Waters is not a traditional biography. After a certain point, Branch barely mentions aspects of Dr. King’s personal life except in reference to the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, Dr. King’s serial adultery – which might have gotten more play in a standard bio – is barely mentioned here, except to the extent it demonstrates the utter illegality of the wiretaps used against him. This is not so much reticence as an acknowledgment that Branch has bigger goals for this book. While Dr. King looms large, he was not the entire show. To that end, Parting the Waters can more accurately be described as the biography of a crusade, rather than of an individual. Nevertheless, Dr. King dominates the early stages of Parting the Waters. In Robert Caro-like fashion – the highest compliment I can give an author-historian – Branch devotes his early chapters to Dr. King’s forerunner, Vernon Johns, and the history of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King first preached. These sections are deep background, but give an idea of the importance of the church in black communities, where preachers were often the exemplars of the middle class. More than that, it was Dr. King’s choice to take a job at Dexter, rather than with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, that positioned him to step forward when Rosa Parks refused to get up. Branch also spends significant time on Dr. King’s studies, as he consumed and digested the thinkers and theologians who would define his philosophy. It is striking, especially today, to see how strongly religion and theology underpinned the Civil Rights Movement. Parting the Waters really hits its stride with its first big set-piece: the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Having heard of the boycott since I was in first grade, but having never studied it before, it was truly thrilling to read about here. As Branch painstakingly shows, it was not simply a matter of folks not using a segregated city service. People depended on the busses, and if they couldn’t ride the bus, they couldn’t get to and from work. Beyond a moral undertaking, the boycott was a huge logistical operation that required volunteer drivers, automobiles, and a lot of money to pay for gas, maintenance, and legal bills. For all of that, it was a near run thing. From Montgomery onward, the tale broadens in scope, as Branch tries to cover all the flashpoints of the Civil Rights Movement, from the high, to the low, to the unknown. Space is devoted to the Freedom Rides (to integrate interstate bussing); Robert Moses’s voter registration drive in McComb, Mississippi (where he earned a reputation as a preternatural student of nonviolence); James Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss; Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail; the Children’s Crusade (where youngsters lined up to be incarcerated); and ultimately, the March on Washington (where Dr. King gave one of the most famous speeches the world has ever heard). Along the way, we witness savage beatings, mass arrests, midnight bombings, and a lot of infighting, including an extended section devoted to the power struggle at the National Baptist Convention. We are also introduced to a huge cast of characters, from the famous to the relatively unknown, including Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis (who later went to Congress); the aforementioned Bob Moses (not to be confused with the city-segregating asshole from NYC); co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Ralph Abernathy; Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth; civil rights lawyer John Doar (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012); and activist leader Bayard Rustin (who was a onetime communist, gay, and indispensable). When narrative history is done right, it can be an extraordinary way to demonstrate that history was not inevitable, however much it might look that way in hindsight. The Civil Rights Movement was not a single upward march, but a brutal back-and-forth, with one small victory matched by three defeats. Everyone knows about Dr. King in Montgomery and Birmingham. Less known is his troubles in Albany, Georgia, where many – including black members of the Albany Movement – did not exactly welcome his presence. Parting the Waters eventually coalesces around two big conflicts. The first was between the Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedys. Despite supporting the Civil Rights platform during the election, President Kennedy saw foreign affairs as his main role. To that end, Civil Rights were a distraction. After all, it was hard to chide the Soviets for their illiberalism when his own citizens were marching in the streets because they were not allowed to vote or use integrated restrooms. Both Kennedys provided help, but it was always grudging, and seldom enough. Branch is scrupulously fair – though at times blisteringly critical – with regard to the roles played by both Jack and Bobby Kennedy. (Quirkily enough, it was President Eisenhower – less-than-openly-friendly to Civil Rights – who was willing to use federal troops to enforce integration orders. He also nominated a bunch of the judges who wrote the orders killing legal segregation, including his “biggest damn fool mistake,” Earl Warren. Meanwhile, President Kennedy, who talked a good game, hesitated to use troops, going so far as to corral Border Patrolmen and prison guards to reinforce the U.S. Marshals in the Ole Miss protests. Tethered to Southern Democrats, he also nominated a string of racist, segregationist district court judges who obstructed progress by ignoring clear Supreme Court precedents). In the end, constant pressure from black leaders pushed President Kennedy to announce a new Civil Rights Act. How that might have played out is anyone’s guess, as Kennedy went to Dallas and never came back, leaving the task to an unlikely torchbearer. The other big conflict was within the Civil Rights Movement itself. The movement – like the black community it represented – was not monolithic. It was made up of a lot of different people proposing a lot of different ideas to achieve a lot of different goals. Some wanted to focus on marches, sit-ins, and civil disobedience, while others sought to increase voter registration or bring court cases. While Dr. King is as close to a public saint as we have in America today, he was often criticized by his contemporaries as too timid, too worried about the limelight, too much a celebrity. For example, there was no small amount of friction between Roy Wilkinson of the NAACP and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as both vied for control of the way forward. Even in a book this big, there is never enough room. While the scope is admirably broad, it still isn’t quite broad enough. Branch frequently leaves Dr. King to follow other threads, but he never gets too far away. That means that certain pivotal figures get short shrift. Thurgood Marshall merits only a few brief mentions, while Malcolm X gets even fewer. As a whole, I think that Branch vastly underplays the role of federal court decisions, never giving the lawyers – such as Marshall – enough credit. (The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, was not simply a moral victory, but a legal one). Slight flaws such as this are easy to forgive. Indeed, they do not even need to be pardoned. Not in a book this overwhelmingly good. On top of everything else, Branch is a writer with some real literary skill. Not only is he able to marshal his vast research (including hundreds of personal interviews), but he is able to mold it into something breathtakingly readable. There are moments when he describes things just perfectly, as when comparing President Kennedy’s speech in Berlin with Dr. King’s own speech in Detroit: In those few days, a president of Irish descent went abroad to Germany while a preacher of African descent went inland to Detroit, both to stir the divided core of American identity. The proconsul defended the empire of freedom while the prophet proclaimed its soul. They inspired millions of the same people while acknowledging no fundamental differences in public. Together, they traced a sharp line of history. Where their interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade. Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War. Jim Crow and segregation is a national stain that will never be removed. Reading about it – from petty cruelty to the murder of children – can make you a bit sick. The moments of despair in these pages are too numerous to count. At the same time, the history of the Civil Rights Movement is an inseparable part of American history, not some parallel track. That means it is something of which we can be enormously proud. At the very least, in this time of empty plinths dotting parks and street corners, Parting the Waters presents some very good ideas about what statues we should raise.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-04 00:00:00 Timothy May This is simply an unparalleled work of history that makes one appreciate and understand the civil rights movement in a way no other work can. It consistently astounds and amazes, which is itself impressive for a tale so often told. To tell the truth, I've never been very interested in the "classical" civil rights movement, the one we read about in all the US history textbooks, from the Birmingham bus boycott of 1955 up through the march to Selma in 1965. I thought it was perhaps the most important event in 20th century US history, sure, but the stark dichotomy of it all, with a saintly Martin Luther King and the non-violent movement arrayed against a host of bigoted Southern sheriffs, seemed almost too pat and too obvious a morality play. It seemed like a victory so obvious, with the moral standing of the two sides so clear, that there was nothing to wonder or debate about. This book can't help but blow those ideas out of the water. For one, it shows how impossible the civil rights movement seemed, even right up until 1963. The fact that Southern blacks were being murdered and beaten for trying to vote didn't make it into the nation's newspapers, barely garnered a discussion in congressional or presidential contests, and seemed almost natural to most Americans, who were more than happy to ignore the issue in any case. The system of oppression was so tight, in fact, that many thought the low voter turnout among blacks in the South, and segregation more generally, was just a kind of mutual accommodation made by the two races in the South. Only with the 1963 marches to the courthouse and downtown department stores in Birmingham did the movement really attract national attention, and lead to a wave of other protests and finally the beginnings of a presidential response by Kennedy. Before, even sympathetic Northern papers and commentators wondered about the morality of "sit-ins" at segregated stores, marches that were designed to get people arrested, and boycotts generally. Even if many were sympathetic, many also thought that the methods the civil rights movement used were questionable at best. And the methods are what this book is all about. It constantly reminds me of the old saying that good generals study strategy while great generals study logistics. This book shows the mind-numbing complexity of organizing these movements, from gathering money for bail (always, always, raising money for bail), to keeping marching formation, to keeping the appropriate number of waves of protesters to overload southern jails, to trying to coordinate with federal marshals or prosecutors to protect the defenseless people who insisted on protesting even when everyone counseled caution. (It's hard to remember that even King himself, after the "sit-in" movement started in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, was worried about the morality of getting himself arrested, as opposed to just boycotting). At all times everyone in the movement was subject to merciless beatings or murder. This book, told with the help of countless interviews with the main participants, makes one feel that immediacy and courage of the movement in a way I've never imagined before. I can't recommend it enough.