Taylor Branch's America

In Pillar of Fire, the second in a projected three-volume study of the civil rights era, Taylor Branch focuses more narrowly on “the movement’s peak years,” 1963–1965. As in his monumental, Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters, Branch follows the campaigns of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Alabama, while adding a major section on the SCLC-led demonstrations in St. Augustine, Florida. The grass-roots activism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi again merits careful consideration, as do events in Washington during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Most surprisingly, in his new book Branch incorporates the life of Malcolm X into his civil rights master narrative.

Although the stories he tells will be familiar to specialists in the field, Branch’s use of newly released sources enriches his account. Particularly interesting are the FBI tapes on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the taped conversations in Johnson’s Oval Office. Nobody handles dialogue better than Branch, and his insider’s view of the problems besetting King and Malcolm, as well as his use of revealing telephone conversations that provide insight into the Johnson White House, add a sense of immediacy to the events he chronicles.

The chapter on the 1964 challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to the white supremacist “regular” state delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City shows Branch at his narrative best. Lyndon Johnson, fearing a walkout of southern delegations if the overwhelmingly black MFDP delegation were seated, masterminded a behind-the-scenes campaign to deny it recognition that included FBI surveillance, wiretaps on movement offices, and FBI agents posing as NBC reporters, in addition to the old-fashioned arm-twisting for which the president was legendary. All the while, Johnson ordered his confidants to deny that he was in any way involved: “I never heard of it [the challenge]. . . . My name’s Joe Glutz, and you haven’t talked down here” (p. 458).

MFDP testimony before the Credentials Committee (and a national television audience) aroused the conscience of the nation—and of the delegates assembled in Atlantic City. The highlight of the hearing came when Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged sharecropper soon to become the symbol of the Mississippi movement, took the stand. Branch is particularly effective in describing the impact of her remarks:

She stared straight at the bank of Credentials Committee delegates, flouting norms of polished authority with her unlettered grammar. Words that first seemed a masquerade of Aesop rose toward the spare cadence of a biblical text, packing abstract force into stories of household strife.

(p. 459)

After Mrs. Hamer’s testimony, which included a detailed account of the brutal beating she suffered in a Mississippi jailhouse, Senator James Eastland phoned the president to lament: “The thing is out of hand now” (p. 462).

Employing the newly released Johnson tapes on the Atlantic City convention (parts of which are available in Michael Beschloss’s Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 [1997]), Branch provides the most comprehensive treatment yet of the successful efforts by the White House to defeat the challenge.

Branch also does right by several secondary characters, including Vernon Dahmer, a courageous black Mississippi activist who was murdered by the Klan in 1966. (In August of 1998 a Mississippi jury found Klan leader Sam Bowers guilty of Dahmer’s murder.) The author presents a balanced portrait of Ralph Abernathy, King’s much-maligned associate and confidant. While showing Abernathy’s weaknesses, such as his petty, jealous outbursts at the Nobel Prize ceremonies (which depressed King for weeks), Branch deftly reveals the qualities that made Abernathy so important to King’s movement by quoting at length his celebrated “doohickey” speech at a Selma church. (“Doohickey” was Abernathy’s term for the police microphone attached to the pulpit):

Abernathy mined an orator’s gold with his prop. He made friends with it. (“Now, little doohickey, I...