Out In The 1960s Civil Right Struggle Night- Taylor Branch’s Pillar Of Fire-America In The King Years, 1963-65- 50 Years Later Still Mississippi Goddam –And Alabama Too

Book Review

Pillar Of Fire-America In The King Years, 1963-65, Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998

No question the early 1960s, the political coming of age time of my generation, the generation of ’68, were exciting times, times as the English poet Wordsworth said in the context of the early part of the French Revolution, “to be young was very heaven.” Although a reading of Taylor Branch’s second part homage to the King’s years, Pillar Of Fire also brings back memories some of the ugliness of the period that got my generation off the couches, out of the classrooms, out of lethargy, and into the streets to stake our claim to a say in a world we had not created, and had not been asked about. And the number one issue, in my high school circles, and I am sure in others as well was the canker sore of Mister James Crow segregation down South(and a little later de facto James in our own northern precincts) before the hellfire of the damn war in Vietnam took up all our air.

Of course the central character then, if less so now, now that Malcolm X has captured the minds of the street smart, and the central character in this the second book of the Taylor Branch’s trilogy, is Doctor Martin Luther King and the struggle to end Jim Crow in all its pervasive forms from segregated schools, public accommodations, and culture to the right to vote which he led. 1963, while not the start of the more vocal aspects of the civil rights movement (after all Montgomery, freedom rides, and sit-ins had already occurred), certainly was the point when the situation in the south concerning second (hell, third, or no) class citizenship was the norm, no more so than in the Deep South states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and hellhole Mississippi which Branch concentrates on. Doctor King, whatever his political shortcomings, was personally brave and courageous in leading those struggles. But Branch also starts in this second book, and rightly so, given the trajectory of the black liberation struggle later in the decade over the thorny question of black nationalism exemplified by the actions of the Black Panthers begins to give some space to Malcolm X and his brand (or brands) of black nationalism as a counter-balance to King’s liberal integrationism, as, really, a counter-posed strategy for liberation.

For those now two generations removed from the events of the 1960s and for those like me who lived through the period and was involved in different aspects of that struggle Taylor Branch has captured the key names and events that have gone, or will go down in history. Obviously names Doctor King and Malcolm, but also names like SNCC, Robert Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, SCLC, Mohammed Ali, and the feisty Fanny Lou Hamer of blessed memory. Also some villains like the bizarre J. Edgar Hoover, Sheriff Jim Clark and Bull Connor (I still rage and want to throw something over that scene where he unleashed the dogs and water cannon on young black children in Birmingham). And god forsaken places like Selma, Greenwood, Birmingham, Philadelphia (Miss), Hattiesburg, Saint Augustine, and Lowndes County. And events like the myriad Klan cross-burnings, the shootings of local black activists trying to exercise their rights, the Birmingham Sunday murders, the murders of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia , Selma, the heroic Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the March on Washington and a book packed full of information about the period. This three part project should be the first stop for those seriously interested in this period. And fifty years later after reading this material I still agree with the late torch singer Nina Simone- Mississippi goddam and Alabama too.