With each of these movements, there were many leaders. No one person can be said to be the sole person responsible for the movement. Branch makes clear that this is the case with the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was, for much of the 1960s, the most visible African American civil rights leader. But the movement began in the early 1950s, and became widely visible to the white population with the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954; and it continued in the courts, in Congress, and in society well after Dr. King’s assassination in April of 1968.
But, all that said, Dr. King personified the movement, to whites and to blacks, in the 1960s. He was the visible and spiritual leader (though not initially of his own choosing) of the Birmingham campaign of 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963 (where he gave his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech), the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965–67, and the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968, which led to his assassination by James Earl Ray.
And, of course, outside the United States, Dr. King was widely seen as the most important leader of the civil rights movement. He was the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his civil rights efforts.
In the interview, Branch discusses the challenges that Dr. King constantly faced as the visible leader of the movement: he sparred with more-senior civil rights leaders, who often disagreed with his tactics and resented his visibility; many in the African American community questioned the effectiveness of Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolent protest, especially when they were confronted with violence by their opponents; he and his family were constantly subjected to death threats; he was accused of being supported and advised by Communists (and the FBI, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval, wiretapped his conversations, and also disseminated salacious details about King’s personal life to his wife, among others).
Today, for those who may not have lived through the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. King may be best remembered for the memorial to him in Washington and for the national holiday honoring his birthday (both of which his widow, Coretta Scott King, sought as appropriate commemorations of Dr. King’s epic civil rights leadership).
But for others, he may be best remembered for the extraordinary speech he gave at the March on Washington. In the interview, Branch points out some interesting facts about that speech:
Dr. King was assigned the final speaking position that day by the organizers. Because of Dr. King’s well-known rhetorical skills, the other speakers did not want to follow what they expected would be a barn burner of a speech.
Dr. King had assistance with writing the speech late into the night before it was given, but he strayed from the prepared text and gave his now iconic “I Have a Dream” remarks extemporaneously. But these were remarks he had previously given and felt quite comfortable delivering, preacher-style, without notes.
The next day, newspaper coverage did not really focus on Dr. King’s remarks, now so well known (a situation that reminds one of the next-day coverage of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address).
President Kennedy chose not to speak at the march. The federal government was worried about violence at the event, and Kennedy did not want to be visibly identified with it and its purpose. But he did greet Dr. King afterward at the White House with the line “I have a dream,” signaling his admiration for the speech’s rhetoric, if not its substance.
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MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You spent how many years working on these several thousand pages of books that you wrote on the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular?
MR. TAYLOR BRANCH (TB): Twenty-four years—1982 to 2006.
DR: Did you ever think maybe you were giving too much time to this project?
TB: No, I was enthralled. It was supposed to take three years, which was two years longer than any other book I had done. But I knew it was a big topic, and the more I got into it—I didn’t want it never to end, but I never regretted how long it took.
DR: How many total pages are the three books?
TB: It depends on whether you count the footnotes. But there are 2,200 pages of book and about 700 pages of notes.
DR: After all of the time you spent on this, what would you like to convey to people about the civil rights movement? Could you summarize, in just one or two sentences, the main point you wanted to convey in these 2,200 pages?
TB: That it was the essence of patriotism. It was modern founders doing what the original Founders had done, confronting systems of hierarchy and oppression and moving toward equal citizenship. And in that sense, I think the civil rights movement is still a shining example of patriotism.
DR: Martin Luther King Jr. is not the only person in the books, but he’s the main person featured. After all your research, what thing or things most surprised you about him?
TB: The surprises begin with his name and never stop. He wasn’t born Martin; he was born Michael. His father went to Germany and saw the birthplace of Martin Luther, and got so carried away with himself that he changed his own name to Martin Luther King and his son’s name to Martin Luther King Jr. This embarrassed his son, who was reluctant to use the new name.
Black men, in those days, didn’t want to use their first names anyway, because it would allow white people to diminish them by being familiar. So he went by M. L. until the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, when Time magazine put him on the cover.
They asked him what his name was, and he said it was M. L. King, and they said, “No, we can’t do that.” Sheepishly, he said he was Martin Luther King Jr. After that, his revised name was public.
DR: Did you come away respecting him and admiring him more or less after you did the research?
TB: Much more after I did the research. At the beginning I was a fellow Southern Baptist who thought maybe he got carried away by turning the other cheek and stumbled into a historic movement. The longer I studied him, the deeper and more profound for me was his understanding of ecumenical, spiritual, and political movements. He was a much more profound figure than I was prepared to believe at the beginning.
DR: If you could have dinner with him tonight and could ask him one or two questions, what would you like to ask the man that you spent twenty-some years researching?
TB: If I had one question, it may not make much sense to most people. To me, the turning point of his career—and a turning point in American history that pushed the civil rights movement into momentum that lasted—was in Birmingham on May 1, 1963, when the movement was about to fail and he was getting run out of town.
He was under tremendous pressure to let children march, and not to let them march, when adults became too afraid or discouraged to demonstrate anymore. It was the biggest crisis of his life so far, and angry black parents came to him and said, “You are absolutely insane. You are not going to skulk out of here leaving our children with criminal records, spoiling what little chance they have to have a decent life.”
He decided to go for broke and to let the children march. On Friday they had 13 adults march, on Saturday they had 600 children march, and on Sunday they had over 1,500 march.
It was “D-Day.” The photographs of dogs and fire hoses turned on young children, I think, melted emotional resistance in the United States to the civil rights movement. It was a turning point.
It’s amazing to me that there’s never been a PhD dissertation analyzing why America turned on the witness of schoolchildren as young as six years old, but it happened, and it was a tremendous risk for him. He had to go in and face those parents and say, “Don’t worry about your children.”
DR: What would you want to ask him?
TB: I would want to ask him, how did he make that decision? How did he decide to let two thousand small children march into Bull Connor’s jail in early May 1963? Because that was a turning point for American history. [Bull Connor was the commissioner for public safety in Birmingham who led the savage attacks on the
marchers.]
DR: Your books feature the period from 1954 to 1968—a fourteen-year period of time. Between the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments after the Civil War—when slavery was outlawed, African Americans could be citizens, and they could have the right to vote—between that time and 1954, virtually no progress was made in civil rights for almost a hundred years. Why, in the fourteen-year period you write about, did so much happen when so little had happened in the one hundred years before?
TB: For a lot of those one hundred years, we were busily misremembering everything that had produced the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. We more or less buried them. They didn’t apply the Fifteenth Amendment at all. In retrospect, it’s amazing that you had a Fifteenth Amendment there, guaranteeing the right to vote, but black people couldn’t vote, and nobody seemed to notice.
Even the Fourteenth Amendment—giving equal citizenship and due process to freedmen, that’s what it was for—was nullified within ten years by the Supreme Court. Thereafter, those rights really applied more to corporations than they did to African Americans.
American history can go backwards in race relations, and we were doing that busily. What turned us was in part World War II, in part the Depression, and in part ceaseless agitation that finally confronted, in the 1950s, how we could live up to the ideology that we had extolled when we were fighting Hitler and Japan.
DR: In 1954, we had the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional. Was it a shock to the country that the decision went that way and that it was unanimous?
TB: It was absolutely a shock that nine white men would say that the central institution of southern segregation violated the Constitution. Everybody was in shock, including a lot of black people who said, “This is a hallelujah day,” but then in the next breath said, “What’s going to happen to our black schools and our black principals? Are they all going to get fired?”
DR: When the decision came down, the Supreme Court said that with all deliberate speed we should implement this, but things didn’t happen that quickly. Why was it in Little Rock, Arkansas, that there was a confrontation, and did Eisenhower really want to send troops into Little Rock? I thought he was not really in favor of that decision.
TB: He wasn’t so much in favor of the decision. But the more I have studied it, the more I give Eisenhower credit, because once he decided that the honor and the legality of the federal government was at stake in enforcing the court’s orders against open resistance by the state powers, he said, “I want to do this effectively,” and he sent in paratroopers.
He sent in the 101st Airborne. He said, “If I’m going to intervene militarily, I want to do it decisively.” And he did.
DR: Why Little Rock and not some other city?
TB: Little Rock had two things. It had a committed small group of children willing to take upon themselves the burden of being guinea pigs to march into this very large school. They had a lot of support in the local NAACP, and they had a state governor who was very ambitious—not particularly a segregationist, but when push came to shove, he felt that he had to stand up against the federal government and against the power of the courts. He got himself trapped so that he had his state troopers and his National Guard preventing the children from entering.
It was unlike anything since the Civil War. You had the powers of the state resisting the powers of the federal government over the issue of race.
DR: In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to somebody who was white and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Was that the first time that had ever happened in the South?
TB: No. A large handful of people were arrested for violating the segregation laws for one reason or another. Many of them were not considered suitable to become a test case because the people involved were drunk, or pregnant out of wedlock, or didn’t have an exemplary record.
Rosa Parks was respected by everybody. She was a unique person in that she was a seamstress who spoke perfect English and was the secretary of the NAACP, so that middle-class black folks respected her, and the working-class black folks respected her because she never looked down on them. She had this cross-class admiration, so that when it happened to her, people said, “It happened to Rosa, so we’ve got to stand up for her.”
DR: When she was arrested, there were protests. How did Martin Luther King Jr. get in the middle of this? He was a preacher in that city then, but he was not that heavily involved in civil rights before that, was he?
TB: No. He was fresh out of grad school, and he had just come to Montgomery. He was a brand-new preacher in town, and that’s arguably the reason that he became the leader of the bus boycott. All the established preachers thought it was a ticket to get run out of town, a ticket to certain failure. So they voted him in to head the bus boycott that many felt was going to go down the tubes.
Fortunately, some blessed person recorded the speech he gave on the first night of the bus boycott, December 5, 1955. I spent a week trying to capture the dynamics in his first public address, talking about what the bus boycott meant.
It was full of theology but also full of the Constitution, and what it meant to protest, and why they should protest, and how much discipline it took to protest, and how they were going to make each other proud and stand together.
He was fishing around for an applause line, and finally he said, “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He went on to the next line, and then all of a sudden in the tape you can hear the thunder of applause come rolling through. He gets the rhythm of that, and you can see the public person being born in that speech.
DR: Did he want to be a preacher? When he was growing up, his father was a preacher in Atlanta. Did Martin Luther King Jr. say, “I want to be like my father”?
TB: No. He said he wanted to be unlike his father, because his father was bombastic and selfish and wanted to drive a big car. King always used to say that in the black South of that era, if you were an idealist you wanted to be a lawyer, and if you wanted to be rich you wanted to be a preacher, which was the reverse of white culture.
So it was a big struggle for him to want to become a preacher. He knew he had been groomed for it and that he loved speaking, but for a long time he wanted to be a lawyer, and it was hard for him to reconcile himself to idealism in the ministry for which he was born.
DR: What was the outcome of the Montgomery bus boycott?
TB: The outcome was that those people who loved Rosa Parks marched for a year and proved that they could do it and made an enormous and inspirational story, but the Supreme Court basically ordered bus segregation to end. It didn’t have that much effect on bus segregation elsewhere. Nothing was ever solved all at once.
But it did become a victory. And it became a victory that the NAACP associated with a legal strategy and winning a court case, and that King associated with people standing up for their rights to make them real, because if you don’t stand up for those rights, it doesn’t matter what the court says.
DR: Not too long after the bus boycott, there was a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. What was that about?
TB: That was a spontaneous protest by students who were frustrated that, six years after the Brown decision, not much had changed. Segregation was still there, and the blacks-only and whites-only signs were still everywhere.
The students went and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter and were amazed that they weren’t arrested. So they decided to do it again the next day, and it spread. It spread like wildfire, so that ten weeks later, students from all over the South came to form a student coordinating committee because there were protests going on in so many different places.
Now, King became important then because he was the only adult civil rights leader who instantly said, “This is a breakthrough, because these students have found a way to amplify
their words with sacrifice. They’re willing to go to jail. You can’t boycott someplace that won’t let you in.”
King, coincidentally, had been frustrated in the late 1950s because he thought he could preach America out of segregation, like Billy Graham. He traveled hundreds of thousands of miles doing it and failed. He was the first one to say, “This is a breakthrough. My words aren’t enough. I’m a gifted preacher, but if you’re going to be a citizen, you’ve got to be willing to make sacrifices and go beyond just telling everybody what to do.”
DR: There were hundreds of these sit-ins. John Lewis, the future congressman, was involved in one in Nashville, Tennessee. What happened there?
TB: John Lewis is famous for saying, “We’re going to march through the Yellow Pages of Nashville,” because they would march against the theaters, which were segregated, the lunch counters, the hotels, everywhere. Even the airport. They went everywhere that was segregated, and they had a lot of victories.
The message was that every city in the South needed to have sit-ins, because there were no public officials who were openly against the segregation laws. You pretty much couldn’t get elected if you opposed those laws, and so the civil rights protestors marched and marched and marched.
Meanwhile, the people defending segregation mobilized, to the point that King said, in 1962, “The defenders of segregation are mobilizing more rapidly than these isolated movements that I keep getting called to like a fireman for support. We’re losing our moment, our window in history, if we don’t establish a foothold pretty quick.”
That’s why he went to Birmingham and made his supreme gamble there: “We have to make a breakthrough. I have to risk more.”
The American Story Page 28