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390- | Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference |
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
By David J. Garrow
New York, William Morrow, 1986. 800 pp. $19.95.
The publication of David Garrow's award-winning study is an important event in the on-going effort to understand the life and significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Garrow, an associate professor of political science at the City College of New York, has spent more than a decade researching his subject. The result is a masterful and comprehensive portrayal of King and his role in the Civil Rights Movement. Except for a brief section of eighteen pages devoted to earlier years, Garrow's book-awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography-is a careful and methodical study of King's life from the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott to his death in Memphis in 1968.
Based on interviews with more than seven hundred persons who knew King during that era and Garrow's reading of F.B.I. documents and King's personal papers, Bearing the Cross is the author's effort to portray objectively King and the milieu in which he lived and worked. Garrow is relentless in his marshalling of facts and in the documentation of daily events. His purpose was apparently to produce a definitive study of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., based on rigorous and objective historical research and reporting. The "personal portrait" of King emerges for the reader as one plows through the historical detail of the movement. The portrayal of King appears to be honest, straightforward, and, for the most part, convincing.
The central theme of the book is King's emerging awareness of his "cross," that sense of mission that came to him early in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King was, says Garrow, a reluctant and hesitant leader, ambivalent about his new found role. But as the years passed, King began to feel that he had lost control of his life. His mission, his "cross," was to be one of self-sacrifice in which he not only gave himself to the movement, but also for it.
Garrow's King "appeared to be a happy and well-adjusted child...The forcefulness of his father was the most striking aspect of King's school-age years." Although a good student in high school and college, King became more serious in his studies while at Crozer Seminary, where he became the valedictorian of his class. After completing coursework at Boston University, he was married and moved to the Dexter Avenue church in Montgomery. "The most important night of his life" came on January 27, 1956, in the early days of the boycott. The pressure of leadership had built up on the young pastor and, under the stress of the obscene and threatening phone calls, King became deeply disturbed and fearful. In his kitchen about midnight, he discovered "that power
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391- | Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference |
that can make a way out of no way." This experience, which gave King new strength and courage, became in Garrow's assessment a moment of revelation and sustaining power. Garrow returns to this experience throughout the book in an effort to describe the transforming power and cohesive force in King's life.
Garrow's portrayal shows that King's life was subject to immense pressure and difficulty. The staunch segregationists of the South in time became supplanted by greater and more complex problems for King. Garrow notes that by 1964 King was "more optimistic about the South than the North." Garrow details the various issues that left King often fighting depression and despair in his last years: his family life, harassment from the F.B.I., the loss of momentum in the movement, and the escalation of the Viet Nam war. The Nobel Prize left King with a commission to increase his efforts and to develop a world perspective. In his last years, Garrow's King struggles with deep depression, becomes increasingly militant and radical, and finds his movement undergoing a transformation from civil rights to human rights. King, who was a deeply humble man, in Garrow's perspective also lived with an unusual propensity for guilt and self-incrimination. The end of Garrow's study of King is filled with the pathos and poignancy of human struggle as the author narrates the effort by King's colleagues to understand the various dimensions of their leader's strength as well as his human frailty.
Garrow's book will be welcomed by an audience that values rigorous research leading the reader to the privileged perspective of an insider. In terms of scope and substance, this volume will be valued greatly by scholars and other interested readers. Some readers, however, will find that Garrow's "personal portrait" of King, as comprehensive as it may be, still needs to be supplemented. For Garrow, King's "cross-bearing" has to do with his mission within the civil rights movement. Yet, Kelly Miller Smith and others have rejected this "slain civil rights leader" perspective and advocated the proposition that King was a martyred prophet of God-killed for doing what prophets do. This perspective raises important questions for the analysis of King's life. Those for whom King is an exemplar of the praxis tradition, and therefore one who would refuse the separation of faith and action, may find that Garrow's historical methodology and style tend to portray King too dangerously close to the privatization of religion and faith. For example, was King a man of faith whose ministry was the reconciliation of the human community, for whom civil rights activities were an extension of ministry, or was King a civil rights leader who only happened to be a black Baptist preacher? Is it possible that King's cross, more than the sense of mission of self-sacrifice for the movement, was none other than an identification with the cross of Christ, which for King became real in the larger ministry that had become his?
Other readers will question Garrow's ability to portray the central motivating force in his subject's life. When Garrow attempts to portray King's faith, he often refers back to the kitchen experience in Montgomery.
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394- | Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference |
In so doing, Garrow avoids further and deeper analysis of King's faith. Though this experience was, no doubt, a profound experience for King, Garrow does not make the case for his statement that this was "the most important night of his life." To Garrow's credit, he has, following James Cone, made an important point about the nature and content of King's transforming faith. This experience seems to have been an important breakthrough for King that came to symbolize something like the bedrock of his adult faith, a realization of the sustaining power and healing presence of his Lord. This was an important event, something like that of an "adult conversion" that validated the faith of his childhood, authenticated his own autonomy and manhood, and prepared the way for future creativity based on this new-found bedrock. One can find similarly significant experiences in the lives of John Wesley and H. Richard Niebuhr.
These weaknesses aside, David Garrow's portrayal of King is an important achievement. The publication and its award may signal a new seriousness in the effort to understand and come to terms with the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Frederick L. Downing
Louisiana College
Pineville, Louisiana