Garry Wills reviews Taylor Branch on M. L. King

In the current New York Review of Books, Garry Wills has a beautifully written, and powerfully insightful review of Taylor Branch's latest vol. on M. L. King. Near the end of the review, Wills highlights some of the ways our present experiences echo those of the late 1960's.

Wills also notes the numerous ways that King was mocked, villified, & attacked, on his long road to Memphis and his own Calvary. Then he asks this vital question --

"How did King survive all this? He would not have, if he had ever stooped to returning hate for hate with Hoover. That would have tripped him up without fail. King said, "I refuse to hate," and repeatedly told his allies that love was their only real weapon. That is the profound lesson in the power of nonviolence. Hate and violence are self-destructive. Whatever his other faults, fidelity to nonviolence was King's one towering virtue. He frequently expressed disappointment with others—with Johnson, with Hoover, with many of his own followers or putative friends, with the white power structure. But he did not poison himself with enmity. Even his depressions were self-punitive rather than accusatory. That is the astounding record of the man. He lived with constant threats to his life, subject to vicious racist calumnies, ridiculed by former allies, stalked by Hoover's agents, denounced by high government officials —yet he never lashed back with anger or violence...."

"Though Branch admires King's greatness, this is no great man history. It is, rather, a great men and women history. And the greatest were often the least. Branch knows that King could have done nothing if poor and excluded blacks had not had the courage to shake off their servitude. The ones who joined the boycotts, the marches, the registration drives, did it at risk to their jobs, their property, their lives. Lowndes County, with a majority of black residents, did not have a single black voter when the SCLC went in to encourage people to take up their freedom. The outnumbered whites had kept them under by fear and reprisals. It took great pride in themselves for the blacks to defy generations of repression. I remember what a farmer marching to Montgomery told one of the SCLC people. Asked whether he thought the marchers would be able to win in Montgomery, he said "We won when we started."