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christythelibrarian's review against another edition
5.0
“Stokes raised both hands toward [LAPD officer] Weese, who shot him through the heart from about eight feet.”
This sentence depicts the fatal escalation of the April 27, 1962 conflict between the LAPD and members of the Nation of Islam temple no. 27. The chaotic sequence of events that led to the killing of Ronald X Stokes started with this: outside temple no. 27, Monroe X Jones asked Fred X Jingles to inspect some suits in the trunk of his car to help determine of they had resale value. Two white police officers driving by saw the two men at Jones’ car, and decided to stop and conduct a “burglary sweep.”
The full account of this conflict, where seven unarmed Nation of Islam members were shot by the LAPD, is the starting point for Pillar of Fire, the second of Taylor Branch’s trilogy about the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
This account of the events of April 27, 1962 is one example of how reading history helps us understand how we got to where we are today. Pillar of Fire is full of moments of recognition, where the reader sees the DNA of today’s news in past events.
Pillar of Fire covers events from 1963 to 1965. It is impossible to recount everything that struck me while reading this book. I was highlighting passages in my Kindle edition like mad. What follows is an attempt to highlight some of the prominent narrative threads and themes I noted.
There’s a reason that the recent movie Selma begins with the September 15, 1963 killing of four young girls in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham. It is an event that reverberated throughout the civil rights movement, even though it didn’t quite shame the nation into repentance.
"[A] white lawyer made himself a lifetime pariah from Birmingham by blaming every citizen who took discreet comfort in segregation, saying, “We all did it,” but Mayor Albert Boutwell stoutly insisted, “We are all victims.”"
Upon hearing the news in North Carolina, James Bevel and Diane Nash, civil rights leaders and champions of nonviolent activism, briefly contemplated vigilantism. In the end, they hatched an idea for a mass nonviolent protest centered around Alabama’s capital, Montgomery, an idea that found form later in the Selma to Montgomery march. (Pillar of Fire‘s chronological coverage extends almost to the point of this march.)
The lack of justice for the 16th Street Baptist bombings is a shadow throughout the book. (No one was convicted for the crime until 1977.) This injustice is joined by the lack of justice for NAACP leader Medgar Ever’s 1963 assassination (no conviction until 1994); the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner (those few of the lynching mob who are convicted in 1967 do not serve more than six years in prison). In an epilogue, Branch also describes the 1966 Klan killing of Mississippi voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, and how three of the four convicted were pardoned after only four years in prison by the state governor. The KKK leader, Sam Bowers, who ordered the murder was tried for the crime, but deadlocked juries kept him from conviction. In 1998, the case was reopened and Bowers was finally convicted of Dahmer’s murder.
While mulling over this systemic denial of court justice, consider the segregationist congressman who decried the 1964 Civil Rights Bill as a “monstrous instrument of oppression upon all of the American people.” Or the time when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is told by a fellow plane passenger that the new civil rights law would “just carry on the trend toward federal dictatorship.” (Newsweek polls found that 74% of whites believed that the pace of integration was “moving too fast.”)
The skillful framing of desegregation as a big government imposition was propagated by several politicians of the era. During his presidential campaign, former Alabaman governor George Wallace talked often of “states’ rights” and “sweeping federal encroachment.” Such dog-whistle rhetoric was picked up by the chosen Republican presidential candidate Goldwater. Of Goldwater, King stated, “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist.”
The galling fact is that if anyone was suppressed by big government intrusion, it was Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is well-known now that Dr. King was under almost constant FBI surveillance. The loathsome and powerful FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover directed this surveillance and also authorized releases of scurrilous information about King to the press (false accusations of Communistic ties, true accusations of infidelity). Hoover tried to prevent King’s meeting with the Pope and in a press interview, Hoover called King “the most notorious liar” in the United States. Again, the FBI’s surveillance of King is no longer a secret, but I was still surprised and horrified by the persistence, extent, and petty exploitation of it.
The in-depth nature of Pillar of Fire also alerted me to historical events I’d never heard of. I had no idea about the integrationist movement in St. Augustine, Florida, for instance, which called out the fact that the oldest city in the United States remained segregated. I also did not know about the jailing of voting rights activists from Greenwood and Itta Bena, Mississippi (for “disturbing the peace”). Some of these activists were imprisoned in the notorious Parchman Penitentiary, where they were sometimes kept in hotboxes, and also hung by their hands in their cells. I didn’t know about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that sought seats at the Democratic National Convention, and were denied their place in the political process. And though I knew of Malcolm X, I didn’t know many details about what he did and said.
As I said about the first book, I feel like Pillar of Fire has helped me understand my country better. Not to sound hyperbolic about it, but in some not-fully-realized way, I feel like these books have changed my life.
This sentence depicts the fatal escalation of the April 27, 1962 conflict between the LAPD and members of the Nation of Islam temple no. 27. The chaotic sequence of events that led to the killing of Ronald X Stokes started with this: outside temple no. 27, Monroe X Jones asked Fred X Jingles to inspect some suits in the trunk of his car to help determine of they had resale value. Two white police officers driving by saw the two men at Jones’ car, and decided to stop and conduct a “burglary sweep.”
The full account of this conflict, where seven unarmed Nation of Islam members were shot by the LAPD, is the starting point for Pillar of Fire, the second of Taylor Branch’s trilogy about the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
This account of the events of April 27, 1962 is one example of how reading history helps us understand how we got to where we are today. Pillar of Fire is full of moments of recognition, where the reader sees the DNA of today’s news in past events.
Pillar of Fire covers events from 1963 to 1965. It is impossible to recount everything that struck me while reading this book. I was highlighting passages in my Kindle edition like mad. What follows is an attempt to highlight some of the prominent narrative threads and themes I noted.
There’s a reason that the recent movie Selma begins with the September 15, 1963 killing of four young girls in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham. It is an event that reverberated throughout the civil rights movement, even though it didn’t quite shame the nation into repentance.
"[A] white lawyer made himself a lifetime pariah from Birmingham by blaming every citizen who took discreet comfort in segregation, saying, “We all did it,” but Mayor Albert Boutwell stoutly insisted, “We are all victims.”"
Upon hearing the news in North Carolina, James Bevel and Diane Nash, civil rights leaders and champions of nonviolent activism, briefly contemplated vigilantism. In the end, they hatched an idea for a mass nonviolent protest centered around Alabama’s capital, Montgomery, an idea that found form later in the Selma to Montgomery march. (Pillar of Fire‘s chronological coverage extends almost to the point of this march.)
The lack of justice for the 16th Street Baptist bombings is a shadow throughout the book. (No one was convicted for the crime until 1977.) This injustice is joined by the lack of justice for NAACP leader Medgar Ever’s 1963 assassination (no conviction until 1994); the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner (those few of the lynching mob who are convicted in 1967 do not serve more than six years in prison). In an epilogue, Branch also describes the 1966 Klan killing of Mississippi voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, and how three of the four convicted were pardoned after only four years in prison by the state governor. The KKK leader, Sam Bowers, who ordered the murder was tried for the crime, but deadlocked juries kept him from conviction. In 1998, the case was reopened and Bowers was finally convicted of Dahmer’s murder.
While mulling over this systemic denial of court justice, consider the segregationist congressman who decried the 1964 Civil Rights Bill as a “monstrous instrument of oppression upon all of the American people.” Or the time when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is told by a fellow plane passenger that the new civil rights law would “just carry on the trend toward federal dictatorship.” (Newsweek polls found that 74% of whites believed that the pace of integration was “moving too fast.”)
The skillful framing of desegregation as a big government imposition was propagated by several politicians of the era. During his presidential campaign, former Alabaman governor George Wallace talked often of “states’ rights” and “sweeping federal encroachment.” Such dog-whistle rhetoric was picked up by the chosen Republican presidential candidate Goldwater. Of Goldwater, King stated, “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist.”
The galling fact is that if anyone was suppressed by big government intrusion, it was Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is well-known now that Dr. King was under almost constant FBI surveillance. The loathsome and powerful FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover directed this surveillance and also authorized releases of scurrilous information about King to the press (false accusations of Communistic ties, true accusations of infidelity). Hoover tried to prevent King’s meeting with the Pope and in a press interview, Hoover called King “the most notorious liar” in the United States. Again, the FBI’s surveillance of King is no longer a secret, but I was still surprised and horrified by the persistence, extent, and petty exploitation of it.
The in-depth nature of Pillar of Fire also alerted me to historical events I’d never heard of. I had no idea about the integrationist movement in St. Augustine, Florida, for instance, which called out the fact that the oldest city in the United States remained segregated. I also did not know about the jailing of voting rights activists from Greenwood and Itta Bena, Mississippi (for “disturbing the peace”). Some of these activists were imprisoned in the notorious Parchman Penitentiary, where they were sometimes kept in hotboxes, and also hung by their hands in their cells. I didn’t know about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that sought seats at the Democratic National Convention, and were denied their place in the political process. And though I knew of Malcolm X, I didn’t know many details about what he did and said.
As I said about the first book, I feel like Pillar of Fire has helped me understand my country better. Not to sound hyperbolic about it, but in some not-fully-realized way, I feel like these books have changed my life.
mattrohn's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This is a book I'd love to teach from - extremely easy to read, provides good background on Marshall and his legal work for the NAACP LDF, and on Kenya's independence movement in the early postwar era, links the two, and touches on a range of perspectives through which those two projects interacted, both directly and ideologically. For just your own personal reading, if you're already familiar with the history of decolonization in Africa, and particularly with the legal history of the civil rights era, a decent amount of this book will be reviewing events that you're already familiar with, but it's a short book and the parts on Marshall's actual work drafting the Kenyan constitution is fascinating
johnnygamble's review against another edition
4.0
So much I didn't know and so much I'll never understand. I had trouble keepng up with who was who but that's probably on me.
skitch41's review against another edition
4.0
The Civil Rights movement profoundly affected American history and the nation’s race relations for a generation. Some of the big moments, like the March on Washington, are indelibly etched into popular imagination. But what was the movement like at its peak and what lessons does it hold for us today? In this second volume to his trilogy on the era, Mr. Branch catalogues the ins and outs of the movement at its peak.
This volume starts by retreading some ground from the last chapters in the previous book. For those who have read it, you might wonder why Mr. Branch decided to do this. However, Mr. Branch not only helps to refresh the memories of folks who may not have picked up the first volume in a while (almost a decade separates the publication of each of them volumes from each other) while also approaching it from a new perspective. While some of the first part will be familiar, much of it is also new too.
What is also much appreciated in this volume is how Mr. Branch expands his scope to include other voices that were not as prominent or even ignored in the previous volume. Specifically, Malcom X and the Nation of Islam finally make their appearance in Mr. Branch’s history and provide a much needed counterpoint to Dr. King’s nonviolent protest. While acknowledging the stark differences in philosophy, Mr Branch also injects Malcom X with enough nuance to upset the seemingly black-and-white narrative. It should be thought-provoking to many who have not given much though to Malcom X before.
Another great improvement in this sequel from the previous volume is how the chapters have been shrunk. With the exception of the last chapters, the average chapter length is about 10-20 pages; some are even shorter than that. This is a much welcome relief from the previous volume as 30-40 page chapters one after another could get a little tiresome.
Lastly, this book does a tremendous job of showing the forces that were only hinted at in the previous volume coming to a head. By the end of the book, the violent white backlash has come into full swing and the charges of infidelity against King and other members of the movement have come close to undermining the movement and even dissolved some marriages.
As we face another moment in our history where race relations and nonviolent protests are at the forefront of our politics, the lessons one can draw from this book are innumerable. For those who are looking for a definitive history of the Civil Rights movement, look no further than this history. I look forward to wrapping up the final volume in the trilogy soon.
This volume starts by retreading some ground from the last chapters in the previous book. For those who have read it, you might wonder why Mr. Branch decided to do this. However, Mr. Branch not only helps to refresh the memories of folks who may not have picked up the first volume in a while (almost a decade separates the publication of each of them volumes from each other) while also approaching it from a new perspective. While some of the first part will be familiar, much of it is also new too.
What is also much appreciated in this volume is how Mr. Branch expands his scope to include other voices that were not as prominent or even ignored in the previous volume. Specifically, Malcom X and the Nation of Islam finally make their appearance in Mr. Branch’s history and provide a much needed counterpoint to Dr. King’s nonviolent protest. While acknowledging the stark differences in philosophy, Mr Branch also injects Malcom X with enough nuance to upset the seemingly black-and-white narrative. It should be thought-provoking to many who have not given much though to Malcom X before.
Another great improvement in this sequel from the previous volume is how the chapters have been shrunk. With the exception of the last chapters, the average chapter length is about 10-20 pages; some are even shorter than that. This is a much welcome relief from the previous volume as 30-40 page chapters one after another could get a little tiresome.
Lastly, this book does a tremendous job of showing the forces that were only hinted at in the previous volume coming to a head. By the end of the book, the violent white backlash has come into full swing and the charges of infidelity against King and other members of the movement have come close to undermining the movement and even dissolved some marriages.
As we face another moment in our history where race relations and nonviolent protests are at the forefront of our politics, the lessons one can draw from this book are innumerable. For those who are looking for a definitive history of the Civil Rights movement, look no further than this history. I look forward to wrapping up the final volume in the trilogy soon.
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