Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Penguin Life - Rilegato

Frady, Marshall

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670882313 ISBN 13: 9780670882311

Casa editrice: Viking, 2001

Riassunto

A renowned biographer presents an intimate and inspiring portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., drawn from twenty-five years of award-winning commentary on American race relations, that combines the history of the civil rights movement with King's powerful rise to acclaim and influence, bringing to life his political relationships, his goals, and his achievements. 22,500 first printing.

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L'autore:

Marshall Frady, a critically acclaimed biographer and veteran journalist, is the author of Wallace, a biography of George Wallace, and most recently of Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (a 1996 New York Times Notable Book, excerpted in The New Yorker). He has written for Nightline and for numerous publications, including Newsweek, Life, and Harper's, and been a host, chief writer, and award-winning correspondent for ABC News, where his pieces won many awards.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Introduction

Almost a geological age ago, it seems now-that great moral saga of belief and violence that unfolded in the musky deeps of the South during the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. It's hard to remember at this remove of years how profoundly the South then was like another country within the United States. Locked into its own massive apartheid system, implacably enforced by legal and political authorities across the whole spectrum of its social life, it really had more in common with the South Africa of that day than the rest of the nation. At the same time, the South seemed a region that belonged to some older, more primal and guttural script about the human situation, tribal, stark, fatal, that was wholly outside the general American sensibility of rationality and optimism. Even so, it had fallen the lot of the South, formed by slavery and its camouflaged sequel of segregation, to serve as the crucible for the whole nation's periodic struggles of conscience over its own endemic and pervasive racial malaise. As early as Jefferson, the recognition was already gathering that the only fundamental and intractable crisis this Republic finally faced was that of racial schism-that the American political adventure, conceived in such brave hope and largeness of idea, may have also held from its very inception, when the first black man in chains set his foot on the continent's shores, the seeds of its undoing. Indeed, that aboriginal crime has been with us, one way or another, ever since. And it was the South, living more directly and intimately in that crime than anywhere else, that seemed appointed the violent ceremonial ground for America's intermittent travails to purge itself of that primeval shame and guilt.

The civil rights movement became the nation's latest attempt to perform in the South an exorcising of its original sin, and it turned out our most epic moral drama since the Civil War itself. What was taking place for those few passionate years was a kind of high lyricism of the human spirit, played out in the unlikely stage set of bleak little cities and musty towns marooned out in the sun-shimmering backlands of the South. And for its duration, the South itself seemed to pass into a theater of the surreal. Over its countrysides could be found an exotic visitation of gentle young earnest evangels from the far winters of the North and the mild Eden of California, having brought down with them radical humanist fervors from Harvard seminars and all-night discussions in back of Berkeley bookstores, and now damp and tallow-pale in the brutal glare of Mississippi and south Georgia, they had about them a bespectacled, vegetarian, somehow sweetly lost and fugitive quality. With them were the brimstone-eyed young black circuit riders of the movement, Caribbean plantation hats rakishly tilted low over their faces and red bandannas tucked in the top of deerskin boots, dusting from town to town in ramshackle station wagons and muddy coupes, always furiously, manically, inexhaustibly talking....They were days delirious with belief.

It was while I was working one summer in the mid-sixties as an apprentice correspondent in the Atlanta bureau of Newsweek-still a raw young provincial just emerged out of a Southern small-town upbringing-that I was lobbed abruptly into the heats and tumults of that immense folk morality play. One smoldering night in a little Alabama town, I found myself standing in the back of a shoebox tabernacle crammed with a congregation of black maids, janitors, beauticians, schoolteachers-all the windows open to the hot ripe night outside and cardboard fans advertising Peoples Funeral Association fluttering over the packed ranks of glistening faces-as a local preacher, a heavy, sweat-washed man just released from jail that afternoon, led them through one of those mightily swooping hymns of the movement: O freedom! O freedom! O freedom over me, over me....I stepped outside to stand for a moment in the dark under a chinaberry tree, suddenly a bit woozy, and lighted a cigarette with trembling fingers. And with those voices in the church surging on in the night-And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free-I still distinctly remember the prickling that shivered over my hide, and blurting aloud, "Good God." Such moments were a kind of Damascus Road experience in the lives of more reporters than me.

And it would all converge repeatedly into the same, almost ritualistic scene: demonstrators brimming out of a town's black neighborhood and swelling down the plain little main street with a vast clapping and low cavernous choiring-Ain't gon' let nobody turn me 'round, turn me 'round-the marchers moving on toward a courthouse square bristling with white deputies and state troopers waiting with shotguns and billy clubs, their faces blank and flat as nickel coins, chewing small wads of gum with only a faint stirring of their jaws. And when the two met, it seemed with the ceremonious deliberation of a dream, coming together in a strangely slow-motion collision of floundering bodies, howls and shouts, thumping clubs, a few screams....

In time, of course, that passion play transpiring in the South was assimilated, without pause or intermission, by the more expansive and complex national anguish of Vietnam-while the South's racial duress also spanned out over the rest of the country, where it became more diffused and abstract, the saints and villains losing their old palpable simplicity, as the South itself meanwhile receded into the more sedate preoccupation of mutating into some regional version of the San Fernando Valley. Now, all the angers and urgencies of those years of the civil rights movement seem curiously remote, dwindled, archaic, quaint. But the partisans and journalists who passed through that distant time still tend to look back on it something like Lincoln Brigade veterans wistful for the bright days of Spain in '38. Goodness and courage and evil and tragedy all had, for that brief season, a marvelously simple and immediate clarity. The very air seemed vivid then with some fever of superreality. That once, at least, breath truly hit the bottom of the lungs. It was a time of an ultra-aliveness that few were ever to know again.

That moral pageantry playing over the South was all an amplification of what had begun at first obscurely, almost by happenstance, with a bus segregation protest back in 1955 in the winter glooms of Montgomery, Alabama. But the solemn young black minister reluctantly impressed into its leadership, Martin Luther King, Jr., who had remained at the center of its expanding ramifications afterward, was, when I first encountered him in St. Augustine in 1964, a startlingly unprepossessing figure-a short, chunky man, with a manner of unremitting and ponderous gravity in his deacon-sober suits. His round face, black as asphalt, wore a bland gaze of almost Oriental impassiveness, an improbable bourgeois placidness-yet with, I still remember, almost meltingly sweet eyes. But on the whole, he could have been a comfortably prosperous funeral home director, or merely what among other things he indeed was, the Baptist preacher of a big-city church. However surprisingly unheroic his appearance, though, the transfiguration of the South effected in the course of his apostleship-the momentous Black Awakening of a long subject and debased people, their eventual political ascendancy, the widely common public culture now of whites and blacks there-was by almost any measure epochal. And the legacy of racial amity that, perhaps even more astonishingly, followed that transformation would quite likely have been impossible without King's stubbornly persevering, nonviolent gospel metaphysic of redemptive understanding and forgiveness and even sorrow for one's very brutalizers. As he once bayed out, mouth thrown wide in a roar of power from the back of his thick-packed neck, when marchers were facing the dogs and clubs and fire hoses of Birmingham: "We will meet the forces of hate with the power of love....We must say to our white brothers all over the South, We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering....Bomb our homes and we will still love you....We will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."

But before long, King's moral vision had impelled him beyond the South into a mission, even more formidable and in the end tragic, as prophet to the whole national community at America's Augustan noon of pride and power. His evangelism against the primal Cain act of racism-its denial of a natural connection to other human beings, reducing them to objects, which then allows any manner of violence against them-inexorably evolved into an evangelism against what he saw as the moral coma of the country's whole corporate, technological order: its loud and vicious void of materialism, its isolation of individuals from each other, its technician's detachment from the human effects of its interests and policies, and the measureless vandalism this new kind of high-tech barbarism was visiting not only on the life of America, but elsewhere in the world, most luridly at that time in Vietnam. In effect, he came to pit himself against his entire age. Toward the end, he committed himself to a grand social offensive of not only blacks but Hispanics, Native Americans, poor whites, all the dispossessed and discarded and forgotten of American society, to radically reorder the values and power system of the whole nation: he had wound up, as J. Edgar Hoover was not far wrong in fuming, the most subversive man in America. But that was the final, huge, Gandhian ambition that came to consume him: through the same nonviolent mass confrontations that had remade the South, to do nothing less than re-create and redeem America itself. In that sense, he was really just beginning when, only some twelve years after Montgomery, he wandered out to his motel room balcony in Memphis that mild April dusk in 1968.

Over the years since then, ironically, King has passed into the cloudy shimmers ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0670882313
• ISBN 13: 9780670882311
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 224