MLK biographer urges nonviolence again
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch encouraged America to reject cynicism and embrace optimism as it negotiates a range of modern civil rights skirmishes, from the debate over police shootings to sexual harassment.
“We’re trapped in cynicism,” said Branch, delivering the keynote address Tuesday for the National Civil Rights Museum’s MLK50 symposium, “Where Do We Go From Here?”
Branch, best known for his “America in the King Years” trilogy detailing the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement’s critical years, 1954 to 1968, told an estimated 800 guests at a University of Memphis luncheon that King was one of this nation’s great optimists.
“We turned away from the message of Dr. King for 50 years,” said the 71year-old author, emphasizing that while King was no Pollyanna, he found hope in the nation’s darkest corners.
“The American people are infected with with racism. That is our peril,” Branch said, quoting King. “The American people are also infected with democratic ideals. That is our hope.”
Branch’s speech came fifty years to the day of King’s last oration, his famous “Mountaintop Speech,” and highlights three days of observances this week of King’s April 4, 1968, assassination in Memphis, its 50th anniversary coming Wednesday.
Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989 for his initial tome in the trilogy, “Parting the Waters,” which chronicled the movement’s early years, 19541963. He spoke Tuesday of his long journey to writing those histories, growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s in segregated Atlanta and shelving his early ambition to be a surgeon as he found inspiration in the blossoming civil rights movement.
He spoke also of his role as executive producer of HBO’s just-released “King in the Wilderness,” a documentary exploring the final year and a half of King’s life. The film focuses on the conflict surrounding the civil rights leader’s controversial opposition to the Vietnam War and challenges he faced from younger, more militant leaders within the movement. Branch said some of the most poignant moments in the film come as King candidly debates Stokely Carmichael as they walk together through Mississippi on the 1966 March Against Fear — the younger Carmichael favoring Black Power and aggression in answer to violent reprisals from whites, and King arguing for nonviolence.
“Nonviolence is a leadership doctrine,” Branch paraphrased King as saying. “We’re ahead of white America.”
Branch urged a re-commitment to nonviolence in today’s polarized climate.
“People equate violence with strength. Violence is one of the most salient topics there is,” he said.
“We must rise above the stigmatization of nonviolence as something for the weak.”
There is no greater act of nonviolence than exercising the right to vote, he said.
“It’s the greatest invention of nonviolence there is.”