Thursday, February 19, 1998

Searing study of American meanness

By Molly Ivins

As we were saying when we were so rudely interrupted ... B.L.L. (Before L'Affaire Lewinsky), we were trying to have this national dialogue on race.

It was one of the president's woollier ideas, since he failed to mention who, what, why, where, when or how after he dreamed up this scheme. As might be expected of a proposal of such awesome specificity, the national dialogue on race went nowhere for quite a while.

Clinton appointed John Hope Franklin, the distinguished historian, to head up a national commission on jawing about race. The right-wingers immediately made a stink because no one opposed to affirmative action had been put on the commission.

You could tell that this struck poor Franklin as the approximate equivalent of having one of those "scholars" who deny the existence of the Holocaust on a panel about anti-Semitism.

But the only president we've got, ever empathetic toward everybody's pain, called in the anti-affirmative-actioneers to get their take; and there we were, actually having this sort of dialogue about race or at least about what constitutes a level playing field, when ... you know the rest.

Fortunately for all of us, the most extraordinary book has just come out, and it gives us not only a chance to jump-start our dialogue about race but also an opportunity to do so with a sense of the history behind today's conflicts that is priceless.

The book is the second volume of Taylor Branch's magnificent three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr.: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65.

This is not just a biography of one man -- it is a social history of the United States of the highest caliber. All those book-review words that publishers pluck out for advertisements -- absorbing, fascinating, couldn't put it down -- are true of Branch's work.

In the first volume, the story of King himself seemed to me the major theme: such an extraordinary, and unwilling, leader. This country was so lucky to have had him here when we did; the alternatives would all have been disastrous for the nation.

In the second volume, the civil-rights movement is already far larger than King, and he knows it, although white America has yet to get any of it.

For some reason, what kept grabbing my attention in Pillar of Fire was not the players -- not King or my old hero Bob Moses or John Doar or any of the vast tapestry of characters who gradually shaped and moved the civil-rights movement into one of the most awesome and effective forces for non-violent change in all history.

What kept grabbing at me was the meanness -- the sheer, stupid meanness -- of the white response.

Time and again, civil-rights workers would come into a community, try to get a voter-registration drive started or even a meeting about such a thing and ... nothing. No response. Zip. Whole effort a total failure. And then, as though it were part of some ritual of the Japanese Kabuki theater, some local official would inevitably decide on retribution -- some mean, low, ugly way of getting back at whoever was suspected of being "uppity."

And that retribution, that unfairness, would spark off the movement: People who had been terrified of coming to a meeting or going on a march would suddenly find the courage in their anger, their outrage.

An example:

In early 1963, three Nashville students (trained in non-violence by James Lawson, the Nashville students became the shock troops of the sit-ins) came to Hattiesburg, Miss. You cannot imagine how long it took just to convince one black preacher to let his church be used for a meeting about registering to vote. Their fear, of course, was well-founded.

Clyde Kennard, a former paratrooper in Germany and Korea, had returned to Hattiesburg to run a farm for his ailing mother.

He applied to finish his degree at Southern Mississippi, the only college in the area, but neither his outstanding record nor his family circumstances excused such uppityness -- applying to a public university!

Harassment of Kennard began at once and culminated when local law enforcement arrived one morning to discover five bags of stolen chicken feed in his barn.

On the shaky testimony of a single witness, this obvious frame-up got Kennard seven years in the Parchman penitentiary, and then they left him there without medical care while he wasted away from cancer.

So it occurs to me that as we have this national dialogue about race -- trying to figure out why blacks don't earn as much as whites, why black kids still don't do as well in school -- maybe we ought to be looking at what's wrong with white people, too, and how racism affects them.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.