King and Country
SHAPIRO, PAULA MEINETZ
King and Country The King God Didn't Save By John A. Williams Coward-McCann. 221 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Paula Meinetz Shapiro John A. Williams' "Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin...
...According to Williams, the white power structure created King the public man...
...His presentation is lacking in literary or intellectual merit, and is frequently contradictory and repetitious...
...We need an analytical, comprehensive book about Martin Luther King Jr., about the movement and its historical place...
...King emerged as the nation's foremost civil rights leader only because the press thought his philosophy of love and nonviolence suited the white liberal need for responsible leaders who would restrain the angry young blacks...
...This vanity also prompted him to label minor accommodations as important victories...
...Yet after bringing the matter to public attention, Williams should have appraised the likelihood of the wiretaps' existence...
...This contrasts sharply with the treatment of a statement that King "was damned if he could see anything pretty in a black woman," attributed to someone described as "Person B." It is ironic that a black man should be the first to legitimize the purported fbi material, rumored about for years in journalistic circles...
...Another significant weakness of Williams' lackluster portrayal of King and his movement is his failure to acknowledge the psychological, need King fulfilled...
...King kept trying to reach them...
...The discussion of King's private life includes sparse quotations from him or his close associates...
...Throughout the 100 pages about King the public man and the 100 pages devoted to King the private man, the subject is deprived of the sensitivity and humanity he warrants...
...In the 1963 March on Washington, for example, King should have recited a list of political demands rather than his "I Have a Dream" speech, Williams writes...
...What credence can we give Williams after this early declaration: "As King lay dead, a great and joyful tremor ran underground in white America, muted only by the knowledge that public displays of such emotion were not in good taste...
...Williams condemns King's nonviolent methods as a failure...
...Still another obstacle to King's success was his middle-class mores, which ruled out rapport with the lower classes...
...Reviewed by Paula Meinetz Shapiro John A. Williams' "Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King Jr.," as his book is subtitled, can be judged on several levels, and they fail on each of them...
...Several times in the course of the book, Williams refers to records of fbi wiretaps on King's alleged sexual dalliances, but never closely examines or interprets them...
...Vanity and a fear of competition, Williams maintains, led King to conduct a one-man show that died when he died...
...sncc began the voter registration drives, leading to the Lowndes County Freedom party, which evolved into the Black Panther party...
...Part of the problem he attributes to the man, the remainder to America's racist society...
...We as a people as much as Martin King the man, were the target of James Earl Ray's hired bullet...
...Despite the stress on failures...
...when it felt threatened by his stand against the Vietnam war and plan for the Poor People's March on Washington, it conspired to kill him...
...Thus King's nonviolent example in Montgomery inspired the peaceful sit-ins and the formation of sncc...
...King did not realize, Williams contends, that racial equality was intertwined with racial economics, and that the white power structure would concede only what cost it nothing...
...his strategy of conciliation was simply compromising...
...Williams has not written that book...
...he merely serves as the vehicle for his chronicler's point of view...
...Perhaps the majority of men could not be reached through these beliefs, but because Dr...
...Williams says he was interested in the wiretaps only to the extent that King was forced to compromise the movement by avoiding stands that would upset J. Edgar Hoover...
...For Alice Walker, a young black novelist writing in the American Scholar in 1967, King was a "success": "He had suffered much because of his simple belief in nonviolence, love and brotherhood...
...1 saw in him the hero for whom I had waited so long...
...Williams presents a limited family history, emphasizing that King's parents had dominating personalities and were social climbers...
...A biographer may write out of love for, or familiarity with, a person and his works, or because he holds a strong opinion and wishes to express it...
...his wife and children are mentioned only once or twice in passing...
...Williams' motive is clearly the latter, judging from a statement he issued: "I wanted to do a book on [King] because his life and death were irrefutable proof that no matter how high a black may appear to rise above his prefixed station, he is still a nigger and shall be cut down when his usefulness is judged to be at an end...
...Ultimately, King's inability to achieve his goals through moral suasion, the author claims, made others see that their demands would have to be gained by political means...
...The King God Didn't Save does give its subject some credit for providing an initial impetus to certain individuals and groups...
...Although some of the loose generalizations may perhaps be true, his arguments are never convincing because he does not support them with adequate evidence or analysis...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 20
