Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow (PDF)

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. covers the entire life of the leader of the Civil Rights MovementWinner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on more than seven hundred interviews, access to King’s personal papers, and thousands of FBI documents, Bearing the Cross traces King’s metamorphosis from a young, earnest pastor into the foremost spokesperson of the black freedom struggle. At the book’s heart is King’s growing awareness of the symbolic meaning of the cross as he gradually accepts a life that will demand the ultimate in self-sacrifice. This is a towering portrait of a man at the epicenter of one of the most dramatic periods in our history.

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Editorial Reviews: From the Back Cover Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on more than seven hundred interviews with all of King’s surviving associates, as well as with those who opposed him, and enhanced by the author’s access to King’s personal papers and tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents, this is a towering portrait of a man’s metamorphosis into a legend. About the Author David J. Garrow is Professor of Law & History and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of four books, including Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and The American Prospect. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ExcerptChapter OneThe Montgomery Bus Boycott1955-1956Thursday had been busy and tiring for Mrs. Raymond A. Parks. Her job as a tailor’s assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store had left her neck and shoulder particularly sore, and when she left work at 5:30 P.M. that December 1, 1955, she went across the street to a drugstore in search of a heating pad. Mrs. Parks didn’t find one, but she purchased a few other articles before recrossing the street to her usual bus stop on Court Square. The buses were especially crowded this cold, dark evening, and when she boarded one for her Cleveland Avenue route, only one row of seats – the row immediately behind the first ten seats that always were reserved for whites only – had any vacancies. She took an aisle seat, with a black man on her right next to the window, and two black women in the parallel seat across the way. As more passengers boarded at each of the two next stops, the blacks moved to the rear, where they stood, and the whites occupied their exclusive seats at the front of the bus. At the third stop, more passengers got on, and one, a white male, was left standing after the final front seat was taken. The bus driver, J. F. Blake, looked back and called out to Mrs. Parks and her three colleagues, “All right you folks, I want those two seats.” Montgomery’s customary practice of racial preference demanded that all four blacks would have to stand in order to allow one white man to sit, since no black was allowed to sit parallel with a white. No one moved at first. Blake spoke out again: “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” At that, the two women across from Mrs. Parks rose and moved to the rear; the man beside her rose also, and she moved her legs to allow him out into the aisle. She remained silent, but shifted to the window side of the seat. Blake could see that Mrs. Parks had not arisen. “Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?” At that, Rosa Lee McCauley Parks uttered her first word to him: “No.” Blake responded, “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to have you arrested.” Mrs. Parks told him to go right ahead, that she was not going to move. Blake said nothing more, but got off the bus and went to a phone. No one spoke to Mrs. Parks, and some passengers began leaving the bus, not wanting to be inconvenienced by the incident. Mrs. Parks was neither frightened nor angry. “I was thinking that the only way to let them know I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did – resist the order,” she later recalled. “I had not thought about it and I had taken no previous resolution until it happened, and then I simply decided that I would not get up. I was tired, but I was usually tired at the end of the day, and I was not feeling well, but then there had been many days when I had not felt well, I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.” The moment had come, and she had had the courage to say no. Blake returned from the phone, and stood silently in the front of the bus. After a few minutes, a police squad car pulled up, and two officers, F. B. Day and D. W. Mixon, got on the bus. Blake pointed to Mrs. Parks, said he needed the seat, and that “the other ones stood up.” The two policemen came toward her, and one, in Mrs. Parks’s words, “asked me if the driver hadn’t asked me to stand. I said yes. He asked, ‘Why didn’t you stand up?’ I said I didn’t think I should have to. I asked him, ‘Why do you push us around?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law, and you are under arrest.’ So the moment he said I was under arrest, I stood up. One picked up my purse, one picked up my shopping bag, and we got off the bus.” They escorted her to the patrol car, and returned to talk to Blake. The driver confirmed that he wanted to press charges under Montgomery’s bus segregation ordinance, and the officers took Mrs. Parks first to police headquarters and then to the city jail. By then Mrs. Parks was tense, and her throat was uncommonly dry. She spied a water fountain, but was quickly told that she could not drink from it – it was for whites only. Her processing complete, Mrs. Parks was allowed to call home and tell her family what had transpired.1Word of Mrs. Parks’s arrest began to spread even before that phone call. One passenger on the bus told a friend of Mrs. Parks’s about the event, and that friend, Mrs, Bertha Butler, immediately called the home of longtime black activist E. D. Nixon, a past president of Montgomery’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter and the most outspoken figure in the black community. Nixon was not at home, but his wife, Arlet, was, and she phoned his small downtown office. Nixon was out at the moment, but when he returned a few moments later, he saw the message to call home. “What’s up?” he asked his wife. She told him of Mrs. Parks’s arrest, but couldn’t tell him what the charge was. Nixon hung up and immediately called the police station.(Continues…)Excerpted from Bearing the Crossby Garrow, David Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Copyright © 2003 Donna HayAll right reserved. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐David J. Garrow has provided an extensive study of Martin Luther King Jr. and his work within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in his book Bearing the Cross. With a title that portrays the religious and spiritual aspect of King’s personal civil rights vision, as well as the exhaustive extent of the undertaking that would take its toll on King both physically and mentally, Garrow too has undertaken quite a task in writing his in depth and fact filled study. Using hundreds of sources, in fact over 600 interviews alone, Garrow has compiled a complete record of King’s civil rights journey from the moment he entered the Montgomery Improvement Association’s (MIA) bus boycott all the way to his death. However, the book is about more than just King, and that is one of the greatest strengths of Bearing the Cross. The story is really the story of a wider Civil Rights Movement, one in which King would become a leading figure and icon of.Bearing the Cross is undoubtedly a personal story, and everything within is connected to King in some form be it through his participation, association, support, or opposition. King had so many connections in the Civil Rights Movement that to tell his story is to tell each individual story, which Garrow attempts to do when he delves into subjects such as the Freedom Rides, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Selma, the Voting Rights Act, Northern ghettos, and Vietnam, just to name a few. Not only does this portray just how much momentum the movement had, which grew in fervor and activity as the years progressed, and how large it grew, but also what King himself took on when he shouldered the responsibility of becoming one of the major leaders. As reviewers David Herbert Donald and William C. Stinchcombe have noted, Garrow misses occasional opportunities to analyze King, and we are therefore sometimes made to take King at face value with just a selection of his decisions or quotes to flesh out his intentions and feelings. ((David Herbert Donald, “Review: [untitled],” The Journal of Southern History 54, no 1 (February 1988): 135-137; William C. Stinchcombe, “Review: [untitled],” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 367-369.)) While there are moments when we can see the personality and intentions of King come through his words as he speaks for himself to explain his motivations, especially when he talks about his passion for the Civil Rights Movement and his willingness to die for it, other times are a bit more obscure and we are left to wonder why King did some of what he did. For example, Garrow writes that King had expressed some hesitation to be included on a petition to help activist Carl Braden out of a charge of contempt of court. The wife of Carl, Anne, was disappointed that she would likely not get King’s support. However, King changed his mind and phoned her to ask that she place his name on the petition because he had prayed over it and decided it was right (155). This would have been a perfect time for Garrow to attempt an analysis of the whys of King’s action, yet he does not take advantage of the opportunity to use his vast knowledge of King to explain this change of heart, or why King would put himself in such a politically precarious position by association. Perhaps in the cases where Garrow did not analyze, he hoped that his facts would speak for themselves and he was wary of trying to get into the head of King for fear of making too many assumptions that he could not support. Yet Garrow attempts to create a narrative out of the intense amount of facts he includes, and this leads him in some cases to make a few assumptions of King that he cannot, or rather does not, substantiate. For instance, in one of the many discussions of the SCLC’s financial mismanagement, Garrow writes that King brushed off the accusations made at the SCLC’s leaders, but felt they were accurate when he truly thought about it (469). Garrow leaves the statement at that and does not attempt to follow up with any evidence to support it. It seems that Garrow is trying to create a more enjoyable story by including elements of intimate understanding, yet they are not always satisfactory and the text is still dense with dates and an intense volume of fact. That is not to say that a reader will come off not knowing who King was.In fact, Garrow is very adept at including aspects of King’s personality and life that many people do not know or consider. There is a definite evolution of character from King’s kitchen revelation (58), to his trip to India where he refined his own method of resistance as he learned more about Gandhi (114), all the way to his ultimate loss of faith in white men and democracy (604). It is also surprising to learn that King, known as such a great rhetorician, often had others write his speeches and chapters in his books. This aspect almost makes it seem as if King was a popular figure speaking out the ideas of groups, and more pessimistically, a pawn of other thinkers since so many of his ideas were molded by others who could influence or persuade him (139). This does not, of course, tarnish his reputation or his much deserved respect, it merely opens up a new facet to King’s overall focus on collectivity. King did, after all, assert many times that he acted for his people and that the movement did not depend on him and would continue on without him, which means there were other thinkers in the background. Also surprising were the revelations Garrow made about King’s misogyny and views on sex (141 & 374-376). King is an icon, certainly, but now also a man who had his own faults, and at times very fatalistic (232). One other objection to be taken with this novel is its treatment of the NAACP. Garrow is in no way objective when he discusses the animosity that began to grow around the NAACP and King/SCLC. As described by Garrow, the NAACP on various occasions attempted to smear the SCLC or hinder them in their progress in voting rights. The NAACP would naturally take a special exception to King’s assertion that attempting to change the country in front of a judge and appealing for change was not the proper approach, but rather that resistance such as they had been done in Montgomery was vital (87). The two groups had a natural ideological difference. Garrow is unfair in his language, and even goes so far as to include the statement, “With allies like the NAACP, SCLC’s effort had little chance of success” (103). Granted, the NAACP was in conflict with King, Garrow should have exercised a little more neutrality and fairness when discussing these occasions.A final thing must be said about Garrows endnotes. Though he provides a glossary of his abbreviations in the back of the text, his endnotes are still confusing and hard to sift through. Maybe it is his sheer volume of sources that complicates the system, but it does not help that much of his citations are made up of letter and number combinations. When perusing through to find a source, one must flip back and forth to try to make sense of what is being identified and where to finally find it. Though the short form of the citations clears up space, it leads to too much confusion for students and scholars who may want to follow up on his research. It may seem as if there is nothing good about this book since most of what has been written about it so far has been critical, but the sheer extent of Garrow’s research should be praised. When writing on a figure as big and as important as Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who has had much already written about him, one naturally has an understanding of him that they approach studies of him with. Even lacking in the occasional analysis, Garrow provides a vast array of information that pieces together King’s life into one continuous and chronological story. Even if we do not come off understanding the finer details of King’s mentality, we still see how events flowed along a never ebbing, but wavering line, and how ideas melded and split. It is this dynamic that is important to understanding the larger picture of the Civil Rights Movement. So much is encompassed in Garrow’s story that it is almost too much to read and remember in one reading. Despite some of its faults, it is without a doubt a vital book to the history of African Americans, Civil Rights, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

⭐Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most fascinating human beings to have ever walked the face of the Earth. For 12 ½ years of his life, he stood in the spotlight of public attention as a leader of The Civil Rights Movement. King, at first, was a reluctant leader, but at some point, he saw that the Movement was bigger than himself, that the whole Movement was destined to change society. King saw his role in the Movement as not unlike his Call to preach. King felt that God demanded his participation in the Movement, and being the person that he was, King fundamentally understood that his DNA could not say no to God. Thus, he answered the call to be active in the Movement affirmatively. Though he was a reluctant participant, King saw his role as the Cross that he must bear, and this concept goes a long ways towards explaining how Garrow came up with his title. This book is almost a day-to-day account of King’s life from the time he became famous during the Montgomery Bus Boycott until his death. The book is also an example of majesterial scholarship, with Garrow having well over 130 pages of notes, a sign that he was thorough in doing his homework. There are many who will make the argument that this book is boring, that it is just a string of day-to-day events just strung together. Anyone who says this is not taking the time to get at what is being stated within the book, for it is the kind of book that cannot be read in bulk, meaning that if a person tries reading this book 30 pages at-a-sitting, he will miss out on what it has to offer. I read the book patiently, concentrating on just 2 pages at a time. Sure it took me quite a while to read it, but the rewards I gained from reading it in this manner are beyond explanation. I make the case that this book is the finest, most comprehensive, subtle and nuanced biography that has ever been written about M.L.K. In sum, I am saying that one cannot find a finer account of King’s life than this one. Garrow is equal to his subject and has done a masterful job in putting this book together. This is an excellent biography.King’s life has many sides, with many interesting details. A close personal friend of King named Professor Vincent Harding taught a college class on King, with a really interesting twist. The story of what happened is detailed in the book “Reality’s Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture” by Thomas D. Rush on pages 48 and 194 in a piece called “The Picture On The Wall.” The book can be found right here on Amazon. At the current time, David J. Garrow is researching an approved biography of President Barack Obama, which is said to have an expected release date sometime in 2016. Professor Garrow called author Thomas D. Rush in March of 2014 to interview him regarding two private conversations Rush held with the President in January of 1989 while working as a Community Organizer. Professor Garrow told Rush during that conversation that Rush’s book is well-written. Rush’s account of his meetings with President Obama appears on page 95 of Rush’s book in a story called, “You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet.”

⭐MLK was a really good man and his closest followers wanted to be him, but none had the calling he had to advance civil rights for the Black population. He was a great orator and person to all he met.Dr. King was very overwhelmed with people to see and sermons to deliver.It’s hard to believe the people surrounding him were infighting so much, but it’s virtually the same in all organizations and sickening.He was aware of his sins, admitted them and asked for forgiveness, which I’m sure he received.I enjoyed the read and content, however, the ending was what Dr. King expected and very sad. There will never, ever be another man like him.

⭐A hefty read, but important.

⭐Book arrived in excellent condition at a bargain price – definitely worth 5 stars

⭐Great condition and great price

⭐Great Story.

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