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GA06114
Values, not power, are our hope, says Branch
Author of Civil Rights trilogy says human stories can overcome modern myths
By John Sniffen
BIRMINGHAM, June 21* Values, not physical power, will save our society, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch told the Presbyterian Historical Society luncheon Tuesday.
Branch, author of a best-selling trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, said we have a choice between adhering to our values or using force to solve our problems.
"We're already lost if we do not choose values," he said. "We'll be on the slippery slope back to the Inquisition, when torture profaned, not purified, the church."
Most of Branch's presentation centered on the Civil Rights movement, especially Birmingham’s role in that struggle. In the watershed year of 1963, the fear in the city was palpable, he said. Segregation was strictly enforced in matters as mundane as playing checkers in public, and murders of blacks went uninvestigated.
When black churches were bombed and children died in Birmingham, the best President Kennedy could do was to send down former Army football coach Earl Blaik. "There was no hope for justice," said Branch. “Fear gripped Birmingham. People on all sides were afraid.”
King's decision to come to Birmingham that year was "the supreme gamble of his life," and it almost failed. With fewer and fewer adults willing to protest and go to jail, King's advisor James Bevel proposed asking children as young as six to join the protests.
Black families were incensed at the suggestion, but Bevel said it was necessary because the adults had not worked to change the system 40 years earlier when they were young.
By the thousands young people volunteered, protested and hundreds went to jail. When the jails were filled, Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor then turned police dogs and fire hoses upon the young protesters, thinking they would disperse. "But they didn't run," said Branch.
Images of vicious dogs and police brutality filled front pages and television screens around the world.
"That was a transcendent moment in U.S. history," he said. It "melted the moral distance" that many people had placed between themselves and the struggle for civil rights. "The children of Birmingham who were the victims of violence ... rallied the hearts and consciousness of people who were afraid," said Branch.
He credited the events in Birmingham with leading to "many miracles," some in the South and others across the nation and the world. The South began to flourish with new business and major league sports teams. Non-violence was used to end Apartheid in South Africa and "even Tiananmen Square was modeled on a sit-in."
"It went all around the world and changed lives."
Branch decried the current "myths" that say the protests of the 1960s accomplished nothing, that there has been little progress in race relations, that non-violent methods do not work. He compared the situation to the falsehoods about the post-Civil War South that were exemplified by the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
The best way to reveal myths as falsehoods is to present human testimonies to the truth, said Branch. In the case of slavery, this was done by Works Projects Administration interviews with former slaves in the 1930s.
The truth, "grounded in so much humanity, can be recaptured, even if it's lost for a while," he concluded.
Branch, an elder at Brown Memorial Park Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, MD, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, the first volume of the trilogy. That was followed by Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68.
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