Finneran: MLK, LBJ and Savage Selma
Friday, March 06, 2015
I think the movie captures the essence of Reverend Martin Luther King. I think it does an injustice to President Lyndon Johnson. And as with any good movie, it leaves you thinking about many things.
Here and now in the year 2015, it is very hard to comprehend the sheer savagery and racial hatred found in the deep South throughout most of the twentieth century. It beggars the mind that a region that is both deeply religious and admirably inclined to bear arms in the service of the nation could also act so barbarically to fellow human beings, indeed to fellow Americans, even veterans, of a different hue.
Not that the North was any grand bargain for black folks. It’s just that there is a big difference between general indifference and practiced hatred. Perhaps psychiatrists and psychologists can explain the geographic gulf—is it as simple as the steaming resentments and blame-shifting so common to war-vanquished peoples?—but America as a whole might be on a longer road to full racial reconciliation than I’ve imagined.
Generalizations in the realm of American racial history are dangerous. Certainly there were white Southerners who were deeply ashamed of the hostile acts and attitudes of many of their neighbors and their elected officials. Thus there should be no blanket indictment of every Southerner for it is equally certain that there were Northerners who harbored a Southern- equivalent contempt for the efforts of black folks to enter the mainstreams of American life………..
The words “be patient” sound utterly reasonable in most of life’s circumstances, but, if I was black in mid-twentieth century America and I heard those words I’d erupt. Patient for what? Patient for a chance to work? Patient for my children and their education? Patient for my grandchildren? Patient for a drink of water from a public fountain? Or for a chance to play baseball? Or for a seat for my tired mother on her bus ride to work? Patient for an end to the beatings and the killings? Patient for simple justice? How many more years would I have to wait for a simple sample of a free American life? No, I would not have waited. Patience has its limits and those limits had long been passed when Reverend King appeared on the scene.
Reverend King was a complex man of enormous talents, leading an eager long-suffering people and a reluctant nation to a better place. And he was joined in that journey to justice by Lyndon Johnson, another complex man of enormous though different talents. How singularly American that these two towering figures would meet at this momentous crossroads in our history. Forget Nixon-to-China or the Cold War or even Pearl Harbor. Those events involved external adversaries and as such could be met by a nation united in purpose. The issues which tormented King and Johnson were internal, matters of the mind and the heart, and thus decidedly different from armaments and war against foreign aggressors. Their war was against the torments of the nation’s soul.
I don’t pretend to be a Presidential historian. Yet my limited reading informs me that Johnson was a scheming, clever, brilliant political animal, uniquely able to lead, persuade, cajole, and threaten Senators and Congressmen in order to get his way. And, as a Southerner, he was the only person who could make voting rights become real in a region so cruel to political empowerment. The movie grudges him credit. I do not.
Johnson brought King’s dream and demand for justice to statutory life. They needed each other. They each filled a special role, roles that only they, and they alone, could play. Destiny spoke and God’s will was done.
See the movie.
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