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In order to get as much advanced standing as possible, I shamelessly bypassed the Yale admissions office, accepting the offer of Henri Peyre, the chairman of Yale’s French department, that he accompany me on a visit to Dean De Vane, who presided over the academic affairs of the college. Monsieur Peyre boldly proposed that …
Continue reading “A Leap of Faith, a Leap of Action: Excerpts from a Memoir”
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Twenty-five years ago the nation’s attention was riveted on the civil rights struggle in the South. That struggle entered one of its critical stages in the summer of 1964 when young black civil rights workers in Mississippi, aided by about 800 white college students from the North, tried to bring blacks in the Magnolia state …
Continue reading “In Keeping with the Prophets: The Mississippi Summer of 1964”
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At the height of the watershed civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, as the battle in the streets turned in favor of the demonstrators, a jubilant Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed an overflow crowd at St. Luke’s Baptist Church and saluted those who had braved police dogs and filled the …
Continue reading “In the Churches, in the Streets: Taylor Branch on ‘the King Years’”
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Men and women who have dreams, who see visions, and who then have the audacity to prophesy in word and deed have been described by the sustainers of the status quo of every age as being drunk. As Peter had to explain at Pentecost: “For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it …
Continue reading “Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968: In Memoriam”
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Central to the thinking of Martin Luther King was the concept of the "Beloved Community." Liberalism and personalism provided its theological and philosophical foundations, and nonviolence the means to attain it. True, King’s initial optimism about the possibility of actualizing that community in history was in time qualified by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. But the …
Continue reading “Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community”
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It is commonly observed that the crisis in race relations dominates the arena of American life. This crisis has been precipitated by two factors: the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the South to the Supreme Court’s momentous decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, and the radical change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself. …
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When I went to Racine, I idealistically thought of myself as color-blind. Most of the families with whom I worked were African-American, as were all of my colleagues, and for a time I naïvely believed that I had somehow become part of that community. But if I learned anything that year it was that there …
Continue reading “Racism, Reparations and Accountability Payback?”
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On January 20, America officially celebrated for the first time the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a national holiday. The occasion was unique because King is the first clergyman and the first Afro-American to be so honored. It is unique also because it comes so soon after King’s assassination in 1968 and at …
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The first time that I met a survivor of the Holocaust was in the summer of 1964 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The Civil Rights Bill had recently been passed by Congress, and, along with other students from the North, I was in Mississippi helping blacks register to vote. It was, by virtually everyone’s reckoning, a mean …
Continue reading “Righteous Resistance and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
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No one had a greater impact on the cultural consciousness of African-Americans during the second half of the 20th century than Malcolm X. More than anyone else he revolutionized the black mind, transforming docile Negroes and self-effacing colored people into proud blacks and self-confident African-Americans. Civil rights activists became Black Power militants and declared, “It’s …
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In December, 1968, a jury in Memphis, Tennessee, concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and “others, including governmental agencies.” Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the …
Continue reading “The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict”
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The 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was grandly celebrated and widely reported by the media. This year also marked the 20th anniversary of another invasion, but this one was little noted. Few of its veterans returned either to celebrate or to relive the harsh experiences of the summer of 1964. Those who did …
Continue reading “The Mississippi Freedom Summer Twenty Years Later”
