riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (12/13/84)
"Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story" by Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Harper & Bros., 1958)
"The Trumpet of Conscience" by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper & Row, 1968)
Because of a growing interest in nonviolent resistance, I decided recently to
go to the library and see what books I could find by its most famous
practitioner in this country. I was rather surprised to find that the
selection was meager and the titles unfamiliar. After having read a couple
of the books, I now know why: as profound and charismatic a figure as Martin
Luther King was, he wasn't much of a writer. That's not to say that there
are any serious flaws in the prose in these books; they are obviously the
careful work of a highly educated and articulate person, but they just don't
pack the wallop that King delivered in a speech given in the flesh.
That's not to say that reading them wasn't worth my while. "Stride Toward
Freedom" is King's own account of the Montgomery bus boycott of the
mid-1950's, when King first discovered both his abilities as a leader and the
effectiveness of nonviolent resistance as a means of opposing segregation.
Although I found King's way of telling the story less inspiring than the
story itself, the book is very valuable both as a crucial piece of history
and as a practical guide to what nonviolent resistance is all about.
It is instructive to contrast "Stride Toward Freedom" with "The Trumpet of
Conscience," a thin book of lectures King made for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation ten years later (and just a few months before he was
assassinated). An awful lot had happened in the intervening ten years:
American blacks had achieved victories they could hardly have hoped for
previously, yet found that their ultimate goals were tougher nuts to crack.
The worst of the overt forms of segregation had been abolished and the moral
leadership of the civil rights movement had been established (partly by
King's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964), but most blacks were as
economically oppressed and as victimized by racism as they had been before.
In addition, the faith of many people in the continued effectiveness of
King's appeal to nonviolence was wearing thin in the wake of a summer of
riots in black communities around the country. King responsed to this
impasse not by backpedaling but by expanding his concern to include the
plight of all victims of oppression in this country, in Viet Nam and around
the world. Although, again, King's message loses much of its effectiveness
in print, his evocation of the continued need to dream of and struggle for
peace and justice is at least as pertinent today as it was in 1967.
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle