Civil Rights And Wrongs

In the case of the civil rights movement, television provided the first rough draft of history. Searing images of demonstrators being beaten, attacked by police dogs and knocked down by fire hoses aroused the conscience of the nation and helped assure the movement's success. But for all its power and persuasiveness, broadcast news inevitably oversimplified the story, literally reducing it, in the days before color TV, to a black-and-white morality play. It could not explain how ordinary black men and women and their white allies mustered the extraordinary courage with which they confronted the brutality of segregation. Nor could it explain how ordinary white Southerners, who thought of themselves as decent people, could turn a blind eye to the routine indignities that Jim Crow inflicted in their name.

Now, nearly four decades after the movement's greatest triumphs, a more complex portrait of those days is emerging in a harvest of books by scholars and journalists. Two of the best are Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement by Constance Curry, and Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 by Lynne Olson.

Freedom's Daughters (Scribner; 460 pages; $30) weaves the stories of neglected figures like Pauli Murray, organizer of the first sit-ins in Washington during the 1940s, and Gloria Richardson, the firebrand of the struggle in Cambridge, Md., during the 1960s, into a seamless saga of inspiring protest. Olson's subjects had to battle not only white supremacy but also the chauvinism of male civil rights leaders. As she writes, black women in the movement "felt torn between loyalty to their race and loyalty to their sex. Most of them chose race, insisting that their own liberation could not be separated from black men's freedom." As a result, their contributions went unnoticed even by those who owed them the most.

No current book, however, delves more deeply into the nuances of the movement era than Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster; 701 pages; $35). For McWhorter, this is not only history but also autobiography. A native of Birmingham, she was 10 in 1963, about the same age as the four little black girls who were blown to pieces in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. But, as she writes, she was a born and bred member of the city's white upper crust "growing up on the wrong side of the revolution." Her father Martin McWhorter was the renegade son of a family of Ivy League-educated members of the snobbish Mountain Brook Club, where the city's financial and social leaders congregated. McWhorter's quest to understand how he became an increasingly active opponent of Martin Luther King Jr.'s crusade set her off on an ever widening historical journey.

Carry Me Home's main contribution is a massively detailed account of decades of unseemly collaboration between the genteel "Big Mules" who controlled Birmingham's industrial economy and the blue-collar terrorists whom they employed to do their dirty work against not only blacks but also unionists and anyone else who posed a threat to the established order. Rather than issue orders directly to Klan-connected thugs like Robert Chambliss, the organizer of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the Big Mules used intermediaries like public-safety commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor. His brutal tactics produced the shocking television pictures that forced the reluctant Federal Government to intervene on the movement's behalf. As King's aide Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker once said, the battle would have been lost "if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray.''

McWhorter intertwines these dramatic events with an unsettling account of her father's descent into racial vigilantism. For decades, she writes, he boasted about his Klan affiliations and the unaccounted-for nights he spent "at one of his civil rights meetings." But when she finally confronted him, he admitted that he had not been deeply involved with the Klan because "I would have had to kill people." Writes McWhorter: "I couldn't quite grasp the grandiosity that would make someone falsely claim intimate knowledge of the most horrible crime of his time." Neither can we. Like McWhorter, the best we can do is to gaze unflinchingly at the evil of oppression and erase it from our own hearts.