THE SLOW MARCH FORWARD

TAYLOR BRANCH'S HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS YEARS RECALLS THE ADVANCES AND RETREATS OF 1963-'65

Author: By James Goodman

Date: SUNDAY, February 1, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Mississippi was the most dangerous and discouraging state, but the subtitle of that chapter, ``Advance by Retreat,'' might have been the subtitle of half the chapters in this book. Even in the civil rights movement's brightest days, between dramatic victories in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965, activists everywhere were on the defensive. Most white Southerners opposed them. Most white Northerners had yet to take a stand. The forces of law and order, from rural sheriffs on up to J. Edgar Hoover, were on the side of the Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. The White House was moving in the right direction, but slowly. Movement leaders repeatedly had to retreat in order to tend to the wounded, repair rifts, rethink strategy, raise money, prod the president, and try to calm or catch up with the young people at the movement's radical edge.

Writing ``Pillar of Fire,'' Branch discovered that historians, too, must often advance by retreating. His widely praised ``Parting the Waters'' (1986) took the story from the 1940s to late 1963, concluding with chapters on the ``Children's Crusade'' in Birmingham, the March on Washington, and the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. The focus of ``Pillar of Fire'' is the year that followed. But because so many of the people who shaped 1964 figure only marginally in the first volume, Branch begins by taking us back to 1962 and 1963 to meet Malcolm X and other Black Muslims in Los Angeles, liberal clergymen in Chicago, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in St. Augustine, Fla., dozens of movement organizers and foot soldiers in Mississippi. Only then does Branch move on to Washington for the fight over the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; to Mississippi for Freedom Summer; to Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention; to New York and Chicago for the struggles between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad; and back to Alabama, where he sets the stage for the climax, still to come, of the voting rights campaign in Selma.

Readers may still wonder why it takes Branch 600 pages to move his history forward one year. The answer lies partly in the past and partly in Branch's approach to it. After Birmingham, the movement grew dramatically and spread all over the nation; Branch is trying to write a total history, a history of everything that the movement touched, and everything, everywhere, that touched it. He writes about politics in the White House and Congress and politics in churches, sharecropper's shacks, and city streets. He writes about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., two Kennedys, LBJ, and Hoover (who exploits the conflict between Johnson and Robert Kennedy to step up his surveillance and harassment of King), and he writes about scores of people whose names most readers will not know. He writes about St. Augustine, Barry Goldwater, and Muhammad Ali. He writes about the civil rights laws that Johnson knew would cost the Democratic Party the South, and the Vietnam War that Johnson knew would cost the country the Great Society. And much more.

This is jet-propelled history. Chapter 32 begins in Georgia in July 1964, with the investigation of the murder, by Klansmen, of Korean War veteran Lemuel Penn. From there we go to Mississippi, where FBI agents search for the bodies of three missing civil rights workers. Then around the globe to the US destroyer Mattox, patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin. On to Florida, just as nine rabbis and ministers go to jail for violating segregation laws. Back to Washington, where Robert McNamara and LBJ respond to reports of North Vietnamese attacks on the Mattox. Back to Mississippi, in time to discover the bodies, then Washington, Vietnam, Georgia, and finally Mississippi -- this time Jackson, in early August, for the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. All in 16 pages.

Throughout this book there are signs that Branch is struggling with the immensity of his subject and his research. There are stories he could have cut (the arrival of the Beatles is one, however interesting the riff it allows on the interracial origins of their music in gospel and jazz), and others he could have told in less detail. ``Parting the Waters'' ended in medias res. This book should end there too, at the close of Chapter 40, with King promising to ``bring a voting bill into being on the streets of Selma.'' Instead Branch added an awkward epilogue, in which he gets way ahead of his story. The struggle is likely to intensify as Branch moves on to his third volume. There are three long years before 1968.

Nonetheless, Branch's achievement is tremendous. His history is elaborate because the movement was elaborate, dizzying because the times were dizzying, wildly ambitious because the men and women who remade America in the King years were wildly ambitious. How else could a few thousand people, full of faith but armed only with a powerful American dream and the perfect means to bring it into being, imagine that they could force a mighty, mostly hostile majority to the table to negotiate civil rights, political rights, even equality? The negotiations continue to this day. The surprise, in light of our history, is not that the movement sometimes had to retreat, but that it was able to advance so far in the first place.