Blessed Are the Peacemakers.

By S. Jonathan Bass. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. 322 pages.

Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail is one of the most significant documents of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It brought new life, publicity, and money to the struggling Southern Christian Leadership Council, reaffirmed Birmingham on the map as a capital city of bigotry, and secured King as the leader of the civil rights movement. It also created a great deal of grief for the eight individuals to whom King addressed the letter. This book is in part a collective biography of those eight moderate ministers, in part a study of the letter itself.

King and the SCLC were running short of cash, floundering without a clear target. They needed a success to revitalize the movement, and Birmingham was a natural target. Birmingham was still under the influence of the Bull Conners, the Klan, and White Citizens Council. King thought that nonviolence begetting violence with good media coverage would give his movement a symbol, an impetus to continue.

Moderates of various stripes, the ministers opposed extremism by both sides. King equated moderation with racism and bigotry; those who were not with him were against him. History has followed King's lead, in effect dismissing them with the description: a moderate is a moderate is a moderate.

In truth, the ministers are individuals. They have names--Nolan Harmon, Charles Carpenter, George Murray, Paul Hardin, Milton Grafman, Joseph Durick, Ed Ramage, Earl Stallings. The are Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist. They differ in education, age, philosophy, openness to change. The letter and subsequent publicity affected them as individuals of differing denominations and temperaments. Some of these men became activists; some did not. Some could not or would not change. Some survived and rose through their hierarchies; some merely survived.

Bass destroys the myth of King sitting alone and hammering out the document in one extended sitting; the actuality entailed smuggling out of King's notes, forming of fragments into a coherent whole, and multiple rewrites. Actual authorship is cloudy, as with most ghostwritten political documents. The role of the ghost at a minimum involved placing the ideas into a sequence that flowed, correcting misquotes, and making the whole pleasing and readable. One of the appendices tracks the continuing changes in the letter over its publication history.

This book is fascinating on several levels. First, it revives the faded memory of eight honorable men--all but one of whom had been pressured out of Birmingham by 1971. It also puts the almost mythical letter into a context of King's pragmatism and the relative lack of success before and after this episode. It defends the moderate way, and reminds us that nearly forty years after the events of 1963 that Birmingham has not yet attained the dream of King--or those of Harmon, Carpenter, Murray, Hardin, Grafman, Durick, Ramage, and Stallings.--Reviewed by John H. Barnhill, Analyst and Historian, Tinker AFB, Oklahoma.