The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

     I can't exactly remember where I heard of this book. I think it was in something I read by Francis Fukuyama. But whatever I read, it referenced The Leopard's refrain, that "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change." The line is spoken by the young and liberal aristocrat Tancredi in the midst of Risorgimento, the Italian unification. The book deals with this issue, of how the aristocrats dealt with the changing world of the mid to late 19th century, but it has application to all times of great change. The book is especially interesting because the author, writing in the 1950s, was the descendant of the individual characters of the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last of his line of minor Sicilian princes, which ended when Italy abolished titles in 1946. He never published during his lifetime, authoring this one book, which was published posthumously. The book is significant for its depiction of Sicily and for its deep themes of decay and change. It has a nostalgic feel to it, although not necessarily Conservative.

    And politics pass the aristocrats of the story by, more like a force of nature than a force of man. The comparison becomes explicit: "The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint." We never get a direct action by any of the characters on the politics of the world. Instead, the world constantly acts on them, remaining passive. 

    Sicily itself also features as a character in the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa describes summers of obliterating heat, glassy seas pounded by the sun, and people baking in their clothes. Little towns disappear into folds in the land, and the whole earth is the yellowed color of dead grass, with trees few and far between. And there is a slowness, very stereotypical of southern Italy, and really pretty offensive. 

"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogenous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's all our fault." 

    There is always a feeling of some impending doom in The Leopard. It feels like an inevitable wave is washing over Sicilian aristocracy, ending their way of life. It is symbolized in the life and death of the strong, muscular Fabrizio, who is a massive man in 1860, but a shell of his former self in 1880. And there are lines like this one, that Fabrizio the Prince directs towards the priest, Father Pirrone:

"We're not blind, my dear Father, we're just human. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like an eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, she must worry for she is not destined to die..." [emphasis is mine]

 And here's another good example:

The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. [emphasis is mine]

A big "ending" in the book comes in the final chapter, set 30 years after the Prince Fabrizio's 1880 death in 1910. In it, Fabrizio's daughters discover that the relics they believed to be genuine in their family chapel are mostly fake, and, in the words of a priest "have no value whatsoever." I think this is meant to imply that the traditions that aristocrats maintained had lost all value, if not in truth, at least in the perception of the world. The aristocrats themselves lost any societal value. And the book ends with one of Fabrizio's daughters ordering her maid to toss the taxidermized corps of his dog, Bendico, out the window. It briefly resembles the leopard on their coat of arms before landing in a trash heap.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

    I really liked How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith basically travels across the United States (plus Senegal) to chart the history of slavery, but moreso the historical memory of slavery. It is less a book about history than the modern conception of slavery as an historical phenomenon. So Smith compared Monticello, where nearly all the tour guides are white and teaches also about Jefferson the founder, with the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is dedicated to teaching about slavery. I also really liked how well read Clint Smith is, which shows in his frequent citations of other scholarly works. The book is really seamless in transitioning from the scholarly to the personal experiences in each site.

    I've always thought it was interesting how the ambivalence toward slavery at the founding was replaced by vehement support of it in the South. I thought it was interesting that Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

American slavery was unique in relying on natural increase in slaves, whereas most slaver societies maintained profits precisely by not caring for young slaves but by raiding for new slaves in their prime working years. Slavery was so large in the South that one in three Southerners was an enslaved person in 1860, over four million people. 57% of those slaves were under the age of twenty. 

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, was the only governor in the Confederacy who opposed secession, and refused to swear and oath to the Confederacy. Apparently Abraham Lincoln also offered him military assistance to prevent Texas from joining the Confederacy, but Houston refused it.
• Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City at the outbreak of the Civil War, proposed secession to protect the cotton-trading relationship with the South.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

    I thought this was a great book. It was clearly written by an admirer of Malcolm X, but it is also critical and incisive on analyzing Malcolm's weaknesses and flaws. It contains a compelling narrative about a fascinating life and was an easy book to read. It also carries special significance since it was published less than a year before the author's death, and that Marable received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. 

Early Life

    I was struck by how chaotic Malcolm X's life was as a child. And I was also struck by the many similarities to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. X's life seemed very similar to King's life until it went off the rails following his father's death. X's father, Earl Little, had three children with his wife in Georgia before abandoning her to move north in 1915, marrying X's mothing in Montreal in 1919. Him and his new wife were both active Garveyites, spreading the conservative message of Marcus Garvey, who did not object to segregation, but hated white people and sought to build a better world for black people separate from white rule. Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and was often in conflict with the NAACP, which catered to a more middle-class crowd than Garvey. Garvey embraced capitalism, and told his followers that "wealth is strength" and the "real human rights." Garvey also favored separation of the races to such an extent that he met with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke and shared an opposition to intermarriage and social relations between the races.

    Little and his new wife lived in Philadelphia for a while, but decided to move to Omaha, Nebraska, to be UNIA field organizers. In Omaha, the Little's found life very difficult, as it was the height of the 1920's KKK revival. In early 1925, while Earl was away, Klansmen rode out to the family home and demanded that Louise, pregnant with Malcolm, come out. She told them that she was alone with her three children and that her husband was in Milwaukee, preaching. They rode off after warning Louise to take her family and leave town.

    The family next moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a few years until briefly moving to East Chicago, Indiana, before settling in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929. In November of that year, when Malcolm was four years old, the Little's house was bombed and burnt down, although no one was hurt. Instead of helping, police investigated Earl for setting the blaze to collect insurance, although it seems clear to historians that that was not the case. Then in 1931, when Malcolm was just six, his father died. It seems unclear whether it was an accident or not, but it seems like a murder the way Marable describes it. Earl was cut in half by a tram, as if he'd fallen in front of it, but it was in a part of town he wasn't expected to be in. It seems more likely that racist whites hit him with a car elsewhere and then threw his already mangled body in front of a tram in another spot. Louise was sure he had been murdered, but Malcolm was of two minds about it for the rest of his life.

    With Earl dead, the family's life was upended, and debt collectors took much of what his life insurance policy gave to his family. Louise worked hard and managed to support the family until 1937, when a suitor of hers got her pregnant and then ran off, leaving her unable to care for her children. Welfare workers stepped in to look after the children. Initially, he was placed with neighbors close by so he could still visit home, but the new baby (her eighth) pushed Louise past her breaking point. After police found her walking barefoot along a road with her baby not knowing where she was in December 1938, she was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she would be confined for twenty-four years. Malcolm rarely visited her there and was deeply ashamed. The next summer, social workers decided that Malcolm would be moved again, this time to Ingham County Juvenile Home in Mason, Michigan, ten miles to the south. At school, teachers discouraged him from following his dreams of becoming a lawyer, called him slurs, and encouraged him to take up manual labor. Within months, he was expelled from school.

    He then moved to Boston, to live with his half sister, Ella, from Earl's other marriage. But things didn't go well there. Ella enrolled Malcolm in an all-boys private school, which he went to the first morning, and never returned to after seeing there were no girls there. He never went back to a classroom. Ella, meanwhile, was not an ideal guardian, being arrested over twenty-five times, although only convicted once. Malcolm was initially scared being exposed to the big city for the first time, but started to fall to its corrupting influences.

    Soon, Malcolm was a petty criminal. He avoided the draft in 1943 by telling the psychiatrist that, "I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!" He was marked 4-F, unfit for duty, and never heard from the Army again. Malcolm was doing anything for money. The author even claims that he would go once a week to the house of a wealthy Bostonian, where he was paid to undress them both, pick up the old man, place him on a table, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder until the man climaxed. He lived two lives: one in which he was a member of his family with Ella in Boston, and another in which he "participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters."

    After being caught for a gun charge, X betrayed his accomplices from a string of robberies in exchange for a lighter sentence. Instead, because two of the accomplices were white women, the justice system went easier on them and harder on the black men involved. He was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison, and his own lawyer told him it was because "You had no business with white girls!" His white female accomplice, who had also been his girlfriend, told authorities that she "lived in constant fear" of him and served only seven months. This left a profound impact on Malcolm, writing later, "All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak."

Malcolm X in Prison

    Once in prison, Malcolm was put into a mice-infested cell seven by eight feet across, without running water. Prisoners had to relieve themselves in buckets emptied only once every twenty-four hours. Prisoners also had to eat in their cells. In prison, Malcolm initially got clean, but then returned to drugs, getting high on ground up nutmeg, which can be a hallucinogen in large amounts with effects similar to ecstasy. In prison, Malcolm met Elton Bembry, twenty years older than him, who was extremely knowledgeable, and imparted wisdom on the young Malcolm. Self-study was not just for the joy on learning--it could get Malcolm a transfer to a more lenient facility, fulfilling requirements for a university extension and devouring books, including memorizing the dictionary.

    In 1948, Malcolm's brother Philbert sent him an unusual letter, informing him that he and all the members of their family had converted to Islam. Not long after, his other brother, Reginald, wrote to him, "Don't eat any more pork, and don't smoke any more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison." Malcolm was puzzled for days, but decided to follow the advice. Malcolm was sent to Massachusetts' most lenient prison soon after, where he joined a debating club and discovered a passion for public speaking.

The Nation of Islam

    After leaving jail, Malcolm was ready to join the Nation of Islam. While there had been some Muslims among the Africans enslaved in the Americas, the numbers were low. The Nation of Islam was a much newer idea that emerged in the 20th century, and had little connection to Islam as practiced around the world. The first people to bring Islam to the black community were part of the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded in 1913 but an African American named Timothy Drew. The Nation of Islam emerged in the 1930s, when a man named Wallace Fard started going door-to-door in Detroit seeking to join African-Americans to his new religion. Fard was olive-skinned, and it is unclear where he came from. It is also unclear where he went, as he disappeared in 1934 and was never seen again. But the religion became a phenomenon across the Midwest and then the Northeast among African Americans, and was led after 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The religion found great appeal among Garveyites, since it preached a similar self-reliant, apolitical style. But it was hardly related to Islam, and preached a bizarre doctrine about the evil of white people, who were created by an evil black scientist. It resembles a cult much more than a religion. The leadership would extract huge sums of money from members in tithes and by requiring them to buy copious amounts of the periodical they produced, Muhammad Speaks.

    Malcolm rose very quickly to become one of the Nation of Islam's top preachers in the 1950s. He stood out for being one of their most effective speakers and organizers, and was sent to different Temples across the country to represent Elijah Muhammad. But the problems he kept running into were that he sometimes outshone Elijah Muhammad himself, and that X wanted to get into politics, which Elijah Muhammad was extremely opposed to. Malcolm would continually organize protests which the NOI leadership kept trying to reign in.

    As a representative of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm took a trip to the Middle East in 1959, which may have given him his first doubts about the NOI. He realized that all Muslims were clearly not black, and he also realized that he knew very little about orthodox Islam, and the Muslims of the Middle East were surprised that he could call himself Muslim without any knowledge of Arabic. Malcolm's trip would be one of the first of the trips made by senior NOI leaders that caused them to try to bring NOI closer to standard Islam. After Malcolm went, Elijah Muhammad started sending his own sons to the Middle East before and after he himself went in 1960. NOI was heavily criticized by American Muslims throughout its existence as being a heretical, fake branch of Islam. Islam is a universal religion that seeks to transcend race, and NOI was in fundamental conflict with that when it preached that Islam was a black person's religion.

    Another reason for the eventual split between Malcolm and NOI was Malcolm's discovery that Elijah Muhammad wasn't really the holy man he portrayed himself as. In fact, Muhammad was cheating on his wife with several other women, abusing his position as leader to sleep with them. Moreover, he was abandoning his children by these women. And perhaps worst of all, one of the women was Evelyn Williams, a woman that Malcolm had dated and broke up with in the past, who he may have still had feelings for. One time, two of the women brought their children by Elijah Muhammad all the way to his hideaway in Arizona and left them at his door. He turned them over to social services the next day.

    In April 1963, conflict between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad came to a head when X flew to Phoenix to confront his leader about all the women Muhammad had impregnated. While Malcolm was seeking to find solutions, his snooping around on this issue was perceived as an attack on Muhammad. Malcolm began preaching that it wasn't necessary for a messenger like Muhammad to be perfect, contradicting the official NOI doctrine that Elijah Muhammad was perfection. At this time, Louis X (later known as Louis Farrakhan) decided along with other leaders in NOI to turn against Malcolm, and started informing against him to Elijah Muhammad. Continuing to contradict the order to avoid politics, Malcolm kept getting drawn into political disputes. One of the worst was shortly after the Kennedy assassination, which Malcolm X described (only after being prompted by reporters) as "the chickens coming home to roost" as a payback for white violence against blacks. For this comment, Muhammad suspended Malcolm for 90 days from the NOI, which meant he would be shunned by all members. The real purpose of this may have been to create an indefinite suspension from the beginning, but even if it wasn't it certainly became indefinite when Malcolm kept engaging in NOI activities. At this time Malcolm endorsed the young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali against Sonny Liston. Ali won, and Malcolm brought him into the NOI fold, but Ali quickly chose the side of Muhammad against Malcolm X. his life was spinning out of control, and on March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced his decision to leave the Nation of Islam.

Leaving the Nation of Islam

    It may be of some significance that as Malcolm X was leaving the Nation of Islam, the first major Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. It seems to symbolize to me the defeat of the idea that black people could succeed by staying away from politics. It vindicated Malcolm's statements to that effect, but proved the weakness of his behavior by staying in NOI. During the legislative process to pass the bill, Malcolm X visited Washington, D.C., and went to listen to a press conference that Martin Luther King was giving after his discussions on the Civil Rights Act with senators. They encountered each other accidentally in the hallway after leaving through separate doors, and a photographer took a snapshot of them shaking hands--it was the only time the two ever met. The next month, Malcolm X gave the speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," which was momentous not for the violence it called for (Malcolm was already doing that) but because he called for political action--voting--for the first time.

    Already, Malcolm knew that NOI thugs were planning to kill him. These plots and attempts escaped scrutiny because their intended victim was Malcolm X, which left the police unsympathetic, and also because it was well-known that NOI members did not carry weapons. It was less well-known that they had enforcers who would regularly beat and intimidate members. One way to escape them was to leave the country, which he did in April of 1964, embarking for Mecca on the Hajj.

    The Hajj was an awakening for Malcolm. Not only did it mean his embrace of orthodox Islam over NOI, but it also exposed him to Islam as a universal religion, with no distinction based on race. Famously, Malcolms declared that, "I have eaten from the same place, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God . . . with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue . . . [for] the first time in my life . . . I didn't see them as 'white' men." This reveals the huge change Malcolm was going through, but also how naive he had been. His world had been small while he was a NOI member, and it now became large enough to fit more complexity in it. Travel broadened his horizons.

    But leaving NOI also left Malcolm in a legal struggle to keep his house, which was owned by NOI. Malcolm had put so much trust in NOI that he had few assets of his own, trusting Elijah Muhammad to always look out for him. But now the faithful swore loyalty to Muhammad in the temples, and were expected to denounce Malcolm for heresy. Meanwhile, Malcolm was attempting to set up the Muslim Mosques Incorporated (MMI) as a competitor with NOI for black Muslims while creating the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) as a secular, black nationalist organization. This structure was prone to turf struggles between the two organizations and only endured based on Malcolm's charisma. After returning to the United States from the Hajj in late May, Malcolm left again to spend nineteen weeks in Africa, leaving his organizations to flounder.

    In Africa, Malcolm sought to convince African nations to condemn the United States for its treatment of African-Americans. This effort failed as narrowly interpreted, but Malcolm was still very successful in building diplomatic inroads across the continent. He was treated like a visiting dignitary everywhere he went. But when he returned, he was back in danger.

The Assassination

    The assassination of Malcolm X was planned for a year, and attempted several times before it succeeded. Failures included trying to ram his car off the road, an ambush right in front of his house, and bombing his house. The plan that worked was a full-frontal assault during one of Malcolm's speeches. Very unfortunately, it was a rare occasion in which his wife, Betty, and their children attended. It took so long because Muhammad never exactly gave an order, but just a sort of Henry II vague desire, because Malcolm still had the respect of much of NOI, and because Malcolm had been outside the country so much.

    But it was not possible for NOI to leave him alive. He threatened the legitimacy of NOI by creating another Muslim sect, and the defections of two of Elijah Muhammad's sons, Wallace and Akbar, made the situation even more dire. Muhammad must have felt he was fighting for his life. The murder itself involved four likely gunmen. Two started a fake fight, and while attention was turned away, a third approached with a shotgun. A fourth detonated a smoke bomb to cause even more havoc, and then they all turned their guns on Malcolm until he was dead. 

    Marable makes a convincing argument that justice was not done. Only one assailant was caught on the scene--the others escaped. The shotgun-wielder was caught, and two men claimed to be the other two were as well, but Marable gives good reasons to doubt that they were actually the shooters, even though they would have had the same motive. Most shocking, the police did not secure the crime scene, and the owner of the Audubon Ballroom had the entire space cleaned up, blood mopped off the floor, to host an event four hours later.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

    There are so many interesting points of comparison between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The two were contemporaries: Malcolm X lived from 1925-65 and MLK from 1929-1968. They were the two most famous leaders of Black thought in the 1960s, but completely divergent. King was a Christian preacher, X was a Nation of Islam preacher. King sought integration, X supported segregation. King was a Southerner, and X was a Northerner. Both were sexist, but in very divergent ways. King loved women, and he was a serial womanizer, but he felt there was a certain place for women as wives and mothers, and not as leaders. Malcolm really seemed to hate women. He wanted nothing to do with his wife, and didn't enjoy the company of women like King did. While King was known for tons of affairs, X didn't cheat on his wife, but he didn't spend much time with her either. Malcolm X was also financially abusive, withholding money from his wife, even saying himself that he put her "in jail financially." They also had short careers. Malcolm X only really became involved in Civil Rights in 1957, following an altercation between NOI members and police. MLK got involved during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956. The result is that their careers were eight and twelve years, each lasting until their assassinations. And both knew that they would be killed, making frequent comments about it before the end.

    Ideologically, I found it interesting that both men were converging on the idea that the United States needed a more radical change. Malcolm X was feeling this way by 1964, and King was certainly thinking it by 1966. Both were tempted by socialism as the answer. But Malcolm had less than a year to live after leaving NOI and was never able to fully develop his ideas. He also carried far less sway with black Americans. Consider this- Malcolm X endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, but LBJ carried 96% of the black vote. And he would still say insane things, like that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a "device to deceive the African people." Today and then, it was King's influence who was the greater. Black nationalism remains a fringe movement, while integrationism brought about the first black president. Interestingly, Marable identifies hip-hop and film as bringing back interest in Malcolm X in the 90s, but Islamism as a source for a revival of Malcolm X's legacy in the future.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• While living in Harlem in the 1940s, X worked at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where both he and another employee both had red hair. Malcolm had always been called Red, and to distinguish the two, they called Malcolm "Detroit Red" (no one had heard of Lansing) and the other one "Chicago Red." Chicago Red would change his name again later when he began a comedy career, going by Redd Foxx.
• Of the 15 million Africans taken hostage to the Americas as slaves, about 650,000, or 7-8%, were Muslims.
• NOI maintained connections with the American Nazi Party due to their shared belief in segregation and the NOI doctrine that all whites were racist, and therefore the Nazis were the only ones who were honest about it.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

    King was an excellent book and I'm so glad I picked it up. Martin Luther King is obviously a very well-known figure, but sometimes his fame gets in the way of actually knowing who he was as a person. Eig starts and finishes the book by arguing for a fuller understanding of King not as some super hero of civil rights, but as a good but flawed man who made a massively positive impact on the country over a thirteen year career from age 26 to 39. Eig notes that King himself has been lost in the modern view of him--at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., Eig didn't find a single one of King's books in the gift shop. His age was a huge takeaway- King was so young, but his shar shone very bright during his short time of influence. I also picked up a Malcolm X biography while reading this, since I wanted to compare the two, so some comparisons will follow below, and I'll do a separate reflection on the Malcolm X book when I finish it.

    This biography makes it clear that King's childhood primed him for church leadership and activism. Born an intelligent and thoughtful child, King's parents cultivated his intellect. But his father was also strict. This provided some discipline, but also fear. Bayard Rustin speculated that MLK's beatings from his father made him more fearful, and that even though King had no problems confronting white racists, he "could not bear conflict with older civil rights leaders." His father beat him severely as a child. King went on a trip north to Connecticut before college that really changed him and gave him perspective on the world outside of the South and segregation. King went to the northeast again after his time at Morehouse to attend Crozer, a theological seminary. During his time there, a white student pulled a gun on him, accusing him of pranking him by messing up his room. King refused to file a complaint, earning respect on campus. King also filed a suit against a tavern that refused to serve him in New Jersey while he was there.

    King had two major faults in his life. The lesser fault was plagiarism. I feel like there are at least a half a dozen instances in this book where he plagiarizes something. Part of this is explained by the culture of preachers at the time, who freely borrowed phrases from one another. Scholar Keith D. Miller wrote, "words are shared assets, not personal belongings." The greater one was adultery. I had no idea about this side of him, but it seems like everywhere he went, he was dating women and constantly pursued by them. At Crozer, he even dated a white woman that he seriously considered marrying. Harry Belafonte called her his true love. This was all fine and good as a young man, but even after he was married to Coretta, he would travel a lot and see women wherever he was. He had a kind of magnetic personality and a lot of power, which drew women. On one trip he might call as many as five women and meet up with them. We known about this now thanks to the recollections of others and also because of the massive FBI wiretapping of King everywhere he went. But the press refused to report it, because at that time the thinking was, "If you print it about him, you can print it about any man," according to the editor of the Augusta Chronical. This rule wouldn't be broken until the Gary Hart saga in 1988.

    MLK became the preacher at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at the young age of 26. Later that year, he was already leading the bus boycott efforts. I was struck by how small the demands of Black people in Montgomery were. They only wanted riders to remain segregated without black riders forced to get up from their seats when white people arrived, for the city to hire black drivers, and no more name-calling or insulting black riders. They didn't even ask to sit in the front of the bus. But even so, that was unacceptable to whites. The mayor responded to the bus boycott by leading a campaign of harassment against black drivers, having police issue tons of citations and tickets to them for all sorts of trumped-up violations. There was also a grassroots opposition: King's home was bombed by unknown attackers, but noone was hurt. The Ku Klux Klan rode through Black neighborhoods trying to intimidate people. But after 381 days, the Supreme Court refused to reconsider its decision ordering desegregation, and the boycott ended. But instead of desegregating, the city discontinued bus service, a strategy that would be repeated over and over with public goods.

    The Birmingham protests of 1963 were extremely significant for the movement. The response of “Bull” Connor to release dogs and use firehoses to attack protesters in full view of the press created horrific images that woke up the whole nation to who the savages were in the civil rights fight. It also lead to King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which became famous across the country. That year, the Kennedy Administration began drafting major civil rights legislation that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    The movement really peaked in August 1963 with the March on Washington. It was extremely disciplined and choreographed. Marchers could only bring pre-approved signed, and black police officers were hired to provide an extra buffer between marchers and park rangers and D.C. cops. The march was primarily black--about three-quarters--but TV broadcasts made it look closer to 50-50 by focusing on white marchers. It was the biggest gathering of black people in America's entire history. It should be noted, however, that is was still symptomatic of the sexism that ran rampant through the civil rights movement. No women were offered speaking slots, although six women were asked to stand and be recognized. Rosa Parks managed to merely say, "Hello, friends of freedom, it's a wonderful day." King's "I Have a Dream" speech was written at late the night before, King having only arrived to his hotel at 10pm. He outlined it for two hours and then took another hour and a half to make a finished project, finishing at 3:30am. And at the end of his speech, he improvised. The entire final portion was off-script, including the lines about the "red hills of Georgia" and children hand-in-hand. By the end of the year, King was named Time Person of the Year. This would be the peak of King's popularity, although he still received criticism from more radical ends of the spectrum, both white and black. 

    King also evolved in his ideology over time. In Why We Can't Wait, his 1964 book, King initially included sections about a program for reparations for slavery and segregation. But after meeting with President Johnson, he decided to focus on poverty instead of race. The "Negro Bill of Rights" became the "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged," and called for the eradication of poverty, guaranteed full employment, and an unconditional income paid to everyone as a right of citizenship. He didn't forget about race, but in 1964, King was focusing on race-neutral solutions. As his career went on, King would add to his ideology a strong opposition to the Vietnam War, and greater emphasis on social democratic policies. He also started to feel that reforming existing institutions was not the answer. By 1967, King felt that there needed to be a "reconstruction of the entire society." King also felt after the Chicago campaign that "Most Americans are unconscious racists."

    The Civil Rights Movement hit its peak in 1963 and crested until it fell in 1966. Two major national laws were passed in King's lifetime: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, which contained the Fair Housing Act, was passed by both House and Senate while King was alive, and signed into law by President Johnson a week after King's assassination. 

    King was the target of frequent assassination attempts. There were bombings, stabbings, and beatings long before his actual assassination. That was just the last in a series. From 1957, King's house was bombed with his children inside, and there were countless more attempts on King's life. He became depressed and very frequently said that he expected he would be killed too. MLK's first words to Coretta after the JFK assassination were, "This is what is going to happen to me also." And Coretta couldn't find words to respond, saying later that, "I could not say, 'It won't happen to you. I felt he was right."  At a time when he was asked about how a movie about his life would end, King replied, "It ends with me getting killed." King would talk about retiring sometimes, and often went to the hospital during bouts of depression. I think that more analysis of King's and other historical figures' mental health would be a really interesting field of future study.

    Part of the problem with the Civil Rights movement after 1965 was that they had achieved their major goals. The Civil Rights Movement, as led by King, was a southern, Christian movement attempting to end segregation. When de jure segregation ended in the South, King and others turned north, but struggled. In these cities, the major issue to fight was housing discrimination, but there was less patience for non-violent techniques. Moreover, many blacks did not want to live in integrated communities as much as they just wanted to be treated equally, so support was not as strong for change. Despite this, the Movement found major success in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act, ending housing discrimination. This was the final major piece of civil rights legislation of the movement.

    Another major moment in ending the Civil Rights Movement was James Meredith's March Against Fear. Three weeks into a march through the South, Meredith was shot by a white man. Afterwards, Meredith swore he would not march unarmed again, and much of the non-violent movement was discredited. Meredith survived, and the picture taken just after he was shot (including his attacker to the left) won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1967. See below.

Civil rights organizations rallied to finish the march in Meredith's name, but it became incredibly divisive. The movement essentially disintegrated as Stokely Carmichael, the new SNCC chairman, introduced the phrase "Black Power," and disagreement ensued about the pace of change. It would be the last great march of the Civil Rights Movement. King's popularity was also declining. In 1964, King was the fourth most admired man in the world, but he slipped to sixth of ten in 1965 and by 1966, he was off the list entirely. In 1966, 63% of those polled viewed King negatively.

    To finish, I'll just say that by learning more about Martin Luther King as a person and not a super hero, I've come to respect him even more. Seeing him as a human being makes his achievements all the more impressive because Eig tells the story of King's struggle as well as his triumph. And we see the sadness of his fall from grace in the later 60s before his assassination. It is painful to see that at his death, King was in the political wilderness, but inspiring that he was unbowed in his determination to leave the world better than he found it.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• King was also targeted for income-tax fraud in 1957, which he was acquitted of by an all-white jury.
• At an SCLC convention in Birmingham, a large white man rose from his seat and punched King twice in the face. Witnesses said King dropped his hands and let himself be punched and commanded, “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him,” as others brought the assailant to the ground. The man was a member of the American Nazi Party, and King said that they should pray for him instead. He declined to press charges and invited the man to listen to the rest of the program.
• When LBJ's family dog died, J. Edgar Hoover gave them another, which Johnson named J. Edgar.
• King and Malcolm X only met once, briefly in Washington, D.C. Malcolm X went to Selma and wanted to meet King in January 1965, but King was in jail, and Malcolm asked Coretta to "tell Dr. King that I'm sorry I won't get to see him? I want him to know that I didn't come to make his job more difficult. I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was they would be willing to listen to Dr. King." Malcolm X was assassinated a month later.

How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter

    So I liked this book overall, but I was very much put off my two things: the over-quantification of politics and the prescription at the end to just embrace the liberal policies of the Democratic party and everything will be solved. As for the second one, I don't disagree, but it was just uninteresting and unrealistic. Otherwise, the book had other good insights.

    One thing I thought was interesting was the idea that civil wars rose alongside democracies. Part of the rise of democracy has meant that legitimacy comes from popular support, so now wars for political control are fought not by a few elites, but by the entire population of a country. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, ideology and class were the primary drivers of civil war, but today, nationalism dwarfs all other causes of civil war. This is probably for the reason that democratic legitimacy comes from "the people" and most people agree that "the people" are the nation. Walter writes that in the first five years after World War II, 53 percent of civil wars were fought between ethnic factions, but since the end of the Cold War, 75 percent of civil wars have been fought between ethnic factions. What is critical to know in analyzing whether an ethnic/national civil war will begin is the trajectory of the groups. The most likely culprit to initiate a civil war is a formerly dominant ethnic group that considers itself native to the land when it sees itself losing power. This was the case of the Serbians in Yugoslavia, for example.

    One thing I wish that Walter explored more was the hard balancing act between democracy, demography, and nationalism. Democracies gain their legitimacy from their role in determining the will of the nation. They also gain legitimacy from their acceptance of a broad degree of freedom among their citizens. But when the demographics of a democracy change, the democracy is forced to choose between remaining true to its old nation or to its liberal values. Either it imposes new controls on liberty to maintain the old national demographics, or it allows the national demographics to change, but loses its source of national legitimacy. This is a hard question. But it is also the most interesting question raised by the book and doesn't get enough attention.

    Something interesting Walter touched on is the usefulness of terrorism in targeting a democracy. Terrorism targets citizens, the very people with political power. In a system like a monarchy, where one person has total power, an assassination is more useful to decapitate a powerful state. But in democracy, where the people have the power, terrorists know that they can inflict pain on the citizens to get the government to deliver concessions. Terror is also easier to do in democracies because they have more freedom of movement and less surveillance.

    Finally, I liked Walter's point about the importance of leadership in avoiding conflict. For example, as South Africa transitioned out of apartheid, it was lucky in that it had leaders in de Klerk and Mandela who were able to work together and compromise to avoid the conflict. If either one had defected from that agreement, a bloody war would have been likely.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• There was a huge increase in militia activity when Obama became president, with the number of known militias rising from 43 in 2008 to 334 in 2011. 

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

    This was a really intense book about a really intense storm. It's a little weird since the Andrea Gail lost radio contact, so there's not a ton to write about of the crew's actual experience. Junger fills the book with a long period of tension at the beginning, lots of facts about the sea and storms, and a long portion after the sinking of the Andrea Gail about the other people in the sea during the storm. One thing that gave me pause about the book was that it felt somewhat exploitative since the disaster happened so recently before the book was published. That made this feel more like true crime.

    The town where the Andrea Gail departed from was a fishing town. Gloucester, Massachusetts, had always fished and lost men to the sea--losing a couple hundred men a year in peak years. Since 1650, 10,000 Gloucestermen have died at sea, more than in all of the United States' major wars. From Gloucester, swordfishermen go to the Grand Banks or Georges Bank, which happen to sit on the worst storm tracks in the world. Junger writes,

Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow jet streams out to the sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process . . . As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank--only 180 miles east of Cape Cod--was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for nearly 300 years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on.

But Georges was also home to huge amounts of marine life, and fishing resumed in the 19th century and was hugely profitable. But, 

Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled speared and rigging.

    So the Andrea Gail went out to catch literal tons of swordfish, and were ready to head back after a month at sea when the storm came. The storm was really three storms. One was a hurricane from the south, another was a cold front coming off the Canadian Shield, and another was a storm off of the Great Lakes. They all converged at the Grand Banks. The decision of when to haul in the lines and return to port is a calculation about how much fish you think you can catch, how much you have in the hold that needs to get back to port before it rots, and how quickly you think you can get back. Weather can be a complicating factor. For the crew of the Andrea Gail, who were already heading back, the issue was that if they took a more circuitous path to avoid the storm, they might risk losing a huge amount of their catch. Moreover, they couldn't know where the storm would head next. In a short conversation over the radio with another captain, the last words out of the Andrea Gail are, "She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong." The Andrea Gail diverts slightly north to find colder water, which doesn't feed a storm as well.

    The Andrea Gail isn't the only ship caught up in the Perfect Storm. The Contship Holland a 542-footer 200 miles to the east has things written in its logbook like, "Ship labors hard in very high following seas," "water over deck and deck cargo, ship strains heavily...," and "ship no longer obeys." For reference, the Andrea Gail is just 72 feet long. And the waves are longer. Junger writes, "Forty-five foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. There is a possible lull in the eye of the storm, that would have lasted until one AM. But if the Andrea Gail survived it, it would get worse. Bigger waves would come. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest." The waves end up reaching 70 feet, which mean angled faces of over 100 feet, waves that very few people have ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's very possible that the sea could have overwhelmed the Andrea Gail at that point, but another ship, a 55-footer, wasn't flipped until winds hit 100 knots and waves were 70 feet. Junger estimates that the Andrea Gail made it to the lull, but was heavily beaten, with windows out and electronics dead, the crew hoping to survive while soaked in complete darkness.

    Some waves are worse than others. Gravity waves, or swells, are unlikely to sink a ship no matter how tall they are. A cork floating on the surface would not move side-to-side, just up and down. But in shallow water, waves break when the wave drags on the bottom and the top moves forward, falling over. In the open ocean, "the opposite happens: wind builds waves up so fast that the distance between crests can't keep up, and they collapse under their own mass." These waves don't ripple out, but break, transporting a huge amount of water.

    The Coast Guard never receives a call from the Andrea Gail. This is probably because their radios are out, along with the rest of their electricity and lighting. The only link the ship has to the world is the EPIRB, an emergency device that can be triggered manually to call for rescue or is triggered by water. But at this point, there can be no rescue. No ship can reach the Andrea Gail fast enough, and no helicopter can reach the center of the storm. But the EPIRB is never tripped. That means that the captain must have thought that they could survive right until the moment they didn't. It probably means they were hit by a massive rogue wave that they couldn't see since it was pitch black. The only way to survive out there would be to meet every seventy-foot wave head on. But in the darkness, it would be impossible to see them coming. They would feel a big drop into the trough, "a lurch, and the boat starting up a slope way too steep to survive."

    Junger proceeds to tell the reader all about what drowning is like. We know what it's like from people who have drowned and been miraculously saved. It's not really possible to inhale until a person its that the last moment of consciousness. the instinct not to try to breathe underwater is too strong. Usually, a person will hold their breath until their have so much carbon dioxide and so little oxygen in their blood that they take an involuntary breath. This happens, on average, after 87 seconds underwater. If the drowning person hyperventilates beforehand, like free divers do to flush out carbon dioxide, this might be extended to as long as 140 seconds. And then Junger writes an incredibly bleak passage that I'm just going to copy below.

    Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing "voluntary apnea," choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. "So this is drowning," a drowning person might think. "So this is how my life finally ends."

    Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable. "I can't die, I have tickets to next week's game," is not an impossible thought for someone who is drowning. The drowning person may even feel embarrassed, as if he's squandered a great fortune. He has an image of people shaking their heads over his dying so senselessly. The drowning person may feel as if it's the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.

    These thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happen. In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It's so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.

    In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.

    Occasionally someone makes it back from this dark world, though, and it's from these people that we know what drowning feels like.

Miscellaneous Facts:

•  Fish are not equally distributed in the water column and tend to collect at the meeting point of cold and warm water. So fishermen try to hang their bait there, and to leave long lines in faster currents to cover more area.
• "A waterfront joke: What's the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags."
• More people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States.
• Sometimes the book shows its age being from 1997. I cracked up reading this: "Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it's called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It's accurate to within fifteen feet."
• Another one of these^ "There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising . . . One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by tankers [oil spreads over and calms waters]. Another explanation is that the recent warming trend--some call it the greenhouse effect--has made storms more frequent and severe."
• "A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years."