Two Books for Black History Month

In The Spirit Of Martin
Tinwood Books

Catherine Fox
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

   In 1966, the late artist Ben Shan crafted a powerful engraving of Martin Luther King, Jr, as many knew him — in the midst of oratory. In 1999, self-taught artist Malcah Zeldis, who had seen Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream’’ speech, painted “Peaceable Kingdom,’’ a convocation of spiritual leaders in a sunny pastoral paradise.
   Beginning in the early days of the civil rights movement and continuing into the present, King’s mission and legacy have inspired artists as diverse as Norman Rockwell and self-taught Alabama artist Thornton Dial, Jr. But it is only now that we can get an idea of the quantity and character of their outpouring. “In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,’’ the first major exhibition devoted to the subject, opened its national tour on Jan. 12 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. An eponymous book ($39.95), which adds 40 images to the 120 in the exhibition, has just been released as well.
   The artists represent different generations, races, training and aesthetic interests. Some are famous like Andy Warhol and Jacob Lawrence. Others are not known beyond their communities. They took photographs, welded steel, stitched quilts, pieced together collages. They expressed pride and sorrow, anger and hope. Spelman College professor Lev Mills says King’s death inspired him to take up social and political issues. Louisiana artist Willie Birch just wants to feel that he is participating in the movement.
   “Like King, I think of myself as someone just trying to do my part, to make whatever contribution I can with whatever talent and vision I possess,’’ he writes.
   Although the traveling exhibition will not come to Atlanta, there are several connections. Artists such as former Atlanta City councilman Archie Byron, Malaika Favorite and Mills are among those in the show. In addition, the book is published by the Atlanta outfit Tinwood Books, owned jointly by Jane Fonda and Bill Arnett, a champion of African-American self-taught art who has some pieces from his collection in the show.
   Gary Chassman, the Vermont independent art book producer and publisher for Tinwood Books, is the man behind the show and book. He began thinking about the paucity of heroes in American life in 1998.
   “Then I thought about King,’’ he says. “Here was a man whose dominion has continued to grow since his tragic death.’’
   After researching the myriad responses to King’s life and message, he realized that the visual art would make a powerful exhibition. Lacking the resources for such an endeavor, he presented his idea to Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibitions (SITES) in Washington, D.C. The staff loved the concept and assembled a curatorial team in 1999.
   Led by Chassman, the team augmented the Vermont publisher’s original research. It sent out requests, scouted for work and benefited from word of mouth. From 700 entries, Chassman and his group chose works that covered a continuum starting with the history of resistance — which began as early as 1839 with the slave rebellion aboard the ship Amistad — and running through King’s impact on contemporary art.
   While King himself is at the center of many works, artists also celebrate the ordinary people who took part in his movement, the ones who marched and sang and sat at the front of the bus. As the prescient preacher wrote in a statement for a 1963 exhibition in New York, “. . . their acts cry out for songs to be sung about them and pictures to be painted of them.’’
   SITES is proud of the show. “From among the innumerable exhibition (we have) issued over the years, ‘In the Spirit,’ is one of the most important,’’ says director Anna R. Cohn.
   So is Congressman John Lewis, who wrote a chapter for the book and loaned a Thornton Dial painting for the exhibition.
   “(The book) is a tremendous addition to the literature on the civil rights movement,’’ he said. “It will help to educate and hopefully inspire those young people weren’t even born during the time of Dr. King.’’
   Ed. Note: To this point, the exhibition is not scheduled to be shown in Los Angeles.

   Martin Luther King, Jr.
   Marshall Frady Penguin

Jonelle Bonta
Cox News Service

   “What was taking place for those few passionate years,’’ writes Marshall Frady in his Penguin Lives biography “Martin Luther King Jr.,’’ “was a kind of high lyricism of the human spirit, played out in the unlikely stage set of bleak little cities and musty towns marooned out in the sun-shimmering backlands of the South. ... Goodness and courage and evil and tragedy all had, for that brief season, a marvelously simple and immediate clarity.’’
   The mesmerizing central force of the civil rights movement was King, a young black man Atlanta-born and Boston-educated, who inherited the profession of preaching from his father and grandfather. In a move to distance himself from his domineering father, King accepted a job as pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery in the early 1950s. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, King was thrust into a national leadership role.
   At first hesitant to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, King sat in his kitchen one night and had a religious experience that sealed his fate: “It may well have been from that midnight kitchen epiphany, in fact, that King would maintain through all the turmoils of the years afterward his peculiar mien of an almost galactic remoteness, as if the deepest center of him were lost in a secret communion with something far beyond the furors of the moment.’’
   The volume of literature on King and the civil rights movement rivals that on the Civil War. To many Americans, most aspects of King’s story are as familiar as the life of Abraham Lincoln. What makes Frady’s book unique is the journalistic intimacy he brings to an epic story. A white Southerner - his widely praised 1996 biography of Jesse Jackson established his credibility among black intellectuals — and, like King, the son of a preacher, Frady was a correspondent for Newsweek and saw firsthand the personalities and events of the era. Like a military chronicler writing a narrative of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s battles, Frady deftly outlines King’s strategy and tactics in key campaigns - the familiar names (Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma) and also the important but lesser known victories and setbacks of Albany, St. Augustine and Greenwood.
   The big winner in Frady’s reassessment is King as prophet and savior, the absolutely indispensable man to the civil rights movement. Frady writes, “Somehow, in the intensity of his sheer presence, his solemn carriage and Isaianic oratory, he touched something in their souls beyond all conventional measuring or analysis. At one of his voter registration rallies in a scanty little Mississippi settlement, an elderly black man reported that he had walked thirteen miles there just to personally behold him.’’
   What suffers in Frady’s portrait, perhaps irreparably, is the image of King as saint. Alas, many of the things whispered about King by his worst enemies proved to have a basis in fact. From his college days, King was known to borrow freely from other sources in his writings, which Frady describes as “an inclination to casual textual appropriation that was to become an unhappy habit of King’s.’’
   More disturbing are the accounts of King’s sexual escapades. The night before his death, King had separate liaisons with two women and complained when a third was turned away. Frady directly addresses King’s faults, but concludes, “The truth was, even with all his failings and guilts and self-doubts . . . King was still operating out of a vastness of vision, alone in the sweep of some prophetic intuition of mission immense in its final mysterious reach of feeling and understanding.’’
   In “Wallace,’’ his groundbreaking biography of George Wallace, Frady praised a fellow writer for understanding that “the highest journalism is informed by the insights of the poet and the artist.’’ The same compliment may be paid to Frady, who, in “Martin Luther King Jr.’’ extracts poetry from history: The Kennedy brothers’ perception of King is that he is a man of “holy gullibility,’’ Lyndon Johnson has a “whumping drawl,’’ Ralph Abernathy is King’s “Sancho Panza’’ with “a country cornbread drollness,’’ and Wallace’s later embrace of black politicians is “historical hallucination.’’
   As was said about Lincoln, King belongs to the ages. And Marshall Frady has defined him for ours.