( This review is in two parts. The conclusion will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON, along with an interview with the author, John A. Williams. )

I

TO COME effectively to terms with John A. Williams's most recent book, The King God Didn't Save, "Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.," one must deal with three complex phenomena which-both as individual and collective entities-reveal much of the nature of America today and over the years of King's public prominence.

The first phenomenon is that of Martin King himself, both as a public man and as a private man, and that wasteland where the two identities merge or conflict. The book, which is the second phenomenon, is divided into sections with one focusing upon each identity, and with the area of convergence or conflict. The book, is the second phenomenon, is divided into sections with one focusing upon each identity, and with the area of convergence or conflict acting as a connecting leitmotif. The third phenomenon involved is that of the environment in which both King and the book exist. This environment, which, in simplified terms, can be taken as America, obviously plays a role in the life of every public figure and each book which attempts to analyze him; the role played by America, particularly in terms of the response that has greeted the book since its publication in August of 1970, is of such fundamental importance as to be accorded its own place in the dramatis personae of what threatens to become both the tragedy of Martin King and the tragedy of The King God Didn't Save.

II

THE DEDICATION of the book is "Respectfully... to the memory of the man Martin Luther King could have become, had he lived." This statement is, in effect, a capsulization of Williams's attitude toward King and reveals something of the nature of the imperative which motivated him to write the book. The core of Williams's conception of King is that his ascension to true greatness as a man and as a political force capable of exerting genuine leverage came far later in his life than is generally assumed-if it came at all. Williams believes that King, at the time of his assassination, was only beginning to structure his efforts into forms that could generate the necessary concrete political power and accurately focus it towards the achievement of the survival and self-determination of black people and poor people. The neo-Populism of the Poor People's March and King's activity in the antiwar movement are cited by Williams as indicative of the new directions in which King was moving. Because these new directions posed genuine threats to the institutionalized power of the Church and State in some exercise of white power in America, they provoked "the awe-the United States... that cut King down in conspiracy, and then conspired to plug the memory of the man with putty."

However by examining King's career, Williams demonstrates that these were new directions, collineations not taken or even visible to the man the media credited with having steered black people to their "victories" at Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and the other scenes of the black liberation struggle of the '50's and '60's. Thus, crucial to Williams's conception of the King phenomenon is the growth of Martin Luther King's awareness and sense of responsibility which together with his personal courage made him the man and the figure which the white press and his own ego had once convinced him he had been from the beginning.

III

WILLIAMS explores the 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Dexter was King's first pastorate, and at the time, he said with pride that it "was sort of a silk-stocking church catering only to a certain class." King's life-long friend, the late Louis Lomax, put it more bluntly. As Williams quotes him, "King well knew before he assumed the pastorate... that nonprofessional and uneducated Negroes were not welcome at the Dexter Avenue altar."

King's pride in being the pastor of a "big folks church" was the inevitable result of his background. His family was situated in such a position in the hierarchy of black Atlanta as to have indoctrinated him with this naive reverence of people with "all the right things" behind their names and other basic American middle class values, as well as those particular perversions with which blacks have buttressed those values, such as an internal pecking order based on color-the whiter the righter. Williams says that "King himself apparently had some color hang-up... Of King's personal attitude towards women with dark skin, Person B (Williams does not further identify this source) told me: 'Martin often said that he was willing to fight and die for black people, but was damned if he could see anything pretty in a black woman. '"

For some people such a picture of King is difficult to accept or even understand. But, as Williams explains, "King's color consciousness seems to have been a direct throwback to the social values of black Atlanta." In cities like Atlanta and Washington, where there is a sizable black middle class, color did, and to an extent continues to function as a criterion for acceptance into the upper realms of what E. Franklin Frazier, the black sociologist, termed "the society without substance." Cast after the mold of the white power and Puritan classes, the mores and attitudes of the middle class of the black South are "the direct result of national white attitudes toward black people. Because those attitudes were (and continue to be) so pronouncedly racist, it was natural that within the oppressed community there would be reflected caste systems that were also to some degree racist." Internal racism, or more precisely, hueism, was and is only a part of the cultural whitewash of the black bourgeoisie. Robbed of that sense of greater history and of viable alternative social institutions and codes which are the prerequisites of self-determination, the majority of the black middle class had adopted white social forms and had, to some degree, accepted the assumptions in which white middle class behavior is grounded. In effect, this was the program outlined by Booker T. Washington in his Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895, a miasma which had been inured in the black middle class fifty years before King assumed the Dexter pastorate.

"King's presence in Montgomery had been as carefully plotted as the presence of, say, the Kennedys in the U. S. Senate. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was the place where the coming big men of the black Baptist organization served; it was a step on the escalator... Given King's up-bringing and education, and his father's plans for him, King would very probably have refused to pastor a lesser church." Northern-educated and ambitious, King had gone to Montgomery with a sense of secure possession of a successful future within the structure of the Baptist church and along the lines which success for Southern blacks had been determined since Reconstruction. However, what had not been planned for was the radical change in atmosphere produced by the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the acts of white violence which followed it-in particular, Emmet Till's murder, and the tired feet of Rosa Parks.

These last two factors are of particular importance in terms of King's rise to national prominence. Emmet Till, a 14 year old child from Chicago who had gone South to visit relatives, was kidnapped in August of 1955 by white men who beat his body into mutilation, shot him through the head, and then tied him to the wheel of a cotton gin and dropped him into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The two men who were tried testified at the trial-at which black reporters were segregated-that Till had whistled at a white woman. They were acquitted; however neither the symbolism of the murder act itself nor that of the conduct of the trial was lost on the Southern black population, particularly the middle class which had come to believe that the days of such barbarity had passed. Emmet Till's murder was notice served that the children and grandchildren were as expendable as their parents and grandparents had been and still were. The message that the dream was not only to be deferred but dismasted, disregarded and dispensed with provided the black South with fresh and indisputed evidence of the irrationality of its circumstance. A response was inevitable. The investment in the dream had been too heavy for its foreclosure to go unresisted. The response came in Montgomery the day Rose Parks, a respected former secretary of the local NAACP, refused to obey a bus driver's order to yield her seat in the forward part of the jimcrow section of a crowded bus.

She made no attempt to resist arrest for violating city segregation ordinances. Still, in an event which compressed past and future into the liquid nugget of the present, her stand echoed the tradition of subtle resistance that had characterized the efforts black people have made to obtain justice in America-the quiet violence of ground glass in the master's soup-while simultaneously conveying the continuing injustice and simple pain of the present, Rosa Parks had made her point: NO MORE. She would not be moved. It was a supremely tangible expression, as plain and physical as the way in which she described her motivation, "There was no plan at all. I was tired from shopping. My feet hurt."

PERHAPS if Rosa Parks had not been of "impeccable" character but "had just stepped out of a bar.. Williams suggests that "her attempt (with) her stocking seams twisted," to gain redress against the bus company and the Southern system would have first been thwarted by the Negroes in her own community, for not being exactly the right kind of person it was willing to go to bat for." However, as Williams quotes King, "Fortunately, Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned her by history." And that was to focus the attention of black people, the middle class in particular, on the irrationality of their condition.

IV

NEVERTHELESS, the Montgomery movement was at best an accidental and limited political success. As Williams says, "The irony of the Montgomery situation was that the black people there did not ask for much." They planned a one-day protest, and asked that the segregation ordinances governing public transportation be made more rational. The fact that the boycott lasted 382 days was no less of a surprise to the middle class leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association (of which King was president) than was "the stupidity and short-sightedness of the Montgomery city officials." In retrospect, one of the most surprising recomplished only the desegregation sults of the boycott was that it ac-of the buses; while leaving other public accommodations such as the city's school system and recreational facilities jimcrow. Williams's explanation of this rightfully centers upon the nature of the black South's middle class and its control of the scope and direction of the protest. "The middle class in Montgomery felt it had pushed far enough; that it did not need open schools, parks or playgrounds; that was part of the unwritten contract with the system."

In cities like Montgomery, Atlanta and Washington, the black middle class has always been able to establish institutions of superior education for its own. High schools like Washington's Dunbar and, to a lesser degree, Atlanta's Booker T. Washington, which King attended, and those in other Southern cities where the black middle class had the power to establish them, have produced an array of well-skilled, motivated blacks. Most blacks who attended the better colleges and graduate schools received their early education at these high schools, and the majority of these people either returned with their skills to the community or entered other forms of public service. However, to create an environment capable of producing this elite, which DuBois terms "the talented tenth," whose schools and the quality education they provided were, in a sense, scaled off, both from the whites above and the blacks below. Whites, who would have viewed these schools as threats to their economic and political superiority if they themselves were of the power class, or to their racial superiority if they were not, would have destroyed the schools through political tomfoolery or violence. As it was, the economic policies of white government and educational officials dammed the flow of educational resources, and the trickle that could be tapped was not sufficient for the enactment of mass quality education.

However, the presence of these academic oases, the total internal reflection in which the light of the social concern of much of the Southern black middle class was ensnared, and its contentment with insular success, all tended to reduce the scope of the objectives of the Montgomery move-ment. Moreover, the black middle class in both the North and the South had, in general, failed to form a viable political union with the black masses. Blame for this rests with both parties. During the first half of the century middle class men and women, like William Monroe Trotter of Boston, had given their talents, resources and lives in an effort to form such a union, only to be abandoned by the masses. Such experiences had, created a mistrust of the masses on the part of the middle class which further partitioned the community-in effect, kept it from becoming a community.