As Williams points out, King had neither the organizational dexterity nor the political consciousness to dismantle these class partitions, and as a result failed "to utilize consistently the city's entire black population."

King was never to be an effective organizer. His ego was too large to prevent him from feeling that organization would undermine his authority, and being, at root, the insecure child of a frustrated, demanding father, he lacked the confidence and grace that would have eliminated the need for the yes-men who formed what was always more his court than his kingdom. Finally and most damagingly of all, his grasp of the world beyond the orb of the Southern black middle class was imperfect to the point of terminal misconstruction. Thus as Williams quotes Joanne Grant, a black reporter who covered King closely, "It was very important that he should make the decisions, and yet he really couldn't."

MARTIN KING had made it at Montgomery, out of his father's circumspection and into the public mind. His philosophical explanation for his transportation into public prominence characteristically was rooted in an intangible, "the Zeitgeist-the spirit of the times." Besides being a nifty sublimation of his ego-it wasn't me, but I'm the one who sees and says precisely what it was-his reasoning, if taken loosely, does bear upon the issue. If taken very loosely.

What precisely had made Martin King?

"The bombings had done it; the confrontations with cracker officials had done it; but the press had done most of it." The press had dangled a bait before King that sheerly on the basis of his background was irresistible. At an early age, King had been inoculated with that particular turn of mind that yields easily to the notion of personal destiny. A person who had had a less sophisticated philosophical exposure might have couched this notion into convinced mutterings about the will of God or the whims of Lady Luck-7, 11, or the Second Coming. King, however, spoke of being tracked down by the Zeitgeist, and his diction was a part of his appeal to the white media. His rhetoric, "the soft Georgia cadence" of his voice, and the non-violence of his actions were the stuff of which television specials are made. Entertaining without being threatening.

And why not television specials? King, whose conception of success before Montgomery was that of the insular notoriety of the well-respected minister of a silk-stocking church, discerned within the Zeitgeist the possibility of transcending this notion of success. This idea of becoming a national figure must have played with increasing regularity in King's mind as his press coverage and that of the boycott increased. Having been reared in an environment in which one's social position was, in part, evaluated by the number of one's citations on the society page of the Atlanta Daily World. King was sufficiently media-conscious as to keep a listing of the reporters who came to cover him at Montgomery. However, as Williams cites Lomax who was on the scene, "'What we did not realize was that certain white men and events would make the choice' for King to become as famous as he did."

Driven by an ego which bore the marks of the Hollywood imagination, and blinded by a naivete of fundamental American social and political realities that prevented him from receiving that the media does not give constant attention gratis, King decided that he "could never go back-never go back to being just a minister."

The adverse effects of this decision were immediate-if not immediately understood by King and his associates. "The white press so thoroughly indoctrinated King and his people with the idea that the capitulation (of the Northern-owned Montgomery bus company) was a victory for blacks... (that) they believed it: believed too that other things would fall inevitably like tin soldiers all in a neat line."

This was the tragedy of the movement during the years of blood and dreams at Montgomery, Atlanta, Albany, and Birmingham; this remained the tragedy when the dream was fading at St. Augustine; and would still be the tragedy at bloody, dreamless Selma.

V

THE course which King chose-or more precisely, the press chose-for himself and the movement was set not so much upon a place as a time. That time was 1963. As history bad recorded it up until Williams's book, it all came down on August 28th in Washington. "It was Martin King's day. The march was a pure, unfettered, tasteful triv??h; the I Have a Dream speech is history now, and the dream is dead. But that day, that day..."

Yes, that day. Brotherhood. Innocence. We Shall Overcome. The time slide is swift and easy. So easy that we must question what it is to which we are drawn back, the dream or the reality?

John Williams, who was in the crowd, presents an otherwise unrecorded slice of the reality of the March on Washington.

"When Martin Luther King. Jr., came up to speak, the quarter million were at a fever pitch.

"'I have a dream!' M. L. said.

"'Tell 'em Martin!' Bob shouted. (Bob is Robert Johnson, a college classmate of King's and currently the executive editor of let magazine.)