Harvard Sitkoff
Hill and Wang
2008
288 Pages
Greetings, I borrowed King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop from the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.
Harvard Sitkoff is an American Historian who taught at the University of New Hampshire where he is currently serving as professor emeritus. Sitkoff is a scholar of the American Civil Rights movement and he has written a number of books on that subject. King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop is his most recent book, and his only biography of a movement figure.
King is a short biography of the celebrated Civil Rights leader. Many scholars have devoted an enormous amount of energy describing King’s life, and if a researcher does not require a highly detailed account of a segment of King’s life then Sitkoff’s concise biography is probably sufficient. This volume devotes the last seven pages of its text to the Sanitation Worker's strike in Memphis, for example, which was the issue King was dealing with at the time of his assassination. Meanwhile the book Going Down Jericho Road by Michael K. Honey, a text that deals solely with the events pertaining to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, is over 400 pages in length. While Sitkoff’s text is quite strong, my only grievance with the book is that he presents the bibliography as a ‘bibliographic essay’, where the references are strung together in paragraphs rather than listed as individual entries. I find this form of referencing to be irritating to search through as the biblographic essay is much more dense, textually, than the traditional form of listed bibliographic references.
King: Pilgrimage to the Mounaintop depicts King as a man who realized his talent for speaking, and was thrust by his parishioners into the spotlight. Sitkoff creates the sense that King was one of those men who was created by history, he had the talents to deal with the issues of his time, but it was his time that formed him into the leader he was. One of the primary value of the book is that it depicts King as a man whose life was fraught with failures. King was motivated to try, the success of his endeavours was never assured, and it was often blocked by circumstance. Despite his Nobel laureate status and his ascension to the position of an unofficial founding father for the current age, King’s life was not a string of relentless success. Sitkoff instead presents King as a man who did not falter in his path, despite occasional failure, towards an egalitarian vision of social harmony.
King adopted Gandhi’s principles of non-violent resistance and applied them to the struggle to attain equal rights for poor blacks in the United States. King worked directly with many impoverished black communities, with varying degrees of achievment, although it was his early work in Selma and Montgomery Alabama that brought him the most success and attention. The civil rights leader’s later successes came from not wavering from his dedication to non-violence. Sitkoff presents King’s voice as diminishing towards the end of the 1960s, as the rise of a black power radicalism emerged with the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, and other radical factions. Converse to King and many of the early civil rights groups, the radical organizations and leaders held much more liberal attitudes towards violence, often preaching it as an unwelcome but necessary part of the racial struggle in America. King developed rhetoric to demonstrate a sympathetic understanding of a black will to violence, but he never condoned such action. According to Sitkoff, however, King was constantly criticized for his proximity to the pro-violent groups, King was still the major figure of the movement even though his adherence to peaceful resistance was losing ground within the overall movement. Shortly before his death, King was held responsible for a march turned riot in Memphis that resulted in the death of a teenager. King was accused by a white media establishment of failing to keep the peace, but King simply could not contain the anger of the poor communities he was trying to organize.
Sitkoff portrays King as an individual who was constantly feeling the tension between the constraining power of the establishment, the detractions of other civil rights factions, the white opposition, and the needs of the poor. Furthermore, Sitkoff presents King as a man who was given to vice as a coping mechanism for dealing with the stresses of his position. The leader’s life was fraught with fear, as King frequently received death threats, and Sitkoff tries to represent the inner battle King must have fought to overcome these terrors. In so doing, Sitkoff creates a glimmer of the sense of what the experience of being a leader of history, may actually feel like.
In current popular culture, King's life has primarily been reduced to the speech he delivered in Washington DC in 1963. Perhaps his image has been flattened further, to merely the line "I have a dream!" When isolated, that line is merely a statement of desire for a boundless future, and can be inserted into a history of such expressions. The line is depoliticized when its isolated from the rest of the speech, and decontextualized when, for example, no one has to remember that, several days after that speech was delivered, a bomb exploded in a predominantly African-American church in Burmingham Alabama, killing four little girls. Now, in popular culture, the moment that line was delivered is almost cast as the moment racial tension broke and race was transcended in America. Media apparitions such as the far-right mouthpiece, Glenn Beck freely appropriate King’s image for their own purposes. Sitkoff’s brief biography is unlikely to successfully compete for dominance with any pop-culture constructions of the historic leader, but it still works to return depth to King’s image.
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