More thoroughly than any King scholar to date, he has explored what we might call the sacred and profane aspects of the Rev. While some veterans of the civil rights movement are quick to point out that these victories were not the achievement of King alone, ''Bearing the Cross'' reminds usĪnew that his leadership was the indispensable ingredient.ĭavid Garrow, an associate professor of history at City College and the author of ''The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.,'' has given this biography the informal subtitle ''A Personal Portrait,'' and that is apt. In the period marked by his two ''mountaintop'' speeches, King led the movement that ended the segregation of public facilities in the South, secured the franchise for black voters and changed profoundly the unwritten protocols andĭaily practice of social custom in the region. Moral and physical courage that was, let us not forget, a new force on the stage of Southern history. Early and late, this man was able to summon a The language, of course, anticipates that of the more famous speech King gave in 1968 in Memphis on the eve of his assassination, and the similarity underscores the central miracle and mystery of his life. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I've been to the mountaintop and I've seen the promised land and it's going to be here in Montgomery.'' Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I'm going to stand up to them tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I'm going to stand He was in his pulpit saying, ''I'm not afraid of anybody this morning. ONE Sunday morning in 1957, Martin Luther King Jr., a young preacher who still had the open, unformed face of a boy, found an unexploded dynamite bomb on his front porch in Montgomery, Ala. Section 7, Column 3 Book Review DeskīY HOWELL RAINES Howell Raines, the author of ''My Soul Is Rested,'' an oral history of the civil rights movement, is deputy Washington editor of The New York TimesīEARING THE CROSS Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. November 30, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

My soul is rested by howell raines