"When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 41 years ago, the civil rights movement lost both its leader and its way. In the macabre manner of such things, however, nonfiction literature gained a protagonist of mythic proportion. The best books about the black freedom struggle — David Garrow’s biography, “Bearing the Cross”; Taylor Branch’s narrative trilogy; Nick Kotz’s “Judgment Days”; James Cone’s “Martin and Malcolm and America” — rely on the totemic person of King to embody the political and spiritual campaign and to make the pages turn. In these instances, the Great Man theory of history happens to serve art as well.
So Mary Frances Berry faces some substantial obstacles in trying to animate the comparatively more diffuse leadership and more amorphous saga of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, her subject in “And Justice for All.” The commission’s is a story without a single dominant figure or even a single narrative line to pull together all the disparate threads, the way the Brown v. Board of Education case did in Richard Kluger’s classic account, “Simple Justice.”
So Mary Frances Berry faces some substantial obstacles in trying to animate the comparatively more diffuse leadership and more amorphous saga of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, her subject in “And Justice for All.” The commission’s is a story without a single dominant figure or even a single narrative line to pull together all the disparate threads, the way the Brown v. Board of Education case did in Richard Kluger’s classic account, “Simple Justice.”
The commission’s work consists largely of holding hearings and writing reports, a great many reports. Its half-century duration stretches from the moral clarity of the fight against Southern segregation in the 1950s and ’60s to the more ambiguous, muddled landscape of America in the last generation, when the emergence of a growing black middle class, the embrace of diversity in the corporate sector and the recognition of all sorts of mixed-race identities (including our new president’s) have offered evidence that at least some of the battles can be considered over.
An author’s strategy in rendering these events, of course, cannot be to warp the historical record just to suit aesthetic purposes. But neither should a reader be expected to suspend the desire to be engaged simply because the content of a volume is capital-I important. “And Justice for All” is a respectable work that too often feels like an obligation, a requirement, on the part of the author as well as the reader.
That the commission deserves a book is not the issue here. Since being created under the 1957 civil rights law, the first one passed since Reconstruction, the commission has served simultaneously as a monitor of and an advocate for such legislation. Armed with subpoena power, it has looked into conflicts and controversies ranging from the intimidation of black voters in the Deep South to educational inequality in the North to the lack of opportunities for women in sports to the fatal shooting of an unarmed innocent, Amadou Diallo, by New York City police officers. Berry, a professor of American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of eight previous books, served on the commission from 1980 until 2004 and was one of several members whom President Ronald Reagan tried to fire as part of an overall backlash against civil rights activism. (President George W. Bush ultimately succeeded in ousting her.)
Berry’s dual roles as author and participant give “And Justice for All” an awkwardly divided personality. For the first half of the book, which deals with the years before her appointment, she functions as a traditional academic historian; in the second half, she becomes a necessarily self-interested memoirist. The unintended consequence is that some of the most powerful episodes in the commission’s history receive the most dispassionate treatment, while seemingly all the minutiae during Berry’s period receive lengthy attention.
One unexpected revelation in the book may help explain the second problem. In 1999, Berry successfully persuaded the Clinton administration to appoint her editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Victoria Wilson, to an open seat on the commission. It could be that Wilson herself became so absorbed in the inside-baseball of the commission that she, like her author, lost perspective on how much a reasonable reader wants or needs to know about a given battle between liberals and conservatives over who should be named the next staff director.
At its outset, in contrast, the commission was reviled by Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia as “a vehicle for witch hunting at its worst.” When commission members went to Alabama in 1958 to investigate violations of voting rights, they had to stay on an Air Force base because every local hotel was segregated. The testimonies that the commission heard in those early days contained horrors capable of shaming a nation — that of a black veteran, for instance, who was shot in the back and paralyzed by an Alabama police chief and then denied his Army pension for supposedly having provoked the attack.
A reader — this reader, anyway — longs for a fuller, deeper account of how the commissioners handled the physical and political risks of finding facts in a lethally hostile environment. Only intermittently does one particular commissioner, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, then the president of Notre Dame, leap vividly from Berry’s dryly dutiful account. Losing his temper during a hearing about school desegregation in Maryland in 1970, Father Hesburgh declared, “This commission has had it up to here with counties and communities that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the U.S. Constitution.”
Still, as Berry recounts investigation after investigation, report after report, the impact of the commission feels like less rather than more. A far shorter-lived body, the Kerner Commission (formally known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), left behind a clearer, more memorable legacy with a report warning, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Closer to the present, some of the civil rights commission’s disputes with conservative foes have been significant. As Ronald Reagan basks in a posthumous, bipartisan glow, it’s very instructive to be reminded by Berry of the divisive racial politics he practiced with the commission. In a move that anticipated President George H. W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court a decade later, Reagan installed as commission chairman Clarence Pendleton Jr., a black conservative opposed to much of the civil rights agenda, affirmative action in particular. Administration officials described the commissioners they inherited as a “pocket of renegades that needed to be cleaned out.” The staff and budget were drastically cut.
Would that Berry had been more discerning about which battles might have benefited from more explanation and which ones could have been omitted altogether. And in the style of the score-settling Washington memoir, she reduces her antagonists (Linda Chavez, Abigail Thernstrom, Michael Horowitz) to two-dimensional caricatures. Agree with them or not, these people are not mindless enemies of equality.
Reviewing a book is not reviewing a life. For her public service on behalf of racial justice, Mary Frances Berry deserves her many accolades. But on the evidence of “And Justice for All,” she may have been the wrong person to tell a story that obviously matters to her so deeply."
AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America
By Mary Frances Berry
