#david garrow

[watchingalotofmovies]

MLK/FBI

MLK/FBI    [trailer]

Based on newly declassified files, a doc that explores the US government's surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr.

By now the events are familiar. But a reminder of the abuse of power by Hoover and the racist FBI is always instructive. Which felt save in the knowledge that the majority of the American people back then backed their action.

It struck me that King was only 39 when he was assassinated.

[brotheralyosha]

‘No. No. No.’ Obama Said, but He Went On Anyway

Ambition, expectations, disappointment

Obama cops early on to possessing “a deep self-consciousness,” or what the Nigerian American novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in by far the longest book review in the history of The New York Times, characterized as “a man watching himself watch himself.” He tells readers nothing new about his childhood, college experiences, or his young adulthood as a community organizer on Chicago’s Far South Side in the mid-1980s, but he does expressly confirm how Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor, whom Obama once met only briefly, served as a profound inspiration for him. “Above all, Harold gave people hope,” and “For me, this planted a seed. It made me think for the first time that I wanted to someday run for public office.”

After less than three years as an organizer, “I left for Harvard Law School … with my motives open to interpretation” and “my own ambitions” very much in mind. By early in his second year, Obama admits “knowing even then that the practice of law would be no more than a way station for me.” Just before his 1991 graduation, he told his then-fiancée, Michelle, “I could even see myself running for office.” Michelle’s brother Craig has long told of how Barack volunteered to him that those aspirations included the presidency.

Back in Chicago, Obama began his political career within less than five years by winning election almost unopposed to a seat in the Illinois state Senate. “The first two years in the legislature were fine,” notwithstanding his wife’s intense distaste for how often the job took him away from home, but “by the end of my second session, I could feel the atmosphere of the capitol weighing on me,” particularly as a junior member of the minority party. In addition, Michelle was increasingly unhappy, for they now had a newborn baby in their young family. “This isn’t what I signed up for, Barack. I feel like I’m doing it all by myself.”

Obama acknowledges that “I knew I was falling short,” but his response to this conundrum was to run for Congress, challenging the well-known incumbent and onetime Black Panther Rep. Bobby Rush. “Almost from the start, the race was a disaster,” and the result was “a humiliating defeat” in which Obama won barely 30 percent of the vote. In its wake, “I recognized … I’d been driven … by the need to justify the choices I had already made” in pursuing a political career and “to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy” of others. “In other words, I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician.”

This is an unforgettable self-critique and confession, as Obama admits that even in the face of his wife’s intensifying opposition to his life in politics, he was simply unable to quell his ambition for electoral success. Oddly, he then quickly narrates his decision to undertake a statewide race for a U.S. Senate seat without any similar self-revelation as to how he justified this initially long-shot undertaking in the face of such a daunting self-portrait. In the end, Obama triumphed thanks to self-inflicted wounds on the part of two top-tier opponents and a superb last-minute television advertising campaign. At age 43, following a breakout address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he found himself a widely heralded U.S. senator, much to his wife’s amazement.

Ensconced in his new office, “I figured I had all the time in the world” to ponder a subsequent race for Illinois’s governorship or the presidency some years in the future. Yet within just a year’s time, Obama’s ambition once again surged to the fore. Rather unconvincingly, Obama asserts that a disastrous hurricane and a brief early-2006 trip to an American military quagmire altered his relaxed timetable. “Katrina and my Iraq visit put a stop to all that. Change needed to come faster,” and so “by the spring of 2006, the idea of me running for president in the next election … no longer felt outside the realm of possibility.”

When Obama first broached the idea with his wife, Michelle was unsurprisingly furious. “When is it going to be enough?” she asked, and her anger echoed something she had told him years earlier: “It’s like you have a hole to fill … That’s why you can’t slow down.” Obama concedes the point. “Was I still trying to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me” and was now long dead? “Whatever it was in me that needed healing, whatever kept me reaching for more” was the root of his unquenchable ambition, but Obama plumbs the question no further.

Eight months later, on the night of November 6, 2006, Obama returned home after the last of countless campaign appearances on behalf of other Democrats, appearances at which crowds responded far more to him than to the actual candidates. In what is without question the most notable passage in A Promised Land, Obama recounts what he says is a dream that awoke him late that night. “I imagined myself stepping toward a portal of some sort … And behind me, out of the darkness, I heard a voice, sharp and clear … uttering the same word again and again. No. No. No. I jolted out of bed, my heart racing, and went downstairs to pour myself a drink. I sat alone in the dark, sipping vodka, my nerves jangled, my brain in sudden overdrive. My deepest fear, it turned out, was no longer of irrelevance … The fear came from my realization that I could win” the Democratic nomination and then the presidency, should he indeed declare his candidacy.

This is an indelible admission for a world-famous figure, yet to date not a single English-language commentator on Obama’s memoir has highlighted and quoted this passage, a comprehensive web search confirms. Yet it seems beyond doubt that some part of Obama’s brain was attempting to rein in his snowballing ambition, warning him—“No. No. No.”—not to pursue the chalice of which he had long dreamed. But as clearly as Obama remembered that late-night vision, he cast the warning aside and pursued the presidency just as he had long planned.

[eelhound]

"Some of [Martin Luther] King’s gravest moments of self-doubt came in 1955, at the beginning of his activism in Montgomery. He was newly married, and the floods of death threats and obscene phone calls that he had begun to receive made him wonder if he could stand to press forward with civil rights work. The following excerpt from David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross [PDF] describes the inner turmoil King faced:

'I felt myself faltering and growing in fear,' King recalled later. Finally, on Friday night, January 27, the evening after his brief sojourn at the Montgomery jail, King’s crisis of confidence peaked. He returned home late after an MIA meeting. Coretta was asleep, and he was about to retire when the phone rang and yet another caller warned him that if he was going to leave Montgomery alive, he had better do so soon. King hung up and went to bed, but found himself unable to sleep. Restless and fearful, he went to the kitchen, made some coffee, and sat down at the table.

'I started thinking about many things,' he recalled eleven years later. He thought about the difficulties the MIA was facing, and the many threats he was receiving. 'I was ready to give up,' he said later. 'With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward,' to surrender the leadership to someone else… 'I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born …. She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her.

And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak. Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way. And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it … I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.'

But King says that as he prayed, he felt God telling him to stand up for justice, and reassuring him that his cause was right. Through his faith, King was able to press forward despite his nerves and fear."

- Nathan J. Robinson, from "Seeing Martin Luther King as a Human Being"

[empiricalscotus]

Was it Ever Really Roberts’ Court?

Was it Ever Really Roberts’ Court?

It has been a long two weeks for the Supreme Court.  Since the leak of Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, several of the Supreme Court Justices have come forward offering their thoughts on the leak. According to the Washington Post, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called the leak ‘absolutely appalling.’ The Supreme Court issued a news release calling the leak a ‘betrayal of the…

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[gettothedancing]

“Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.”

[fileebooks-blog]

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow [ download book ]

http://hububooks.blogspot.ro/2017/06/rising-star-making-of-barack-obama-by.html

grab a copy

[teapartycrusaders-blog]

BIOGRAPHER CLAIMS BARACK OBAMA CALLED AMERICA ‘RACIST SOCIETY’ IN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT

BIOGRAPHER CLAIMS BARACK OBAMA CALLED AMERICA ‘RACIST SOCIETY’ IN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT

Written by: Katherine Rodriguez A biographer who is writing a book about former President Barack Obama claims that Obama once called America “a racist society” in an unpublished manuscript from his law school days.

David Garrow, the author of the upcoming book on Obama’s life, said he uncovered lots of revelations about the former U.S. president during his research for the book, the Daily Mail…

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[robertocotroneo]

Il web è una gigantesca rete ferroviaria di binari morti

Il web è una gigantesca rete ferroviaria di binari morti http://wp.me/s20jLI-binari

David Garrow è un bravo storico, così bravo che ha vinto un premio Pulitzer, ed è un biografo e uno studioso della figura di Martin Luther King. Nel 2003 Garrow pubblicò un libro dove sosteneva, senza alcun dubbio, che Martin Luther King aveva già usato l’espressione “I have a dream” almeno quattro volte, in quattro discorsi pubblici precedenti a quel 28 agosto 1963 a Washington. Ma l’espressione…

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