c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ In his book,”Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65″(Simon & Schuster), Taylor Branch, using recently declassified material, unearths the seamy _ and to some, unknown _ side of the civil rights movement.

In the book, a sequel to his earlier”Parting the Waters,”Branch shows Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries as at times duplicitous, jealous of one another and involved in promiscuous sexual relationships.

It is a portrait at odds with the popular myth of King and the movement.

Of particular interest to me is Branch’s description of King’s 1964 trip to Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. During the trip, several members of King’s entourage were apprehended in various stages of undress by hotel security officers while chasing prostitutes”who had stolen money or personal property from them.” For their part, the prostitutes”said they had been promised Martin Luther King himself in exchange for favors to his unscrupulous associates.” Branch gives us in this book a portrait of a fractious movement led by a flawed Moses (King) toward a Promised Land of decidedly mixed blessings.

The Nobel Prize trip, however, provides a morality tale with some object lessons worth considering.

First, even though King was not directly involved, no arrests were made, and the story was never reported by the press. But the incident did provide FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover with more ammunition with which to harass, intimidate and discredit King and the movement.

Hoover and the bureau were already monitoring and harassing King and other black leaders, and King’s charisma made him, in Hoover’s view, especially dangerous while his wandering eye made him especially vulnerable.

Nevertheless, it seems to me, the harassment King and his fellow civil rights activists were subjected to at the hands of Hoover was partly the product of their own moral failure. And because of this moral failure, it can be said that King and his associates were _ unwittingly, perhaps _ subverting their own movement.

Yet there is another, equally disturbing aspect of the Nobel Prize episode. For me, as a child of the civil rights struggle reared on the iconography of King and his legend, there is something unsettling about the tawdriness of the affair as the pageantry and nobility of the moment is tainted by an unseemly sideshow.

Nor, apparently, am I alone.

Branch writes that Ann Jones, the wife of King attorney Clarence Jones,”idolized King (and) could not believe that he would allow such antics around him.”When she heard of the events in Oslo, she was stunned to hear her husband attempt to excuse such behavior.

Eventually, Branch writes, she”realized that her husband had been an accomplice to similar events _ including some in their own home. … Clarence Jones would consider the shock of the Oslo reports a precipitating factor in his divorce, and perhaps even in his ex-wife’s untimely death from alcohol depression.” The moral downfall of a hero is a painful thing to endure. This is especially true if the hero is himself a moral leader. King was hardly the first such icon to falter, but his reputation is probably the most enduring, and thus his failure is more difficult to accept.

This is not to suggest King cannot be forgiven. Indeed, to paraphrase the late Eric Severeid, half a hero is still a lot of heroism.

But the reality is that because of Branch’s important work, the legacies of King and his fellows will be viewed in a clearer, if harsher, light.

DEA END ATCHISON