A WAY OUT OF NO WAY
A Memoir of Truth, Transformation, and the New American Story
By Raphael G. Warnock
288 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
The pastor of a renowned African American church but a political novice launches a campaign for the United States Senate in 2020, challenging a wealthy, right-wing Republican incumbent. Facing long odds, he wins a breathtakingly close race based on promises to find a way to bring his state and the nation closer to the civil rights movement’s ideal of the “Beloved Community.” This upset victory gives the Democratic Party control of the Senate by a single vote, enhancing the prospects for progressive reform.
An improbable story to be sure — yet this is exactly what happened to Warnock. The senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — once Dr. King’s church — he made the transition from spiritual counselor to politician look easy, following in the footsteps of his friend and parishioner Congressman John Lewis. In 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery march and the Voting Rights Act, the great Gandhian intellectual Bayard Rustin famously urged civil rights leaders to turn from protest to politics. Regrettably, the list of leaders who took Rustin’s advice is relatively short — at least on the national scene — with Lewis and Jesse Jackson being the most prominent civil rights figures to seek or hold a position in Washington.
Democrats were ecstatic about Warnock’s election, one-half of the “Georgia miracle” that saw two Democratic senators — Warnock and John Ossoff — elected in a Deep South state. Many, however, were not sure what to expect. With no political record behind him, questions arose not only about Warnock’s legislative priorities but also about his views on abstract issues like the proper relationship between religion and politics.
The answers to these and many other questions can be found in the sparkling pages of his memoir, “A Way Out of No Way.” In nine engrossing chapters, Warnock offers a narrative of an extraordinary life, from impoverished beginnings in Savannah to his arrival on Capitol Hill. Along the way, he reflects with considerable candor and insight on the meaning and importance of faith, truth-telling and political and social redemption.
ALABAMA V. KING
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement
By Dan Abrams and Fred D. Gray with David Fisher
384 pp. Hanover Square. $28.99.
Gray is a lawyer’s lawyer, still practicing at the age of 91, yet he remains an unsung hero of the modern civil rights struggle. His name rarely appears on lists of the movement’s most influential and revered activists, who fought for freedom and social equality out in the open, often in the streets.
By contrast, Gray’s association with the high drama of the movement and its most illustrious practitioners — like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis — was largely indirect and hidden. His contributions to racial justice took place not in mass gatherings but in Alabama courtrooms. Unlike the movement’s most famous attorney, Thurgood Marshall, he never made a name for himself in Washington and only once performed his legal magic in an argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, he stayed close to home, in communities like Montgomery and Selma, painstakingly laying the groundwork for equal justice under the law.
As revealed in “Alabama v. King,” Gray’s career as central Alabama’s most effective advocate for the legal rights of African Americans makes for a fascinating story of grit, determination and courtroom acumen. Gray has related parts of this story in earlier books, like “Bus Ride to Justice,” but now, with the help of Abrams and Fisher, he takes us back to 1956 and the early months of the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, for a detailed look at the trial in which Gray made a seminal defense of the right to protest. This was King’s first experience as a criminal defendant.
The narrative of the prosecution’s attempt to break the back of the boycott by imprisoning one of its leaders and Gray’s spirited counterattack against Jim Crow “justice” is both compelling and revelatory. Indeed, the stirring tale of how an inexperienced 25-year-old lawyer, only two years out of law school, played a pivotal role in King’s emergence as the “American Gandhi” is a story for the ages.
FROM THE HOOD TO THE HOLLER
A Story of Separate Worlds, Shared Dreams, and the Fight for America’s Future
By Charles Booker
336 pp. Crown. $28.
The author of this combination memoir/manifesto is the “other” Booker, not Cory Booker, the two-term United States senator from Newark. But like the senator, Charles Booker is an African American who grew up in “the hood,” in his case an impoverished neighborhood in the west end of Louisville. After practicing law for a decade, he was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2018, and two years later he entered the Democratic senatorial primary, ultimately losing a close race to the former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, who went on to lose to Senator Mitch McConnell in the 2020 general election. Unfazed by his defeat, Booker is currently seeking the nomination to run against Kentucky’s other incumbent Republican senator, Rand Paul, in November 2022.
Booker’s life story — and the political philosophy that grew out of it — begins in urban Louisville but eventually ranges across the expanses of a predominantly rural state. “From the Hood to the Holler” is both the title of his book and also the name of a community outreach organization he founded in 2020. Determined to bridge the cultural, economic and racial gaps between urban and rural communities — the “separate worlds” of the book’s subtitle — he calls for a “new politics” that recognizes and encourages the “shared dreams” of all Americans. Focusing on what unites us rather than what divides us, he refuses to abandon the dream of a nation unified under the banner of democratic inclusion.
A self-proclaimed progressive, Booker supported Bernie Sanders in 2020 and continues to associate himself with left-leaning leaders like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and with a broad array of progressive programs including the Green New Deal, universal health care and a thorough overhaul of the criminal justice system. Clearly, Booker has chosen a hard row to hoe in a deep red state, but as someone who has beaten the odds before, he rejects the conventional wisdom that little can be done to rise above the urban-rural culture war threatening to tear our nation apart.
