Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3)

by Ken Follett

Marriage is a promise. You can’t keep a promise only when it suits you. You have to keep it against your inclination. That’s what it means.”

What frightened her was the knowledge that the Stasi could do anything. There were no real restraints on them: complaining about them was a crime in itself. And that reminded her of the Red Army at the end of the war. The Soviet soldiers had been free to rob, rape, and murder Germans, and they had used their freedom in an orgy of unspeakable barbarism.

He was pleased to see John Lewis, a quietly impressive theology student who was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the civil rights groups.

He was looked down upon by ugly white people too stupid or too lazy to do anything harder than pour drinks or pump gas.

Violence had broken out on the sixth. The victim had been John Lewis, the theology student. He had been attacked by

thugs in a white restroom in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Lewis had allowed himself to be punched and kicked without retaliation. George had not seen the incident, which was probably a good thing, for he was not sure he could have matched Lewis’s Gandhian self-restraint.

A white American can orbit the earth, but a black American can’t enter a restroom.

“Curious, isn’t it?” she said. “He believes in freedom and democracy for German people in East Berlin, but not for American Negroes in the South.”

Speaking of JFK

A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”

White people did not know about “vagrancy.” Somehow it slipped their minds that Alabama had continued to send Negroes

to forced labor camps until 1927. If she spoke about such things, they looked sad for a moment, then turned away, and she knew they thought she was exaggerating. Black people who talked about prejudice were boring to whites, like sick people who recited their symptoms.

The Americans did not know it, but the Soviet Union had few nuclear weapons, nowhere near the numbers the USA had. The Soviets could hurt the Americans, yes, but the Americans could wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the earth.

Was there an honest regime anywhere in the world?

Castro really understood propaganda, she reflected; unlike the old men in the Kremlin, whose idea of a slogan was: “Implement the resolutions of the twentieth party congress!”

George shrugged and said no more. Nowadays he avoided political discussions with outsiders. They usually had easy answers: send all the Mexicans home, put Hells Angels in the army, castrate the queers. The greater their ignorance, the stronger their opinions.

In truth, nobody was going to give Turkey away. The proposal was to scrap some missiles that were obsolete anyway.

“Klan members throw homemade bombs at the homes of prosperous Negroes in mixed neighborhoods. Some people call this town Bombingham. Needless to say, the police never arrest anyone for the bombings, and the FBI somehow just can’t seem to figure out who might be doing it.” “No surprise there. J. Edgar Hoover can’t find the Mafia, either. But he knows the name of every Communist in America.”

“Bull Connor won’t give us a permit to demonstrate, so our marches are illegal, and the protesters are usually jailed; but they’re too few to make the national news.”

“Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly

says, like Bobby Kennedy: ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.’ He paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

“We will have to repent, in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people, but for th...

King himself had gone to jail here exactly three weeks ago, on Good Friday. George had marveled at how crass the segregationists were: did they not know who else had been arrested on Good Friday?

He did not like Southern segregationists, but he was not willing to sacrifice himself in the battle against them. So the civil rights campaign was fizzling out.

JFK

the white Southerners had gone too far. The press were now talking about violence against children on the streets of America. They still quoted men who said it was all the fault of King and his agitators, but the segregationists’ customary tone of confident deprecation had gone, and now there was a note of desperate denial. Was it possible that one photograph could change everything?

George Floyd and Aubrey. Pictures say it all.

The wealthy white businessmen of Birmingham wanted to end the conflict. No one was shopping: a black boycott of downtown stores had been made more effective by the fear of whites that they might get caught up in a riot.

And the White House hated the continuing global headlines. Foreign newspapers, taking for granted the Negroes’ right to justice and democracy, could not understand why the American president seemed unable to enforce his own laws.

But that was what Governor George Wallace wanted, he realized. Wallace, like Bull Connor and the bombers, saw that the only hope now for the segregationists was a complete breakdown of law and order.

“We preach freedom around the world,” the president said. He was about to go to Europe, George knew. “But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly to each other, that this is the land of the free—except for the Negroes? That we have no second-class citizens—except Negroes? That we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race—except with respect to Negroes?”

“The fires of frustration are burning in every city, north and south, where legal remedies are not at hand,” Kennedy said. “Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made this century, to the proposition that”—he had gone formal, but now he reverted to plain language—“race has no place in American life or law.”

“Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence,” the president said, and George thought he meant it, even though doing nothing had been his policy until a few hours ago. “I ask the support of all our citizens,” Kennedy finished.

“True.” But the Kennedy brothers were fastidious. They did not want to dirty their hands. They preferred to win the argument by sweet reason. Consequently, they did not make much use of Johnson, in fact they looked down on him for his arm-twisting skills.

King’s voice shook with emotion as he said: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

“That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character—I have a dream today.

“With this faith we will be able to hew, out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. “With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

“And when this happens; when we allow freedom to ring; when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city; we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands . .

King’s voice trembled with the earthquake force of his passion. “. . . and sing, in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! “Free at last! “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The newsreader continued remorselessly. “This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years,” he said. “The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings.”

The Sunday school bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Barry Goldwater was a right-wing Republican who wanted to scrap Social Security and drop nuclear bombs on Vietnam. “If Barry runs for president, he’s going to take Texas.”

At midday on Sunday, in the basement of the Dallas police station, the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered, live on television, by a minor mobster called Jack Ruby; a sinister mystery piled on top of an insupportable tragedy.

At last he spoke. In an even, measured tone of voice he said: “All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.”

LBJ

“First,” said Johnson,

“No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”

We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.”

“In fact, that Ho Chi Minh deftly manipulated the two most powerful countries in the world, and ended up getting everything he wanted.”

And she had realized that wherever there was cruel oppression—in the Deep South of the USA, in British Northern Ireland, and in East Germany—there had to be many nice ordinary people like her family who looked away from the grisly truth.

Kerner Commission, appointed to examine the causes of racial unrest during the long, hot summer of 1967. Their report pulled no punches: the cause of the rioting was white racism, it said. It was sharply critical of government, the media, and the police, and it called for radical action on housing, jobs, and segregation. It was published as a paperback and sold two million copies. But Johnson simply rejected the report. The man who had heroically championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the keystones of Negro advancement—had given up the fight.

“It’s not just Dubcek’s revisionist ideas about freedom of the press,” said Yevgeny Filipov to Dimka one afternoon in the broad corridor outside the Presidium Room. “He’s a Slovak who wants to give more rights to the oppressed minority he comes from. Imagine if that idea starts to get around places such as Ukraine and Belarus.”

“No, I’m not. I’m against criminals. Cops who beat up demonstrators are criminals, and they should go to jail.” “There, that’s why I support such men as Nixon and Reagan: because their opponents want to put cops in jail instead of troublemakers.”

The conservatives in the Kremlin had won, Tanya realized. Czechoslovakia had been invaded by the Soviet Union. The brief season of reform and hope was over.