BuzzFlash Reviews
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
Taylor Branch
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From Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review. The engrossing final installment of Branch's three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. maintains the high standards set in the previous volumes, the first of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Moving from the protest at Selma and the 1966 Meredith March through King's expanding political concern for the poor to his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tenn., Branch gives us not only the civil rights leader's life but also the rapidly changing pulse of American culture and politics. The America we find in this last chapter of King's life is on fire—the Republican Party has begun to court white Southern voters; the Civil Rights movement itself has fractured; King sees bold challenges to his teaching of nonviolence in the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. King himself has evolved, spreading his interests beyond civil rights to become a more outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and of poverty. A turning point in King's legacy, says Branch, was his housing actions in Chicago in the summer of 1966.
This work "nationalized race," showing that it wasn't just a Southern problem, and ensured that King would go down in history as much more than a regional leader. As a literary work, Branch's biography is masterful. About midway through, the author begins to foreshadow King's death—by, for example, quoting his 1965 statement to a filmmaker: "I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right." If Branch indulges in predictable throat clearing about the lessons from King's life that endure in America today—well, that is to be expected. This magisterial book is a fitting tribute to a magisterial man. 24 pages of b&w photos.
The final and concluding volume in a series of three books on MLK's life.
1056 enlightening pages long.
From an online reviewer:
America, created as an experiment in individual freedom, embedded the legal right to own slaves in its founding charter. The working out of these contradictory impulses has been the central American story. This is the story that Taylor Branch tells in engrossing detail through his three volume history of "America in the King Years."
The Civil Rights Movement brought out the best and the worst in the American character; over almost 3,000 pages, Branch assembles the facts, interviews the survivors, and bears witness. The first volume, Parting the Waters, traces Martin Luther King's rise from obscure Baptist preacher to a civil rights leader forged in the crucible of the Montgomery bus boycott. Pillar of Fire goes from JFK's assassination to an abrupt, somewhat unsatisfactory ending at the beginning of the 1965 Selma campaign. At Canaan's Edge starts with the triumph of the Montgomery march and ends with King's assassination in 1968.
The author describes his approach as a "narrative biographical history," that uses King's life to illuminate broad American themes. There's more narrative than history in these volumes. Very seldom does Branch take the long view, or give us contextual exegeses. What he does give us is compelling, often brilliant reporting that features participant interviews, a deep dive into formerly classified documents, and a you-are-there look at the conversations, strategy sessions and public theater of the friends and foes of civil rights. These books aren't exactly a King biography, a history of the Civil Rights Movement or a history of America during a time of wrenching change, and yet they're all these things, the whole becoming greater than the sum of the parts.
One of the many rewards of reading this trilogy is the skill with which Branch has resurrected the living, breathing King. We learn about an intellectual more at home parsing Reinhold Neibuhr's philosophy than facing down rabid mobs of diehard segregationists. A holy man beset by common human lusts. An executive who dealt with PR, fundraising and staff squabbles. A preacher buffeted by the sectarian struggles in the Black Baptist Church. A politician weaving, often groping, through racial and cultural thickets toward goals that seemed impossibly distant. One comes away awed by the immensity of the burdens King assumed, and humbled by the grace with which he bore them.
Review from the New York Times:
We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions. That was Martin Luther King Jr.
He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years — from Dec. 5, 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to April 4, 1968, when he was murdered — he changed the face of America.
This is the last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes.
"America in the King Years," Branch's running title for the trilogy, is not a mere conceit, a fancy way of describing a biography. It is not a biography of Dr. King. It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them.
From the Washington Post review:
In "At Canaan's Edge", Taylor Branch offers a moving and panoramic view of America during the last three years of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To get a feel for the book's scope, take Branch's juxtaposition of the streams of events that were rushing together in January 1966, 40 years ago this month.
One such episode took place on a numbingly cold day in Chicago, where King dramatized his forthcoming battle against poverty and racial injustice by moving into a third-floor walk-up in a rundown black neighborhood. A bare dirt floor graced the entry to the tenement. "The smell of urine," his wife, Coretta, recalled, "was overpowering. We were told that this was because the door was always open, and drunks came in off the street to use the hallway as a toilet."
As the Kings were settling in, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was conducting nationally televised hearings critical of President Lyndon B. Johnson's military escalation in Vietnam. Describing the confrontations that roiled these hearings, the reporter David Halberstam wrote, "This was a fire fight, angry, bitter, and hostile." Unmoved, Johnson resumed heavy bombing of Vietnam; three months later, the New York Times wrote that 1,361 American soldiers had been killed during the first 99 days of 1966, a total that matched "the cumulative toll over the previous five years."
Meanwhile, white racists were assailing people loyal to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other groups struggling for equality in the South. In early January, a white man in Tuskegee, Ala., murdered Sammy Younge, a black civil rights worker. Vernon Dahmer, a revered black activist, died following the firebombing of his house in Hattiesburg, Miss. The Georgia House of Representatives refused, by a vote of 187 to 12, to seat Julian Bond (now the NAACP's chairman), a young black leader who opposed the Vietnam War.
Elsewhere, in Lowndes County, Ala., a cockpit of racial turmoil, a federal judge in early February approved plans to desegregate the area's public schools. But black parents did not dare send their children to the white schools, and 24 of the 27 dilapidated Negro-only schools in the county were closed, obliging black families to relocate. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, only a tiny fraction of black children in early 1966 attended schools with whites in the Deep South.
Pulling together these and many other memorable events, Branch brings to a close his epic three-book history of "America in the King Years." The first volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Parting the Waters" (1988), masterfully described civil rights efforts between 1954 and 1963. "Pillar of Fire" (1998) covered the next two years, ending with the onset of the campaign for black voting rights in Selma, Ala., in early 1965. "At Canaan's Edge", a slower-moving narrative than "Parting the Waters", devotes 200 early pages to that momentous struggle in Selma, which culminated with the passage in August 1965 of the historic Voting Rights Act -- the high point of success for the civil rights movement.
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