One of the greatest of American stories has found its great
chronicler in Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in
1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now
with At Canaan's Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin
Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic
they deserve. The three books of Branch's America in
the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history
as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of
King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson,
Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that
of his central character.
King's movement may have been nonviolent, but his times were
not, and each of Branch's volumes ends with an assassination:
JFK, then Malcolm X, and finally King's murder in Memphis. We
know that's where At Canaan's Edge is headed, but it starts with
King's last great national success, the marches for voting rights
in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Once again, the violent response to
nonviolent protest brought national attention and support to
King's cause, and within months his sometime ally Lyndon Johnson
was able to push through the Voting Rights Act. But alongside
those events, forces were gathering that would pull King's
movement apart and threaten his national leadership. The day
after Selma's "Bloody Sunday," the first U.S. combat troops
arrived in South Vietnam, while five days after the signing of
the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots began in Los Angeles. As
the escalating carnage in Vietnam and the frustrating pace of
reform at home drove many in the movement, most notably Stokely
Carmichael, away from nonviolence, King kept to his most
cherished principle and followed where its logic took him: to war
protests that broke his alliance with Johnson and to a widening
battle against poverty in the North as well as the South that
caused both critics and allies to declare his movement unfocused
and irrelevant.
Branch knows that you can't tell King's story without following
these many threads, and he spends nearly as much time in
Johnson's war councils as he does in the equally fractious
meetings of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Branch's knotty, allusive style can be challenging, but it
vividly evokes the density of those days and the countless
demands on King's manic stoicism. The whirlwind finally slows in
the book's final pages for a bittersweet tour through King's last
hours at the Lorraine Motel--King horsing around with his brother
and friends and calling his mother (in between visits to his
mistresses), Jesse Jackson rehearsing movement singers, an FBI
agent watching through binoculars from across the street--that
complete his work of humanizing a great man forever in danger of
flattening into an icon. --Tom Nissley
Timeline of a Trilogy
Taylor Branch's America in the King Years series is both a
biography of Martin Luther King and a history of his age. No
timeline can do justice to its wide cast of characters and its
intricate web of incident, but here are some of the highlights,
which might be useful as a scorecard to the trilogy's nearly
3,000 pages.
King The King Years
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
May: At age 25, King gives his first sermon as pastor-designate
of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 1954
May: French surrender to Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Unanimous
Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board outlaws segregated
public education.
December: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat
on a public bus, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott, which
King is drafted to lead. 1955
October: King spends his first night in jail, following his
participation in an Atlanta sit-in. 1960
February: Four students attempting to integrate a Greensboro,
North Carolina, lunch counter spark a national sit-in movement.
April: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded.
November: Election of President John F. Kennedy
May: The Freedom Rides begin, drawing violent responses as they
challenge segregation throughout the South. King supports the
riders during an overnight siege in Montgomery. 1961
July: SNCC worker Bob Moses arrives for his first summer of voter
registration in rural Mississippi.
August: East German soldiers seal off West Berlin behind the
Berlin Wall.
March: J. Edgar Hoover authorizes the bugging of Stanley
Levinson, King's closest white advisor. 1962
September: James Meredith integrates the University of
Mississippi under massive federal protection.
April: King, imprisoned for demonstrating in Birmingham, writes
the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
May: Images of violence against marching children in
Birmingham rivet the country.
August: King delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech before hundreds
of thousands at the March on Washington.
September: The Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street
Baptist Church kills four young girls. 1963
June: Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers assassinated.
November: President Kennedy assassinated.
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65
November: Lyndon Johnson, in his first speech before Congress as
president, promises to push through Kennedy's proposed civil
rights bill.
March: King meets Malcolm X for the only time during Senate
filibuster of civil rights legislation.
June: King joins St. Augustine, Florida, movement after months of
protests and Klan violence.
October: King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and campaigns for
Johnson's reelection.
November: Hoover calls King "the most notorious liar in the
country" and the FBI sends King an anonymous "suicide package"
containing scandalous surveillance tapes. 1964
January: Johnson announces his "War on Poverty."
March: Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam following conflict
with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
June: Hundreds of volunteers arrive in the South for SNCC's
Freedom Summer, three of whom are soon murdered in Philadelphia,
Mississippi.
July: Johnson signs Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination
based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
August: Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing
force in Vietnam. Democratic National Convention rebuffs
the request by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be
seated in favor of all-white state delegation.
November: Johnson wins a landslide reelection.
January: King's first visit to Selma, Alabama, where mass
meetings and demonstrations will build through the winter. 1965
February: Malcolm X speaks in Selma in support of movement, three
weeks before his assassination in New York by Nation of Islam
members.
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
March: Voting rights movement in Selma peaks with "Bloody Sunday"
attacks and, two weeks later, a successful march of
thousands to Montgomery.
August: King rebuffed by Los Angeles officials when he attempts
to advocate reforms after the Watts riots.
March: First U.S. combat troops arrive in South Vietnam.
Johnson's "We Shall Overcome" speech makes his most direct
embrace of the civil rights movement.
May: Vietnam "teach-in" protest in Berkeley attracts 30,000.
June: Influential federal Moynihan Report describes the
"pathologies" of black family structure.
August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, the
Watts riots begin in Los Angeles.
January: King moves his family into a Chicago slum apartment to
mark his first sustained movement in a Northern city.
June: King and Stokely Carmichael continue James Meredith's March
Against Fear after Meredith is and wounded. Carmichael gives
his first "black power" speech.
July: King's marches for fair housing in Chicago face bombs,
bricks, and "white power" shouts. 1966
February: Operation Rolling Thunder, massive U.S. bombing of
North Vietnam, begins.
May: Stokely Carmichael wins the presidency of SNCC and quickly
turns the organization away from nonviolence.
October: National Organization for Women founded, modeled after
black civil rights groups.
April: King's speech against the Vietnam War at New York's
Riverside Church raises a storm of criticism
December: King announces plans for major campaign against poverty
in Washington, D.C., for 1968. 1967
May: Huey Newton leads Black Panthers in armed demonstration in
California state assembly.
June: Johnson nominates former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall to
the Supreme Court.
July: Riots in Newark and Detroit.
October: Massive mobilization against the Vietnam War in
Washington, D.C.
March: King joins strike of Memphis sanitation workers.
April: King gives his "aintop" speech in Memphis. A day
later, he is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. 1968
January: In Tet Offensive, Communist guerillas stage a surprise
coordinated attack across South Vietnam.
March: Johnson cites divisions in the country over the war for
his decision not to seek reelection in 1968.
- Used Book in Good Condition.