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At
Canaan's Edge
(Simon & Schuster, 2006)
At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume
history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American
race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling
author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil
rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to
James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.
In At Canaan's Edge, King and his movement stand at the zenith
of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the
promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression
of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965. The quest to cross
Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge engages the conscience of the world, strains
the civil rights coalition, and embroils King in negotiations with all
three branches of the U.S. government.
The marches from Selma coincide with the first landing of large U.S.
combat units in South Vietnam. The escalation of the war severs the cooperation
of King and President Lyndon Johnson after a collaboration that culminated
in the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
After Selma, young pilgrims led by Stokely Carmichael take the movement
into adjacent Lowndes County, Alabama, where not a single member of the
black majority has tried to vote in the twentieth century. Freedom workers
are murdered, but sharecroppers learn to read, dare to vote, and build
their own political party. Carmichael leaves in frustration to proclaim
his famous black power doctrine, taking the local panther ballot symbol
to become an icon of armed rebellion.
Also after Selma, King takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes.
Integrated marches through Chicago expose hatreds and fears no less virulent
than the Mississippi Klan's, but King's 1966 settlement with Mayor Richard
Daley does not gain the kind of national response that generated victories
from Birmingham and Selma. We watch King overrule his advisers to bring
all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War. We watch King make
an embattled decision to concentrate his next campaign on a positive
compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike,
and King's assassination.
Parting the Waters provided
an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness, beginning with
the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and ending with the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Pillar of Fire, theologians and
college students braved the dangerous Mississippi Freedom Summer of
1964 as Malcolm X raised a militant new voice for racial separatism.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation by race and mandated
equal opportunity for women. From the pinnacle of winning the Nobel
Peace Prize, King willed himself back to "the valley" of
jail in his daunting Selma campaign.
At Canaan's Edge portrays King at the height of his moral power
even as his worldly power is waning. It shows why his fidelity to freedom
and nonviolence makes him a defining figure long beyond his brilliant
life and violent end.
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Pillar
of Fire
(Simon & Schuster, 1999)
In Pillar
of Fire, the
second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch
portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, Parting
the Waters, won the
Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that
stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience
during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of
the narrative, Branch recounts the climactic straggles as they commanded
the national and international stage.
Pillar
of Fire covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1963 to 1965--Dallas,
St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ's Great Society and the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. And it provides a frank, revealing
portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr.--haunted by blackmail, factionalism,
and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as
a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed
racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch
counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country
to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal
votes, equal souls.
Branch's gallery of historic
characters also includes:
Malcolm X, who challenged
King's vision of nonviolent integration and lived under threat of death from the Nation of
Islam.
Lyndon Johnson, who
believed racial conflict was destroying his political base in the South and threatening
his dream to end poverty.
J. Edgar Hoover, under
whose direction the FBI, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy's approval, spied on King
with wiretaps and bugs, and yet solved the most heinous racial crimes of the era.
Diane Nash, the passionate leader
behind sit-ins and Freedom Rides, whose determination shaped the Selma voting rights
movement.
Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic
theologian who bonded with King in devotion to the Hebrew prophets.
Robert Moses, the Mississippi SNCC
leader who finally came undone over the human suffering caused by his Freedom Summer.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper
who commanded a powerful voice for the unlettered.
Pillar
of Fire takes readers inside the dramas that shook every American institution,
from the local pulpit to the Presidency. We disappear with courageous
young people into Mississippi's feudal Parchman Penitentiary. We absorb
the shock of a single Presidential election in 1964 that revolutionized
the structure of partisan politics. We follow Northern rabbis summoned
by King, and Mary Peabody, mother of the governor of Massachusetts, into
the segregated jails of St. Augustine, Florida. We witness the Shakespearean
conflicts between Lyndon Johnson and King and Hoover and Robert Kennedy.
Branch brings to bear
fifteen years of research--archival investigation; nearly two thousand interviews; new
primary sources, from FBI wiretaps to White House telephone recordings--in a seminal work
of history. Pillar of Fire captures the intensity of the legendary
King years, when the movement broke down walls between races, regions, sexes,
and religions, and between America and the larger world. Its struggle to
rescue and redeem, its victories and defeats, its failings and
sacrifices gave rise to opposing tides that still dominate the national debate
about justice and democratic government. The story of this movement is an
incandescent chapter in America's distinctive quest for freedom.
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE!
Parting the Waters
(Touchstone Books, 1989)
The first book of a formidable
two-volume social history, Parting the Waters is more than just a biography of the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the decade preceding his emergence as a national
figure. Branch's 880-page effort, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award
for General Nonfiction, profiles the key players and events that helped shape the American
social landscape following World War II but before the civil-rights movement of the 1960s
reached its climax. The author then goes a step further, endeavoring to explain how the
struggles evolved as they did by probing the influences of the main actors while
discussing the manner in which events conspired to create fertile ground for change.
Moving
from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot
where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar
Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a
revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an
unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and
private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history
behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege
and murder.
Epic in scope and impact,
Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
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