At Canaans Edge: America in the
King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch
Thank You, J. Edgar
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 Canaans Edge,
Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent
revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of
Branchs America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social
history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands
of Kings movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob
Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his
central character. Kings movement may have been nonviolent, but his
times were not, and each of Branchs volumes ends with an assassination:
JFK, then Malcolm X, and finally Kings murder in Memphis. We know thats
where At Canaans Edge is headed, but it starts with Kings 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 Kings 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
Kings movement apart and threaten his national leadership. The day after
Selmas 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 cant tell Kings story without following these many threads,
and he spends nearly as much time in Johnsons war councils as he does
in the equally fractious meetings of Kings Southern Christian Leadership
Conference. Branchs knotty, allusive style can be challenging, but it vividly
evokes the density of those days and the countless demands on Kings
manic stoicism. The whirlwind finally slows in the books final pages for a
bittersweet tour through Kings 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
Branchs 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 trilogys 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 Montgomerys 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, Kings
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 police 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 Birminghams 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 Kennedys 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
Johnsons reelection.
November: Hoover calls King the most notorious liar in the country and the
FBI sends King an anonymous suicide package containing scand
Personal Review: At Canaans Edge: America in the King Years,
1965-68 by Taylor Branch
This third and final volume of Branch Taylor's trilogy is of all the three the
most unambiguously tragic. At times, reading the previous two volumes, I
was so heartbroken at the succession of tragic setbacks in the movement
that I wondered when and where the great, decisive victories against
segregation ended. And ACE is of all the three the one with the most
devastating setbacks. It leaves one to ponder if the Civil Rights Movement
eventually achieved its immediate goals so sweepingly precisely because
the white power structure finally recognized --so to speak--that those goals
were compatible with its continued flourishing.
For readers interesting in buying this book: bear in mind that this trilogy is
to all intents and purposes a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is NOT
a hagiography; Branch frequently mentions the roiling emotions and
infidelities of MLK. When contemporary observers remark that a particular

appearance or speech fell flat, Branch says so. Perhaps Branch knows
this narrative technique is more effective at inspiring admiration than
unalloyed praise would have been; perhaps not. But in truth, it's difficult to
imagine any sensitive reader not being filled with wonder that such a moral
giant like King could even exist.
Rather than duplicate the effort of the other reviewers (particularly the
excellent review by G. Bestick, posted below on January 24, 2006), I want
to comment on something that has not been addressed by the others. I
believe the single most important theme in the trilogy was the exposition of
King's doctrine of "nonviolence." I use quotes because "nonviolence" is
such an inadequate word to describe the doctrine. Elsewhere, Branch
alludes to King's opposition to "enemy-ism," in which King rejects lines of
reasoning that culminate in demonization or vilification of one's
adversaries. First, King's doctrine acknowledged the common humanity of
all people; humans deviated in different paths of moral conduct depending
on reasons that are compelling--perhaps irresistible--at the time.
Perpetrators are also victims. Second, the resolution of injustice through
violence was untenable; the oppressor in any relationship would always
win any challenge that employed violence, if for no other reason than
because the victorious liberator would become a new oppressor. Third,
the practice of nonviolence required unusual discipline and courage, and
King was able to transmit the latter through the force of his oratory.
In POF (please see my review for that, also), the rival doctrine was
belligerent posturing as practiced by the Nation of Islam and by the
segregationist authorities. The upheaval of the '64 elections tended to
reflect the loss of face of an earlier generation of white elites, and their
replacement by redneck "enforcers." While the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) remained true to the principles of
nonviolence, a major ally, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) repudiated nonviolence in favor of Black Power. The new SNCC
was utterly ineffectual and quickly vanished. The Black Panthers was
doomed from the start with its scorn of all "white" ideologies and its lack of
any coherent replacement. New converts to the ideology of self-defensive
violence like Charles Evers could not even bring themselves to target
known killers; Byron de la Beckwith, universally known to have murdered
Ever's brother Medgar, was never threatened by the SNCC.
White supremacist violence now became endemic; before, there were
exceptional cases such as the 9/15/63 bombing of a church in
Birmingham; but cases of ambush and murder proliferated dramatically
after 1965. The destabilization of white supremacist violence now
challenged the very survival of American institutions and Southern police
forces increasingly intervened against their former Klan allies.
Looming over everything was the Vietnam War, which for King was the
most urgent injustice he faced. Johnson hated the war (Stanley Karnow's
*Vietnam* confirms this) but was unable to accept defeat in it; King was

unable to compromise with a known evil, and the most conservative 60%
of white American public opinion dreaded facing up to an unbeatable foe.
Frustration and ambient racism further stimulated conservative support for
the war, while the fiscal woes inflicted by the war extinguished every
remaining trace of Johnson's Great Society. The failure of progressive
initiatives, when void of King's own nonviolent doctrines, was universal and
inevitable. At the time of his death, King was not so much defeated or
even overwhelmed, as he was offset in a floodtide of squalid reaction.
After King, the depressing deluge; and after that, his stunning
achievements, like a field of tulip bulbs, bloomed amid the receding glacier.
But the triumph of nonviolence was like the glimmers of lightning in a
summer electric storm, flashing without warning in random corners of the
sky.
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