The Monumental Epic of the King Years

In At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, $35), the long-awaited final volume of his trilogy on the history of the civil rights movement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch describes a heart-wrenching moment in 1967. In the last months of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., the central figure in Branch’s monumental study, breaks into a fit of despair and rage.

“I don’t want to do this any more!” he screams from the lonely confines of a hotel room. “I want to go back to my little church.” Awakened by King’s cries, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, two of his closest friends and advisors, rush to his side, separate their beloved leader from the whiskey bottle he has slowly been draining throughout the evening, and coax him to bed.

The next day he apologetically tells them, “Well, now it’s established that I ain’t a saint.”

In Branch’s first volume, Parting the Waters, readers saw a young Martin Luther King develop from an intelligent but somewhat frivolous youth into a serious, disciplined leader of nonviolent protest. In the second volume, Pillar of Fire, King emerged as a national power broker increasingly willing to push the limits of civil disobedience in the struggle for black equality.

At Canaan’s Edge reveals a more troubled Martin Luther King, in what —should not have been—but was—the winter of his life. Torn between jealous and competitive aides who vied for his approval; accused by white “moderates” of inciting unrest; branded an accommodationist Uncle Tom by radical factions within the broad civil rights coalition; hounded mercilessly by J. Edgar Hoover, arguably one of the most insidious and corrupt—but also powerful—government officials in modern American history; and increasingly prone to depression, drinking, and extramarital trysts, followed by waves of deep remorse and self-recrimination, King appears much older than his 30-some years, and deeply conflicted about the role that history chose for him.

The new volume shares many of the strengths of the earlier installments of Branch’s trilogy. A truly talented writer, he conveys a dizzying amount of information with such grace and aplomb that the narrative reads better than most good fiction. He opens his story in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, where Sheriff Jim Clark’s uniformed hoodlums assaulted several hundred peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, thereby opening the way for Lyndon Johnson’s crowning civil rights achievement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. From there the book follows King and his colleagues as they venture far and wide, from Chicago and Cleveland to Lowndes County, Alabama, and Los Angeles.

All the while, the story of Lyndon Johnson, whom the historian Robert Dallek has described as a “flawed giant,” acts as a counterweight in the narrative built around King. As the war in Vietnam intensified, both men struggled to deal with its meaning. For Johnson, the war proved his personal undoing as well as the downfall of his Great Society programs. More ominously, Branch shows, the war shattered the last liberal presidency of the twentieth century.

For King the war—and the imperative to oppose it—caused an irreparable breach with the White House, estranged him from many liberal allies, who continued to believe that Southeast Asia was the last front in the war against global Communism, and led him to embrace a sweeping critique of violence, capitalism, and racism. By the time of his assassination in April of 1968, King had developed into something of a Western European-style democratic socialist. Had he lived, his increasingly radical politics—radical by American standards, anyway—might very well have marked him out as an iconoclast rather than the icon we think of today.

Branch handles this story deftly. But his book does suffer from some of the problems that historians located in the first two volumes.

First, he is a better storyteller than analyst. The chapters on King’s forays into northern cities like Chicago fail to relay the complex ingredients of ghetto poverty. Academic scholars have produced a wealth of important literature on the urban crisis, particularly, on the way grassroots resistance to integration, public-sector policies, and private-sector discrimination all conspired to create third-world conditions in large tracts of America’s major cities.

As a working academic, I’m the first to admit that most of these monographs are too dry and technical for the lay reader to enjoy. But Branch, if his bibliography is any indication, doesn’t attempt to consult or synthesize these works, and the result is a glossed-over picture of ghetto life, with plenty of description but less investigation into its origins. As a skilled populizer of American history, he could and should have made better use of these works.

Second, Branch has been faulted by several accomplished King scholars—particularly David Garrow, Ralph Luker, and Charles Payne—for treating his sources too uncritically. The result, they say, is that he repeats some anecdotes that either cannot be verified (for instance, his contention that King told Coretta of one of his extramarital affairs whiles she was recovering from a hysterectomy) or have been pretty much discredited (for instance, Branch’s account of King’s first trip to Montgomery in 1954—a trip that probably never happened). Here Branch may be a little like Carl Sandburg, who conducted decades of research to write his multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln but didn’t always sift carefully enough—or with a discerning enough eye—through all the material he collected.

Still, like its companion volumes At Canaan’s Edge has a lot to recommend it to the general reader. Particularly compelling is its treatment of J. Edgar Hoover, who willfully disregarded a direct order from Lyndon Johnson (issued through Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach) to cease and desist from all domestic bugging of King and of everyone else the FBI was hounding. Branch reveals Hoover for the lawless, fanatical bigot that he was. Under his direction the FBI was often complicit in Southern violence. For instance, it had in its employ one Thomas Rowe, an informant-Klansman who, among other crimes, savagely beat Freedom Riders at the Birmingham, Alabama, bus depot in 1961 and was one of the civil rights martyr Viola Liuzzo’s assassins in 1965, just after the third and final Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Moreover, the FBI illegally wiretapped and bugged King and his entourage for well over five years, at one point using evidence of his extramarital affairs to try to drive him to suicide. Reading Branch’s book, one wonders why Congress hasn’t rechristened the federal building that bears Hoover’s name.

Branch also does a fine job of examining King’s intellectual development. One of the most intriguing chapters, in which King addresses a triumphant crowd in Montgomery, Alabama, soon after the bloodbath at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, shows King drawing on the work of the historian C. Vann Woodward, who famously argued that Jim Crow was a cynical ploy, hatched by white elites in the 1890s, to politically disenfranchise and economically exploit an underclass of white and black tenant farmers. “It may be said of the Reconstruction era,” King said, “that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow . . . a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man and better than the black man.”

Branch quotes King as telling the crowd, “They segregated Southern churches from Christianity. They segregated Southern minds from honest thinking. And they segregated the Negro from everything.” Those words were lifted directly from the radical white writer Lillian Smith’s 1940 parable, “Two Men and a Bargain.” It’s not clear from Branch’s text whether King identified Smith as the original source or knowingly appropriated another author’s words without citation (as he did on other occasions, including in his doctoral dissertation). Indeed, Branch seems not to have recognized the passage as Smith’s.

Either way, it’s a compelling story that goes a long way in explaining King’s path from moderate integrationist to sharp, even radical, critic of the intertwined problems of race and poverty.

Finally, Branch’s book is a jarring reminder of the culture of violence and lawlessness that reigned supreme in Alabama and Mississippi even as late as 1966. He chronicles a string of murders of civil rights activists that went unpunished in state courts, leaving the reader with a better understanding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) ultimate rejection of nonviolence. As it became increasingly clear to many rights workers that a black person’s life—and even a white activist’s life—was cheap and expendable, and that even laws against murder were unenforceable in the Deep South, many longtime champions of nonviolent resistance questioned the applicability of their creed to the American scene. Justice Department prosecutors who dragged their feet earlier in the decade, but who moved these murder cases into federal courts in the late 1960s (and secured several high-profile convictions), may very well have salvaged what was left of law and order in vast parts of the United States.

At Canaan’s Edge will reach millions of readers and introduce them to a story they may not know. Less triumphal than textbook renditions of King’s life, more skeptical of the aging white liberals who claim civil rights as their own crowning achievement, the book—like the trilogy as a whole—contributes mightily to public understanding of the civil rights movement. This achievement greatly overshadows any of the shortcomings that critics have rightly pointed out.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, to be published in March.