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Conclusion of trilogy: Taylor Branch explores vast scope of King's legacy
The Associated Press
BALTIMORE
At the end of a quarter-century spent chronicling the civil rights movement, Taylor Branch is admittedly and visibly relieved. But his voluminous research into Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries has not diminished his opinion of King's historical stature.
Far from it.
Branch, in his third and final volume of a narrative history of the civil rights movement, titled "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68," argues that King deserves to stand alongside Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as among the most important and transformative figures in American history.
"It was against my own instincts, frankly. That's not where I started off. I thought of him as a religious figure or a racial figure," Branch said in an interview at his Baltimore home.
"The founding fathers confronted systems of hierarchy and subjugation in the British monarchy ... and they developed a political approach to help convert that into a common citizenship in the constitution and a whole new horizontal system of politics based on the vote," Branch said. "King did the same thing. Because he was so focused on the catalytic role of democracy and democratizing politics, he set in motion things that democratized America far beyond race."
Among those changes: equal rights for women, economic growth in the South and an influx of legal immigrants from around the globe.
For Branch, 59, who is white, the journey to reaching such sweeping conclusions about King's legacy began inconspicuously. He was born in Atlanta, and in his middle-class upbringing, he "was taught to be polite and to bemoan segregation but to leave it alone."
A few events jarred him from such complacency. He was 16 when, in 1963, he saw footage of police in Birmingham, Ala., using dogs and fire hoses on girls as young as 8, and hauling them to jail for protesting segregation.
"I was spellbound by it," Branch said. "I went to my parents and said, 'How can this be?'"
That question dogged Branch as he switched his major at the University of North Carolina from premed to political science and history, protested the war in Vietnam, and enrolled in a master's program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
In the summer 1969, he took a job registering black voters in rural Georgia. Branch kept a diary of his experiences, excerpts of which were later published in Washington Monthly magazine. The revelations of that trip were what first sparked the idea of a narrative history.
"I formulated this theory that in race relations, when you're across gaps, when you're uncomfortable, that you really learn by personal experience, not by ideas and abstractions," he said.
A noble idea, but one that required an enormous undertaking. Branch pitched the project in 1981 and planned to finish the first half of a two-volume series in three years. But it was seven years before "Parting the Waters," covering the years 1954-63, was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989.
Two volumes became three. The next, "Pillar of Fire," covering 1963-65, came out in 1998. The first two were New York Times best sellers, and publisher Simon & Schuster has similar high hopes for "At Canaan's Edge," which had an initial printing of 100,000.
"We expect it to be a best seller," said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising for Barnes & Noble booksellers, noting that Branch's previous volumes "are essential history titles ... and continue to sell well."
Branch did all his research himself. After "Pillar of Fire" was published, he taught for three semesters at Goucher College near his home, but gave it up because it was taking up too much time.
Reviews for "At Canaan's Edge" have been generally glowing, praising the expanse and specificity of Branch's storytelling. Some critics, however, express concerns about his refusal to make encompassing judgments. "At times, Branch serves up more content than interpretation, assuming that facts speak for themselves," writes David Levering Lewis in The New Yorker.
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times accuses Branch of "pelting the reader with incidents and facts in the place of analysis and perspective."
In conversation, however, Branch reveals no shortage of either, as when he explains why the pace of his narrative slowed down in the later volumes. He sees the struggle for civil rights and the protests against the Vietnam war as part of the same debate _ Americans pursuing freedom both at home and abroad, through divergent means.
"To me, that's why the '60s have been so hard to sort out, such a big historical blur and burden for us, because you tend to write about civil rights or Vietnam but not both, and not try to relate them," Branch said.
"You had the whole country up and struggling in a very basic way about freedom and democracy and violence."
King, then, had a moral obligation to champion nonviolence abroad as he did at home, despite the withering criticism he received for denouncing the war, Branch said.
Branch's narrative catapults from demonstrations on the streets of Selma, Ala., to discussions in the Johnson White House about escalating the war. He details infighting among civil rights leaders _ the Rev. Jesse Jackson recently took issue with the book's assertion of a bitter rift between him and King. But despite the near-omniscience of Branch's voice, he declines to devote much space to King's sexual peccadilloes, although he makes clear there were many. (King's family has not commented on the book.)
Now, 20 years since the start of a national holiday celebrating King's birth, the breadth of his legacy is often overlooked, Branch said.
"I think adults tend to trivialize the King holiday as a kind of toss-off day for black people, as though the whole lesson and concern about it ought to be about the state of black America rather than the state of American democracy and the state of justice," Branch said.
Also ignored is what Branch sees as "the third legislative pillar from the civil rights era," after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965: the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which abolished decades-old quotas that had limited legal immigration almost entirely to three countries in northern Europe.
Passage of the law wasn't reported extensively at the time, but its impact has been enormous. While European admissions declined, the law "changed the face of America and introduced families from all over the world as naturalized Americans."
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