Taylor Branch

Press — Baltimore Sun

On 'Edge'
Taylor Branch, who has come to the end of a 24-year journey with the last installment in his civil rights trilogy, 'At Canaan's Edge,' discusses his life's work.

By Joe Burris
January 16, 2006

He has come to the end of a nearly 24-year literary journey that, almost unimaginably, he once thought would take him three years. At some point - after all these years he can't remember when - it dawned on biographer Taylor Branch that his civil rights trilogy would be, as he called it, his "life's work," something that has consumed much of his adulthood but has also rendered him an authority on one of America's most turbulent periods.

His final installment, now reaching bookstores, "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68" (Simon & Schuster, 1,041 pages, $35), closes out the trilogy with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - the monumental civil rights leader whose life story inspired Branch to embark upon his own journey.

And now that Branch has closed this chapter of his life, with a trilogy that amasses a combined 2,912 pages, the 59-year-old author whose interest in civil rights began at 16 must begin the arduous process of figuring out what's next.

When Branch conceived the project, the holiday that commemorates King's legacy didn't exist. Along the way, Branch became a father and watched his daughter Macy (now 25) and son Franklin (22) grow up as he steadily worked on the project.

Now his work is finished: In the coming months, Branch will be busy with book signings and readings around the country. After that, he says, he knows he'll write again, but he has yet to choose a topic.

Already, he's begun to reflect upon what it's like to be done with a project that has been all-consuming for so long.

"It's giddy and scary," said Branch, adding that he feels a "little lost."

In a recent interview from his Baltimore home, Branch said he had no idea the project would take as long as it did.

"But I don't begrudge any of it," he said. "I think every extra year is a blessing because it has been such a continuous wonder to learn so much and see about people struggling very fundamentally with what the core values and ideals are in race, politics, religion, kind of across the board."

His wife, Christina Macy, has been there with him through the heartaches and joys.

"He works so incredibly hard," said Macy, who is director of publications for the International Youth Foundation. "For years he would get up at 5 [a.m.] when it's cold and dark outside and then knock off at about 5 or 6 [p.m.]."

Macy said her husband's office is in their attic, which meant Branch would often be hard at work when it was "cold in the winter and hot in the summer."

"Sometimes," she said, "he would come down [from his office] and say, 'Are people really going to care about this?' I think the reception he got from the first two books showed that people cared, but there were always moments of doubt."

With a spouse whose income is drawn from book publishing, she said, occasionally "our income went up and down, and there were times when things were really sparse. But certainly for me, it was such an incredibly valuable project and always worth it."

King's final years

Branch agreed to speak last week on a day when he was quite sick: He came to the door groggy and unshaven, explaining that his high fever had just broken. Nevertheless, a hacking cough disrupted his Georgia drawl.

But it didn't dull his desire to talk about his finished work.

"At Canaan's Edge" recounts America during the last three years of King's life, resuming King's biography introduced in Branch's previous two books in the trilogy - the Pulitzer prize-winning "Parting the Waters" (1988) and the second installment, "Pillar of Fire" (1998).

The final installment not only chronicles the civil rights movement but the coinciding Vietnam War, and details how both events divided the nation.

Branch's work places readers in the middle of the struggles of the period, sometimes as they occurred behind closed doors and in conversations that were whispered or spoken over the phone.

Some of those conversations were clandestinely caught on tape, in President Lyndon B. Johnson's Oval Office or on FBI wiretaps, whose use FBI director J. Edgar Hoover staunchly defended.

Branch also covers uncomfortable, intimate moments, including King's confession to his wife, Coretta, about one of his extramarital affairs.

And the biographer re-creates events all-but-forgotten today, such as Johnson's insistence on civil rights legislation to cure America's racial ills, culminating with his nationally televised speech that incorporated the movement's banner slogan, "We shall overcome."

Branch lingers over the significance of that moment, when a Southern president adopted a phrase that all Americans identified with one side in the battle over civil rights. The speech outraged Southern members of Congress, stunned viewers and brought King to tears.

"I only put a few of the reactions I had there, but for a lot of people, it was a jaw-dropping moment," said Branch.

The retelling of such moments with such vivid detail are in part what makes Branch's books so popular.

"[Branch's books] have almost a biblical excitement," said Ted Widmer, a Washington College historian. "I really like something in his approach that is underappreciated. ... He thinks of African-American history as American history and vice versa."

Core themes

Branch's books are hardly quick reads (and who would expect the results of an almost 24-year project to be?), but no matter where you begin, certain core themes are quickly apparent - law versus free will, aggression versus nonviolence, power versus restraint - all told by an author who employs a curator's sense for detail and a novelist's penchant for storytelling.

Said Branch: "The first book, 'Parting the Waters', tended to emphasize race because race was invisible, largely. It was struggling even to be noticed in the '50s."

"In the second one, I wound up emphasizing religion more than I expected. This volume, it seems to me, is more about democracy. And I think it's uncanny the way the Vietnam War starts at the same time [as the civil rights struggle].

"You've got one [the war] testing as to whether you can establish democracy by violence and the other [the civil rights movement] testing whether you can extend it by nonviolence."

Branch set out to distinguish his from other civil rights works, which he said focus mostly on "massaging labels about who was militant and who was radical." He set out to bring out the human qualities in everyone.

Yet he said he hopes readers come away from his books viewing King not as a man who led a black-empowerment movement but a leader who unconditionally embraced values that have benefited America as a whole.

Said Branch: "He was struggling with issues that have to do with how well we maintain and refine democracy, which is by no means guaranteed to last, and in that sense [Americans] should think of him just like they would Jefferson or Lincoln.

"I'm hoping we will be able to have a round of historical reappraisal because I think the civil rights movement benefited lots of people besides black people," he said. "Every woman who goes to school at Harvard, where they didn't allow women, and on and on and on."

'What I didn't know'

As he appraised his own efforts, Branch said that one of the things that kept him enthralled all those years is how much he discovered about the 1960s, a period he grew up in and thought he knew.

"I'm constantly in wonder of what I didn't know," he said.

When asked when he recognized the magnitude of his task, Branch initially responded with pondering silence.

Perhaps, he said, it came before the work even began, back when he was a teenager and student at the Westminster Schools, a prestigious private school in Atlanta.

Already, he had learned first hand about class differences: He went to Westminster on a baseball scholarship that was later rescinded. To keep him at the school, his father, who was in the cleaning business, agreed to do the athletic department's laundry.

The younger Branch was aware of King and the civil rights struggles, but he was also raised to be genteel, nonpolitical.

"Most people wanted to avoid it," Branch said of the civil rights movement. "You knew it might be right, but you knew you could get hurt, you could lose all your friends, and you also felt that segregation was like the weather. You can't change it."

Then came the spring of 1963, when as a junior at Westminster he saw a demonstration in Birmingham, Ala., and witnessed little girls being subdued with attack dogs and fire-hose spray.

"That just stupefied me, and they were singing a lot of the same songs like the ones we sang in Sunday school," said Branch. "I went on to college and still majored in pre-med, but I started getting consumed [in civil rights] by taking political courses.

"It wasn't long before I forgot pre-med. I took courses in politics and history, and the anti-Vietnam War movement was going, but I knew what got me interested in the first place was the civil rights movement."

He became fascinated with King while at the University of North Carolina. King was assassinated during his senior year.

Starting out

After graduating, Branch worked on Sen. George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign in Texas. There he met another campaign worker named Bill Clinton. The two kindled a friendship that still endures, and the former president often consulted Branch on racial matters while in office. (Clinton turned to Branch to help him when the former president began work on his autobiography, "My Life".)

Branch went on to become an accomplished writer. He ghostwrote John Dean's 1976 Watergate book, Blind Ambition, co-authored a book with NBA great Bill Russell and wrote for the Washington Monthly.

When Branch initially approached Simon & Schuster's legendary editor Alice Mayhew about a book, "She told me that I needed more experience," said Branch, "and that's why I wrote the Dean book first."

"Parting the Waters" solidified Branch's reputation as a biographer. Conceived in 1981, it took four years to complete. "Pillar of Fire" took nine.

Ironically, in "At Canaan's Edge" he relies on a form of information gathering that he disapproves of - FBI wiretap transcripts.

"They're at the FBI reading room in Washington, which is in a basement of a windowless room," said Branch. Security was tight: Escorts guide visitors from the entrance to the reading room and even on trips to the bathroom.

After a while, on days when he visited the FBI reading room, Branch made sure he didn't drink coffee in the morning.

He also purchased 600 cassettes (at $6 each) of LBJ's White House recordings, when all modern U.S. presidents taped proceedings. Richard M. Nixon's tape revelations during the Watergate scandal ended the practice.

Branch staunchly believes that the taping practice should be brought back, in part because he found LBJ's conversations "revealing," particularly in the way he agonized over the Vietnam War.

Branch said that both Vietnam and the civil rights movement were so poignant in the shaping of America's history that he's surprised that the nation's current leaders - namely the Bush administration - scarcely make mention of either.

"But now they're trying to establish democracy," he said, "and there are very, very critical and important lessons [to learn from the 1960s], and I don't hear them being articulated. That era seems on point if you're trying to create a new democracy."

What lies ahead

Branch said he believes there are "100 movies" that could be extracted from his trilogy that could teach valuable lessons about the era.

The thing is, he's all but given up trying to bring any part of the trilogy to the screen, having endured several failed attempts.

On two occasions, he said, it appeared there would be an adaptation: Once there was pre-production for an ABC eight-hour miniseries that was to be produced by Harry Belafonte. Another was a feature film directed by Jonathan Demme.

"It's been close but no cigar," he said, "with a lot of heartache."

Now that his life's work is done, the next step is still uncertain. Macy, his wife, said he hasn't spoken about it much.

"It's funny: Our conversations glance on and off of it," she said, adding that in recent weeks all of his focus has been on completing "At Canaan's Edge".

"Now," she said, "he will have the freedom to think about it."

Yet Branch said if he does write another book, "I'll probably write much shorter."

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