Reviews — Chicago Tribune January 8, 2006 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead just two weeks when his long-time aide Stanley Levison felt history slip out of his hands. Already whites were making King into a “plaster saint,” Levison complained, the sharp edges of his prophetic politics smoothed over so that he might serve as a comforting symbol of racial reconciliation. Today the transformation is complete. The plaster King--the Southern preacher standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial proclaiming his dream of a color-blind society--has become a national icon, whereas the King Levison knew, the discomforting voice of an American revolution, is all but forgotten. With his luminous new book, “At Canaan's Edge,” the final volume of his magisterial trilogy on America in the King years, Taylor Branch rights the balance. Like the trilogy's first two installments--1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning “Parting the Waters” and 1998's “Pillar of Fire”--“At Canaan's Edge” is a sweeping history of protest and politics, bursting with outsize figures. There's Lyndon Johnson, whipsawed between dreams of a Great Society and nightmares of war; Stokely Carmichael, struggling to sustain his idealism in the face of unremitting brutality; J. Edgar Hoover, America's Inspector Javert, relentlessly pursuing imaginary subversives; and a host of secondary characters, from a young, ambitious Jesse Jackson to the aged rabbi Abraham Heschel, champion of ecumenical social action. Above them all stands King, part Christian visionary, part radical democrat, using the fierce power of non-violence to force the nation to fulfill its pledge of justice and equality. King didn't always occupy such a lofty place. In his first two volumes, Branch wisely followed the lead of legendary civil rights activist Ella Baker, who always insisted that “the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.” As Branch showed in meticulous detail, King inherited his commitment to Christian witness from a long line of black ministers, one of whom--Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church--opens “Parting the Waters.” King was drawn into Gandhian non-violence by seasoned pacifists such as Bayard Rustin, who guided him through the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young acolytes like Diane Nash and John Lewis rushed past him, risking their lives to confront Jim Crow head-on at lunch counters, bus terminals and registrars' offices. Not until the epic battle of Birmingham in 1963 did King become the movement's leader in both word and deed. The next year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a triumphal mark of ascendancy that ends “Pillar of Fire.” Branch begins “At Canaan's Edge” in spring 1965, as King “will[ed] himself from the pinnacle of acclaim straight to 'the valley' ” of another direct action campaign, this time in Selma, Ala. The campaign, focused on securing Southern blacks the right to vote, began with the same faltering steps and internal divisions that marred King's earlier efforts. But with a single act of defiance and the state-sanctioned violence that followed, the Selma protesters handed him his greatest victory. As news reports of the bloodshed in Selma flashed across the country on March 7, 1965--“Bloody Sunday”--King put out an urgent call for Americans of faith to join him. Within days, Selma became the site of vast moral witness, its streets thronged with ministers, rabbis, priests, nuns and laymen determined to share in the movement's sacrificial suffering. Branch brilliantly recreates the democratic earthquake that rumbled out from its non-violent epicenter. Across the country ordinary people rallied to the movement's side: 8,000 in Philadelphia, 15,000 in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., 20,000 on Boston Common. Johnson professed his allegiance to the cause when he stood before a joint session of Congress and evoked the movement's most sacred hymn. “ '[I]t is not just Negroes but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice' ” the president proclaimed. “ 'And we shall overcome.' ” In the tumult that followed, congressional leaders pledged to pass a voting rights bill that would topple Jim Crow's last bulwark. “ 'This is a revolution, a revolution that won't fire a shot,' ” normally staid Andrew Young exulted at a victory celebration that drew 12,000. “ 'We come to love the hell out of the State of Alabama.' ” At that moment there was no saying how far the non-violent revolution might be extended. Economic inequality, Northern-style segregation, the rapid military escalation in Vietnam--in the latter half of 1965, King imagined confronting them all with the soul force he had unleashed. Even as King laid his plans, though, the nation was slipping into a terrifying cycle of violence. In the Alabama backwoods white supremacists launched a wave of terror that pushed some of the movement's most devoted activists, such as Carmichael, toward fantasies of retribution. In the ghettos of Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit and dozens of other cities, years of frustration and oppression exploded into days of rioting. And in Southeast Asia a carefully calibrated intervention escalated into full-scale war with all its attendant horrors. Fully two-thirds of “At Canaan's Edge” is devoted to King's increasingly desperate attempts to advance his democratic dreams amid the mounting chaos of 1966, 1967 and 1968. As King falters, so does some of the book's narrative drive. It's largely a practical problem: false starts and failed crusades don't lend themselves to compelling storytelling. The setting also makes a difference. Branch has an extraordinary feel for the small-town South of the Jim Crow era, with its crosscurrents of religious fervor, racial subjugation and ritualized cruelty. But he has trouble finding his footing when the story shifts to Chicago, where King mounted his first great campaign after Selma. Like King himself, Branch can't find a way to dramatize the tangle of economics, politics and prejudice that sustained the Northern color line. Chicago had no Jim Crow laws stripping blacks of the rights the Constitution guaranteed them. Instead it fused racism and the forces of the marketplace, segregation enforced by a phalanx of real estate agents, bankers, developers, white homeowners and politicians like Mayor Richard J. Daley, who pledged to protect their interests. In Branch's telling, though, the violence that King encountered as he led marches into Marquette Park comes across as simply a Northern version of Southern extremism rather than a manifestation of the city's volcanic racial dynamic. And because it's never clear what was at stake in the confrontation, King's subsequent retreat from the city does not carry the dramatic weight it should. In his evaluation of the Chicago campaign, Branch quotes the rueful conclusion of the editors of The Saturday Evening Post. The campaign, they said, proved that “[w]e are all . . . Mississippians.” In fact it proved the opposite. Mississippi's system of segregation could be--indeed had been--broken. Chicago's segregation could not. Even if some episodes don't quite work, the cumulative effect of Branch's story is devastating. To see the great promise of Selma crumbling; to watch King searching in vain for the strategy, the words, the gesture that might recreate the glittering moment when non-violence swept the nation; to feel his growing isolation; to hear him deliver his final speech on the night before he died, with its haunting peroration--“I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up the mountain. And I've looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!” --to hear those words knowing what was to come is simply heartbreaking. It has taken Taylor Branch 24 years and more than 2,300 pages to tell the story of America in the King years. Now that the last volume is complete, there will be the inevitable comparisons to Carl Sandburg's “Abraham Lincoln” and Shelby Foote's “The Civil War,” two other masterworks that use the grand sweep of history to lay bare the nation's soul. “At Canaan's Edge” has done something else as well, something that is arguably more important. In resurrecting King's abiding faith in the democratic promise and his commitment to fundamental change peacefully secured, Branch has shown us that despite all the darkness, all the violence--not only in the 1960s but in our own times as well--there is reason to hope. Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune |