Reviews — Richmond Times–Dispatch
NONFICTION: At Canaan's Edge - America in the King Years 1965-68
By Taylor Branch
BY JAY STRAFFORD
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Jan 29, 2006
Robert Caro, take note: A life's work can be brought to a conclusion.
When journalist and historian Taylor Branch began research almost 25 years ago on his study of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement, who could have imagined the length and scope of the project?
And who would have dreamed that Caro's multiple-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson would still be in the works today, the presidential years unreached? Unlike Caro, Branch has now crossed the finish line with this, the concluding volume in his trilogy.
"Parting the Waters," published in 1988, took the story from 1954 through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. "Pillar of Fire," released in 1998, carried the account through 1964's Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and into early 1965. "At Canaan's Edge" opens with the shocking violence at Selma, Ala., and the struggle for voting rights. It proceeds to efforts to fight discrimination outside the North and poverty everywhere and ends with King's murder in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968.
Throughout this enormous work, Branch has offered a wealth of detail, and this volume is no exception. But Branch never lets the detail overwhelm the reader. And his focus on the people of the era -- the heroes and the villains, the politicians and the martyrs -- gives great personal weight to the events.
Among the vast cast, we see a confident King and a depressed one; a Johnson committed to his domestic agenda, anguished over Vietnam and devious about almost everything; a thoroughly repulsive J. Edgar Hoover; and ordinary Americans of every persuasion. King's marital infidelities are touched on but not exploited.
Branch takes a chronological approach to his work rather than dividing it by subject matter. In doing so, he is able to intersperse developments in the civil-rights movement with those in Vietnam. The technique is not insignificant as the book moves into King's eventual decision to treat his opposition to the war on equal terms with his push for equality.
As younger blacks' commitment to nonviolence wavered, King's power waned. But he remained steadfast in his beliefs and in the duality of his roles as preacher and activist, as man of God and man of action.
As Branch writes, "King balanced an imperative for equal votes with the original prophetic vision of equal souls before God. He grounded one foot in patriotism, the other in ministry, and both in nonviolence." And his method -- nonviolence is as important to history as his achievements.
With passion and clarity, with a historian's vision and a journalist's eye, Branch brings this massive and definitive trilogy to a lyrical and majestic close.
Contact staff writer Jay Strafford at jstrafford@timesdispatch.com or (804)649-6698.