Reviews – South Bend Tribune
In King's time, the media sometimes fell short
By TIM HARMON
January 14. 2006 6:59AM
Fans of author Taylor Branch have gotten a wonderful present for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this year: "At Canaan's Edge," the final volume of Branch's magnificent trilogy on King and his contemporaries.
The new book covers 1965-68, the final years of King's short life.
Those who practice or consume journalism should read this book, as well, for it offers some amazing insight into the way the world in King's time was perceived and portrayed by the media. You expect history to offer more insight than breaking news coverage. But some of the gaps between what appeared to be happening in King's final years and the truth that emerged later on are exceptionally wide.
Branch, who won the Pulitzer Prize for "Parting the Waters," the first of the three volumes, makes readers understand King by placing his efforts for civil rights and justice in the context of what was happening around him.
Readers of the new volume spend almost as much time inside Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI headquarters as they do on marches or inside the King family's Ebenezer Church in Atlanta.
Most of us of a certain age can recall how Hoover was once considered an American hero, fawned over by politicians and lionized by the press. It is nonetheless shocking to read quotes from adulatory news stories and editorials in The New York Times about the FBI's role in the civil rights struggle.
For any who still harbor doubts, Branch weaves what we know about Hoover's role in that struggle into a coherent pattern of duplicity, fueled by the director's inexplicably intense personal hatred of King.
There's a certain irony in the fact that the FBI's campaign of wiretapping and bugging has offered Branch and other historians an incomparable, verbatim record of King's everyday travels, meetings and unguarded thoughts. The campaign was purportedly to detect subversion within King's ranks, though Hoover's real objective appears to have been gathering dirt about King's sex life.
"At Canaan's Edge" gives readers the clearest picture yet of how Hoover's blackmail attempts merged with other extraordinary pressures on King during his last years. Branch also tells us there were journalists who knew the sordid story of the FBI's campaign, but didn't blow the whistle.
Branch writes, for instance, that Parade magazine acceded to FBI demands to kill a one-sentence reference to the official file on King's sex life. "Publications avoided the controversy to preserve the prime FBI news source."
Branch's book shows that the media, though helping King draw attention to the violence and injustice of the Jim Crow South, sometimes missed the boat when he tackled wider issues such as war, poverty and hunger.
Branch recounts how even previously supportive newspapers were outraged when King split with President Johnson on Vietnam. The conventional thinking seemed to be that only political leaders were qualified to discuss world affairs.
Some of the media were quick to fuel concerns that King's nonviolent approach to protest was obsolete, as when an uncharacteristically disorganized march King led in Memphis days before his death dissolved into violence.
The final chapters of King's life show a man of extraordinary eloquence and courage whose vision was not yet fully understood by America as a whole, or even by some of his own colleagues.
All our many faults notwithstanding, I have to believe that the media today would have given King a better chance to succeed in his quest.