Reviews — A Triumphant Trilogy — UNC Alumni Magazine
A three-year project to document the work of Martin Luther King Jr. turned into a 24-year immersion for Taylor Branch '68.
by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. '56
When Taylor Branch '68 answered the phone at his Baltimore home office in early December, he was trying to restore order after the long siege that had yielded At Canaan's Edge, volume three of his trilogy, America in the King Years. Critics have hailed it as a masterwork of history and recognized its excellence from the first volume, Parting the Waters, which appeared in 1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Two thousand three hundred and six pages of text later, the climactic volume, like the first two, follows Martin Luther King Jr. as the central figure in the civil rights movement and the Moses of his people. It was published in January and seems destined for further honors.
Branch was busy with the final details of book publication in December, reading galley proofs and preparing to consult with his New York editors at Simon & Schuster, notably the famous Alice Mayhew, who has edited all three volumes. The writing of even shorter books can leave behind a lot of debris; Branch's work space must look a bit like a fought-over battlefield.
There is an eloquent passage in Edward Gibbon's autobiography in which the 18th-century historian of Rome's decline and fall bids farewell to a monumental work of comparable scope. Gibbon arose from his desk in a Swiss garden where he was working and walked about with relief. He felt as if he were parting with an "old friend." Branch likewise was relieved to be finishing up and looking forward to his next project, after a brief vacation trip to Spain and a book tour scheduled to end in Chapel Hill Easter weekend.
Shaped by the '60s
The author of At Canaan's Edge and I entered UNC 12 years apart, from different directions. But even before I met him in the mid-1970s, Taylor Branch had established himself as a writer of promise and distinction. I had come to Washington in June 1975 to edit the editorial pages of The Washington Star and found its op-edit page (of critical importance in a political capital) in need of fresh talent. The Star, then the capital's oldest surviving newspaper, a century and a half old, had Bill Buckley and James J. Kilpatrick but needed moderate columnists of comparable talent. Branch had been writing fine reportage from Washington for Harper's magazine. We met at the Palm Restaurant (then, as now, a popular den of deal-making), and I flourished before him the possibility of a national column, anchored at The Star and distributed by its syndicate. It was an excellent idea; but his was better, for he politely turned me down and soon launched the work he has just completed. American history is now the richer for it.
Branch was a Chapel Hill undergraduate in the very years (1964-68) he writes about in At Canaan's Edge. By that time, the early excitement of the civil rights movement had worn away, and its energies were being transfused into the antiwar movement as "escalation" proceeded in Vietnam. Those energies soon would transform him into a political activist. Branch had come to UNC as a pre-med student from Westminster School in Atlanta, where he'd held a baseball scholarship. But the excitement of courses in history and political science, and the agitated climate of the time, overwhelmed his medical ambitions. He served on the Men's Honor Council. But he came to worry that expulsions might mean the loss of military deferments and, after a struggle with his conscience, resigned.
"This was back in the time when you could get thrown out of school for drinking, or for having a woman student in your room," he said in an earlier interview with the Review following the publication of Parting The Waters. "I had philosophical problems with that because I thought it was inconsistent with citizenship at a time when you could … be drafted at 18. … But then when the war started, and the people we found guilty of campus code or honor code violations would be dropped out of school, stripped of their student deferment, drafted and sent to Vietnam, you had to face decisions. I remember reading 10 books on the history of Vietnam because I wanted to make a decision about whether to stay on the Honor Council or not. I finally resigned."
It was the beginning of a rapid transition from college student to political activist that soon would see him campaigning in Indiana for the antiwar candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, arguing all night with Robert Kennedy, who initially had refused to get into the "dump Johnson movement" organized by another eminent Carolina alumnus, Allard Lowenstein '49. Branch ended up going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a 21-year-old delegate from Georgia. He had traveled about his native state recruiting delegates to challenge the all-white delegation that the white supremacist Gov. Lester Maddox had organized. Not long afterward, as a student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, he wrote up that summer experience, and it became an admired article in Washington Monthly, a now-famous training ground for young journalists. His career as a writer was launched.
His interest in the civil rights movement had familiar origins. Like many Southerners, he had been riveted, at the age of 16, by the spectacle in Birmingham, when police Commissioner Bull Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on young black people demonstrating for civil rights under the auspices of King's nonviolent movement. And formative influences went farther back.
"I was a laundry boy," Branch said, recalling early influences that may account for his deep interest in civil rights, "and from an early age worked spare time in my dad's laundry. My dad was a South Georgia boy whose racial attitudes were moderate; although when the Klan was making trouble he once lent his laundry truck to those working for racial fair play. Most of his workers were black people — he was their boss, but they were mine," Branch recalled. "I have vivid memories of the funeral of my dad's cleaner, Peter Mitchell. Peter handled the volatile dry-cleaning solvents — they may have killed him — and my dad and I were the only white people at the funeral. He was asked to speak and broke down in tears. There were black ladies falling in the aisles."
The senior Branch's gesture in favor of racial progress earned him unwanted newspaper publicity. "He tried to get my mom not to tell me about his 'showboating' fit of conscience," his son recalls.
Branch brings not only the writer's and historian's eye to his work, but a solid grounding in religion, always of intense interest to him. One of the important themes of his trilogy is how politics and religion intersect.
"I argue that there's a space, a zone, where the fundamental philosophy of democracy and a kind of general religious belief intersect," Branch said in the 1990 interview. "King's theology was very close to that, which is why he was so comfortable in politics, where Jews and Reinhold Niebuhr and agnostics find common ground. I haven't worked it all out yet, but I see it in King. If all men are created equal, then that implies that they are equal in some sort of spiritual sense. ... They are related, we are all brothers and can't be enemies. For King, this was the experience of the presence of God."
All three titles of his trilogy — including the second, Pillar of Fire (1998) — echo a biblical typology once familiar to Southerners, black and white. King, in this conceit, re-embodied the archetypal story of Moses, leading his nation from Egyptian bondage to the promised land — a theme echoed in a familiar Negro spiritual (Go down, Moses/Down to Egypt-land/Tell ol' Pharaoh/Let my people go) and in the title of William Faulkner's searching novelistic exploration of race, Go Down Moses. At Canaan's Edge makes the parallel explicit in the climactic moment of King's nonviolent movement. Like the earlier emancipator, King was fated to look over into the promised land but not to reach it himself.
Branch's sense of King's lasting significance is interracial and transnational: "King was the emancipator of his own people, but he also freed white people from the dogmas of segregation — and his nonviolent movement finds its echo still in movements that have succeeded in South Africa, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine. They sang We Shall Overcome in Prague during the Velvet Revolution."
Documenting atrocities
For those who personally remember the troubled 1960s, At Canaan's Edge is a riveting but disturbing time machine, evoking an era of violence: a sorrowful period in American history darkened by the assassination of three eloquent national leaders, King himself and the brothers Kennedy. The many atrocities, which Branch narrates in detail, included the brutal shotgun slaying of a young Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Daniels, valedictorian of his 1961 class at Virginia Military Institute. Daniels and others were drawn south by the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Daniels challenged segregation both raw and genteel in Lowndes County, Ala., where he was shot down in cold blood at the door of a rural grocery store.
If you need a reminder of the violence in which Alabama and other Deep South states were reborn into the age of legal equality (as well as tough Midwestern neighborhoods such as Cicero, Ill., the site of King's most disillusioning march), no story is more emblematic than Daniels'. As with the earlier Mississippi Freedom Summer murder of three young men, all-male, all-white juries made a mockery of the law by acquitting known murderers in the space of minutes. Meanwhile, in 1968, the Watts district of Los Angeles, viewed then as a prototypical black ghetto, erupted in rioting. The effect of that violence was potentially devastating to those who had pinned their hopes on nonviolence and, but for King's influence, might well have become (as many gloomily predicted it would) the pattern of the future.
Equally upsetting images were emerging a world away on film. From America's costly war in Vietnam, napalm, high explosives and body bags were becoming iconic images on the nightly television news programs. In the ultimate image, after Viet Cong guerrillas penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, an enraged police chief shot a bound prisoner at pointblank range. These events form the background and, often, the substance of Branch's account. But the real focus is on the interwoven destinies of two titanic figures, King and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, both of them linked by the Alabama troubles.
Alabama, where At Canaan's Edge opens, was a conservative state that had cast its lot with a bullying governor, George C. Wallace. Like other resistant Southern politicians, Wallace had set himself up as a tribune of white supremacy, though he cloaked his cause in state-rights' rhetoric. King's Selma-to-Montgomery march was, in effect, the first of his major campaigns to challenge the stark denial of voting rights. In Alabama's rural counties, local officials had gone to bizarre, often violent, lengths to bar black registration. The ironic result of the spectacle in Selma was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson introduced the historic legislation in a joint session of Congress and concluded his address electrically by echoing the anthem of the cause: "We shall overcome."
As a counterpoint to the Selma drama, Johnson was sliding into a war in Vietnam that he felt, instinctively, would be his ruin. The president who had shepherded through Congress the first civil rights laws since Reconstruction was soon to dissipate his political authority in the jungles. It was a tragic dilemma for him. He believed that his ambitious domestic program would falter if his foes could charge him with "losing" South Vietnam to communism. The fear overrode his doubts, and not only his but those of former Senate colleagues he trusted, Richard Russell of Georgia and others. This counterpoint is the thematic core of At Canaan's Edge, and it makes for vivid and revelatory reading.
One of the book's many strengths is that it affords a stereoscopic view, a revealing contrast between events as they appeared then and the reality we know from documents now. Johnson's own morbid but hidden fears are not the least remarkable. Here we have another testament to the discord between appearance and reality in American politics. At Canaan's Edge relates much that was hidden — not only Johnson's personal doubts about the wisdom of the war but divisions within King's inner circle.
It was a conflict that became acute when King, as a new Nobel Peace laureate, began to couple the struggle of the Vietnamese peasants with the struggle of black people in America. The association was provocative to his ally Johnson, who was doubtless the more sensitive because of his own hidden doubts about the war. Even in a sympathetic White House, King's sudden lurch into antiwar preaching was a thorn in the side. Add to that another hidden element in the mix: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to discredit King by leaking information about his private life gained by wiretaps and bugging, the latter also one of the haunting inner secrets of two Democratic presidencies.
The pretext for the surveillance, as represented by Hoover, was that King's movement was under "communist" influences. Hoover's excuse for snooping was nonsense. Not merely was Hoover's prime suspect, a white lawyer named Stanley Levison, among King's more cautious and conservative counselors; no movement was ever more native nor patriotic in motive than King's. As he repeatedly insisted, it was a call to the nation to make good what was "written on paper."
'The American dilemma'
Two of the monumental recent works of American narrative history have been written by UNC alumni — Branch and the late Shelby Foote '39 — and their trilogies are related in several ways. Foote's three-volume work on the Civil War has needed no further introduction since he starred as a narrative voice in Ken Burns' remarkable PBS series. Foote's engaging performance as a raconteur enlarged a small but devoted audience into one of millions and did belated justice to a historical masterwork.
Both works, moreover, concern ongoing aspects of "the American dilemma," as Gunnar Myrdahl called it years ago, the dilemma of race. Branch's trilogy is in significant ways a continuation of Foote's account of a fratricidal war over slavery that cost more than 600,000 American lives. King helped bring to birth what another distinguished UNC alumnus, the late C. Vann Woodward '37, called "the second reconstruction." When the struggle for equal rights was renewed after World War II and in the mid-1950s entered its direct-action phase, Martin Luther King Jr., as young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, emerged as the leader of a bus boycott that began with Rosa Parks' refusal to surrender her seat on a city bus.
When Branch spoke recently of his literary influences and models, the first name he called was that of Shelby Foote. "I inhaled Foote's trilogy," he said, "and I knew from that day that this was the kind of history I wanted to write also — storytelling history, dramatic narrative in which people and causes come to life and action tells the tale."
He had no idea at the beginning that his account of the King years would lengthen to three large volumes and thousands of pages and take him 24 years to write and publish. As Foote did before him, he had planned to write a much shorter book. His original contract called for a three-year project, three times longer than his earlier books but still a limited task.
"I knew it was a big undertaking," he says, "but, of course, I wound up underestimating it by a factor of eight, even though I worked full time with obsessive focus. I think two factors explain the extra years: First, I stuck to a narrative style, which I'd called 'storytelling history' in the proposal. I had a theory that we learn across the barriers of race not by abstract argument but by discovery through characters at the most human level. To that end, I ruled out as fool's gold the judgmental labels of race, such as 'racist' and 'militant,' because the abstractions of race usually convey the mere illusion of ideas. My storytelling approach required extra research to bring out at least a modicum of personal identification with the huge range of characters, from the White House down to small rural churches. And that helps explain a second and related reason for all the unplanned years of work: This huge array of historical characters struggled at the intersection of very deep and complicated subjects: race, religion, violence and, of course, democracy."
At the risk of being a bit fanciful, another and very different literary influence might be mentioned. Asked about his favorite writers he named Foote, Garry Wills and others, then paused. "This may sound strange," he said. He then revealed that he is a Jane Austen fan, a Janeite as such fans are known in the critical trade. What, one might wonder, might a young Englishwoman of genius, writing in early 19th-century Hampshire, have to tell a historian of King's era? Here's a theory:
As Jane Austen's devoted readers know, she has a way of resolving intensely dramatic moments of her novels with dry, summary understatement, as when the immortal hero and heroine of Pride and Prejudice finally stop misunderstanding one another. Is it implausible to speculate that Taylor Branch may have borrowed that kind of diminuendo from high intensity at the end of this book?
On the eve of his Memphis assassination in April 1968, King addressed a large audience in searing, fatalistic words no one who heard (or hears) them can forget: "... I've been to the mountaintop. ... Like anybody I would like to live — a long life. ... But I'm not concerned about that now, 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 that we as a people will get to the promised land! So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
Meanwhile, his assassin was stalking him. Branch deliberately cools the tone of his narrative from King's soaring oration to terrible but prosaic facts: "... At four o'clock, an escaped convict bought a pair of Bushnell binoculars ... [and] drove back to finishing setting up a surveillance post ... and perhaps hearing radio reports that specified Room 306 [of the Lorraine Motel] he had located and studied the motel until an hour ago, when he rented a room for $8.50 a week in Bessie Brewer's flophouse next door to Fire Station Number 2. ..." The appalling ballistic details follow.
That modulation is of a polish that only the most skilled writers, operating with a sure sense of pace, bring to dramatic narrative. The terrible tale of the assassination is, of course, far distant from Austen's social comedy, but it reaches the same level of writerly finesse. If it is a flight of the reviewer's imagination to suggest a trans-Atlantic affinity between Austen and Branch, so be it. The point, after all, is the excellence of the writing.