Taylor Branch

Reviews — Washington Post

Looking Over Jordan
The conclusion of an epic trilogy shows the civil rights movement both succeeding and fraying.

Reviewed by James T. Patterson
Sunday, January 15, 2006

In "At Canaan's Edge", Taylor Branch offers a moving and panoramic view of America during the last three years of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To get a feel for the book's scope, take Branch's juxtaposition of the streams of events that were rushing together in January 1966, 40 years ago this month.

One such episode took place on a numbingly cold day in Chicago, where King dramatized his forthcoming battle against poverty and racial injustice by moving into a third-floor walk-up in a rundown black neighborhood. A bare dirt floor graced the entry to the tenement. "The smell of urine," his wife, Coretta, recalled, "was overpowering. We were told that this was because the door was always open, and drunks came in off the street to use the hallway as a toilet."

As the Kings were settling in, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was conducting nationally televised hearings critical of President Lyndon B. Johnson's military escalation in Vietnam. Describing the confrontations that roiled these hearings, the reporter David Halberstam wrote, "This was a fire fight, angry, bitter, and hostile." Unmoved, Johnson resumed heavy bombing of Vietnam; three months later, the New York Times wrote that 1,361 American soldiers had been killed during the first 99 days of 1966, a total that matched "the cumulative toll over the previous five years."

Meanwhile, white racists were assailing people loyal to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other groups struggling for equality in the South. In early January, a white man in Tuskegee, Ala., murdered Sammy Younge, a black civil rights worker. Vernon Dahmer, a revered black activist, died following the firebombing of his house in Hattiesburg, Miss. The Georgia House of Representatives refused, by a vote of 187 to 12, to seat Julian Bond (now the NAACP's chairman), a young black leader who opposed the Vietnam War.

Elsewhere, in Lowndes County, Ala., a cockpit of racial turmoil, a federal judge in early February approved plans to desegregate the area's public schools. But black parents did not dare send their children to the white schools, and 24 of the 27 dilapidated Negro-only schools in the county were closed, obliging black families to relocate. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, only a tiny fraction of black children in early 1966 attended schools with whites in the Deep South.

Pulling together these and many other memorable events, Branch brings to a close his epic three-book history of "America in the King Years." The first volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Parting the Waters" (1988), masterfully described civil rights efforts between 1954 and 1963. "Pillar of Fire" (1998) covered the next two years, ending with the onset of the campaign for black voting rights in Selma, Ala., in early 1965. "At Canaan's Edge", a slower-moving narrative than "Parting the Waters", devotes 200 early pages to that momentous struggle in Selma, which culminated with the passage in August 1965 of the historic Voting Rights Act -- the high point of success for the civil rights movement.

Five days later, violence erupted in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, whereupon King undertook his campaign against racial inequality in Chicago and other cities outside the South. This was, of course, an extremely tough nut to crack, and Branch's subsequent 570 pages tell a grim story of escalation in Vietnam, rising black-white polarization and frustrating fights for racial justice. American liberalism, too, suffered lasting political blows in these pivotal years. On April 4, 1968, four days after LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection, an assassin took King's life.

The civil rights movement has attracted many able historians, and Branch, an indefatigable researcher, has relied heavily on them. Interviews and archival sources add gripping detail, especially of the many bloody episodes during these turbulent years. Branch's account focuses on King and his SCLC entourage, but he also introduces a host of lesser-known grassroots organizers. His narrative should satisfy readers who look for bottom-up as well as top-down histories of the civil rights movement.

Recordings of phone conversations -- either conducted by Johnson in the Oval Office or overheard by bugs and wiretaps planted by the FBI -- further enrich Branch's narrative. Like other historians who have usefully mined these materials, Branch paints a devastating portrait of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who privately called King a "burrhead" and had earlier publicly branded him "the most notorious liar in the country." Even after King's death, FBI officials circulated malicious stories about his personal relationships and his associates.

Those associates were a contentious crew. Much of "At Canaan's Edge" catalogues the sharp intra-movement disagreements that drained King's energies. Two of his top lieutenants, James Bevel and Hosea Williams, clashed endlessly over strategy and access to the SCLC's pitifully small resources. Bevel, heading the Chicago effort, demanded that King highlight his opposition to Vietnam; Williams, trying to manage civil rights campaigns in Alabama, complained repeatedly that SCLC deprived him of funds and manpower. After a long night of argumentative strategizing in September 1967, King shouted, "I don't want to do this any more! I want to go back to my little church!" The livid King "banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends" until aides "talked him to bed."

Meanwhile, civil rights leaders outside the SCLC openly criticized King's moves. Harlem's longtime congressman, the ever wily Adam Clayton Powell Jr., referred to him as "Martin 'Loser' King." More worrisome were black leaders who began to renounce racial integration and nonviolence itself. "Nonviolence has no meaning," the activist James Meredith told reporters in April 1966. A month later, Stokely Carmichael of the increasingly militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) announced that "integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy." Following bitter internal debate in December 1966, SNCC expelled its last seven white staff members.

Although Branch notes King's depressive moments, he admires his almost superhuman tolerance amid these disputes. While giving ample space to the views of leaders such as Bevel, Williams, Stanley Levison, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy and many others, he regards King's religiously based, unswerving and inspiring adherence to nonviolence and integration as the glue that held the increasingly fractious and fragile civil rights movement together until April 1968. The "glaring impact of nonviolent power," Branch concludes, later helped to force the collapse of the Soviet Union and to inspire Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square.

Nor is this mere hindsight; at the time, King deeply believed that nonviolence should not stop at the water's edge. Branch, emphasizing King's mounting opposition to the Vietnam War, devotes many pages to accounts of the fighting in Asia, as well as to meetings of Johnson and his foreign policy advisers. Because the war diverted funds as well as public attention from racial issues after 1964, Branch is right to attend seriously to it. Moreover, King's antiwar beliefs were inseparably connected to his faith in nonviolence, and they fueled his increasingly radical statements about the United States itself. "There is something strangely inconsistent," he declared in April 1967, "about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say be nonviolent toward [the segregationist Selma sheriff] Jim Clark, but will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children! There is something wrong about that!" In Feb. 1968, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

But as Branch's day-to-day narrative moves ahead, it frequently veers away from racial issues in order to describe at length a host of other matters: anti-Vietnam teach-ins, LBJ's thinking about the war, his administration's struggles to promote Great Society legislation, the career of Ho Chi Minh and the massacre by U.S. troops of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in March 1968. Detailed digressions such as these wrench the reader about, resulting in a somewhat sprawling book.

Intent on sustaining narrative pace (no mean feat in a volume of such heft), Branch also does not always give readers his considered opinion about King's and others' key decisions. Was it wise for the resource-strapped, Southern-based SCLC to undertake large-scale civil rights work in the North as well as the South in 1965? Should King have dumped such problematic advisers as Hosea Williams? Was one of King's major goals in Chicago -- open housing -- a well-conceived strategy? Should he have heeded associates who urged him to soft-pedal his politically controversial opposition to the war? Was it sensible of SCLC to press ahead with a campaign in 1968 in support of sanitation workers in Memphis and with an ill-managed Poor People's Campaign scheduled for Washington later that year?

Even in hindsight, these remain difficult questions to resolve, and Branch may be wise to focus on describing the rushing streams of events -- letting readers cast judgments for themselves. "At Canaan's Edge" is a deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America's civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.

James T. Patterson, a professor emeritus of history at Brown University, is the author of "Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy" and, most recently, "Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore."

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