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FEBRUARY 2006

At Canaan’s Edge: America In The King Years 1965-68

Reviewed by Merri Rosenberg

At Canaan’s Edge: America In The King Years 1965-68
by Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuster, New York ( 2006): 1039 pp.

Perhaps only a trilogy as monumental as Taylor Branch’s three-volume history of America during the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., years could do justice to that equally monumental epoch. Branch, the best-selling author and Pulitzer-prize winner who has written “Parting the Waters” and “Pillar of Fire”, which deal with King’s journey from 1954 through 1965, completes his saga in this final volume.

Following Dr. King’s martyrdom and subsequent iconic status in our culture, popular mythology portrayed the civil rights struggle as an historic inevitability, with its participants literally marching on the same page, shoulder to shoulder.

Yet as Branch describes in this compelling, densely detailed and energetically written account of those watershed final years of Dr. King’s life, the outcome was hardly pre-determined.  The civil rights leader had to contend with nearly as many internal battles as with external enemies. There were those who considered him to be grandstanding, who resented his platform of non-violence, who felt unappreciated or discounted as the relentless pace of events seemed to take on a life of its own.

Even as some members of SNCC ( Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) challenged Dr. King’s decisions, seeing him as a “hit and run celebrity”, Dr. King had to deal with President Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. The march in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, with the subsequent national horror evoked by televised images of bullying state troopers wielding clubs, tear gas spray guns and canisters on the marchers, was “ a turning point,” writes Branch. “The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would roll forward still, but an opposing tide of resentment and disbelief rose to challenge the overall direction of American politics, contesting the language of freedom.”

After the first bloody march at Selma, Dr. King’s decision during the second march not to continue on to Montgomery—“With but an instant to decide whether this was a trap or a miraculous parting of the Red Sea”—provided yet another contentious flashpoint, with some movement leaders eager to maintain momentum.

Nor was the civil rights movement the only issue convulsing America, as Branch points out. The escalating war in Vietnam distracted and derailed President Johnson, and formed yet another point of fissure in a country that, at times, seemed to be literally coming apart at the seams.

In Montgomery, Dr. King’s remarks, those that hadn’t been prepared in advance, remain powerful: “How long will justice be crucified and truth buried? I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long. Because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long! Because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long! Because you shall reap what you sow. How long?”.  Thanks to Branch’s skillful description of that scene, painted in all its  immediacy and rhythms, the reader feels as if he were  witnessing it as an actual participant.

Dr. King’s expansion of the civil rights movement to encompass poverty issues in the North, and his protests against the Vietnam War, all contribute to the increasing demands made upon him as a national leader, demands that physically and emotionally exhausted him.

By the time Dr. King reaches his fateful rendezvous in Memphis, the reader has seen Dr. King’s despair and depression as urban riots supplant his message of non-violence. His final speech to the Memphis sanitation workers is heartbreakingly prescient: “Because I have been to the mountaintop... Like anybody I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place...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.”

Branch’s great achievement is that King’s words affect the reader just as powerfully as they did his listeners, and make one mourn as though it were April 1968 the loss of that extraordinary man.#

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