At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch (PDF)

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At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 is the final volume in Taylor Branch’s magnificent history of America in the years of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, recognized universally as the definitive account and ultimate recognition of Martin Luther King’s heroic place in the nation’s history.The final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan’s Edge covers the final years of King’s struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north. At Canaan’s Edge traces a seminal era in our defining national story, freedom. The narrative resumes in Selma, crucible of the voting rights struggle for black people across the South. The time is early 1965, when the modern Civil Rights Movement enters its second decade since the Supreme Court’s Brown decision declared segregation by race a violation of the Constitution. From Selma, King’s non-violent Movement is under threat from competing forces inside and outside. Branch chronicles the dramatic voting rights drives in Mississippi and Alabama, Meredith’s murder, the challenge to King from the Johnson Administration and the FBI and other enemies. When King tries to bring his Movement north (to Chicago), he falters. Finally we reach Memphis, the garbage strike, King’s assassination. Branch’s magnificent trilogy makes clear why the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed King’s leadership, are among the nation’s enduring achievements.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The crowning achievement of Branch’s King trilogy is to show anew the moral power of [nonviolent] philosophy.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution”This is so far the best look at [the Sixties]. It is an essential tool for understanding what happened to and in America across that dizzying span of years.” — Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books”A magnificent account of witness and sacrifice.” — John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine”A thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph.” — Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Book Review”Luminous…magisterial…At Canaan’s Edge is a sweeping history of protest and politics, bursting with outsize figures.” — Chicago Tribune About the Author Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐America, created as an experiment in individual freedom, embedded the legal right to own slaves in its founding charter. The working out of these contradictory impulses has been the central American story. This is the story that Taylor Branch tells in engrossing detail through his three volume history of “America in the King Years.”The Civil Rights Movement brought out the best and the worst in the American character; over almost 3,000 pages, Branch assembles the facts, interviews the survivors, and bears witness. The first volume, Parting the Waters, traces Martin Luther King’s rise from obscure Baptist preacher to a civil rights leader forged in the crucible of the Montgomery bus boycott. Pillar of Fire goes from JFK’s assassination to an abrupt, somewhat unsatisfactory ending at the beginning of the 1965 Selma campaign. At Canaan’s Edge starts with the triumph of the Montgomery march and ends with King’s assassination in 1968.The author describes his approach as a “narrative biographical history,” that uses King’s life to illuminate broad American themes. There’s more narrative than history in these volumes. Very seldom does Branch take the long view, or give us contextual exegeses. What he does give us is compelling, often brilliant reporting that features participant interviews, a deep dive into formerly classified documents, and a you-are-there look at the conversations, strategy sessions and public theater of the friends and foes of civil rights. These books aren’t exactly a King biography, a history of the Civil Rights Movement or a history of America during a time of wrenching change, and yet they’re all these things, the whole becoming greater than the sum of the parts.One of the many rewards of reading this trilogy is the skill with which Branch has resurrected the living, breathing King. We learn about an intellectual more at home parsing Reinhold Neibuhr’s philosophy than facing down rabid mobs of diehard segregationists. A holy man beset by common human lusts. An executive who dealt with PR, fundraising and staff squabbles. A preacher buffeted by the sectarian struggles in the Black Baptist Church. A politician weaving, often groping, through racial and cultural thickets toward goals that seemed impossibly distant. One comes away awed by the immensity of the burdens King assumed, and humbled by the grace with which he bore them.The books also chronicle the history of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. The relationships among the various civil rights groups were often tempestuous. The NAACP under Roy Wilkins thought King’s nonviolent demonstrations too radical. The young activists of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) eventually dismissed King’s approach as too temperate. The leaders of his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Bevel, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, were often at odds with King and each other over movement strategy and tactics. The brilliant, mercurial Malcolm X breaks free from the Nation of Islam, but they get him in the end. SNCC’s rise and demise get covered in sympathetic detail, from early sit-ins to the non-violent triumphs of 1964’s Freedom Summer Project up through the divisive times of Black Power separatism. In particular, SNCC leaders Bob Moses and Stokely Carmichael come across as courageous, committed activists who did lonely and dangerous voter registration work in the rural South when no one was watching and only their enemies cared.Another strand recounts the actions of America’s political leaders. John and Bobby Kennedy engaged in an excruciatingly complex dance between white southern politicians and civil rights leaders. JFK personally believed segregation was wrong, but didn’t want to lose the South for the Democrats by forcing integration through federal mandates. Although Bobby Kennedy became increasingly committed to civil rights, as Attorney General he allowed J Edgar Hoover to illegally bug King in order to save his brother from an incipient sex scandal. Hoover, a diehard segregationist, had an irrational hatred for King, and lost no opportunity to try and discredit him. Branch does a great job of revealing the extent of the FBI’s illegal wiretapping campaigns and their corrosive effect on both civil liberties and the rule of law.The tragedy of lost opportunity befell LBJ. He had the vision, commitment and skill to forge a national mandate to end segregation and begin to eradicate poverty. His domestic agenda got highjacked as he drifted deeper into a war he knew from the outset he couldn’t win. In one of his rare pullbacks to take the long view, Branch pinpoints 1966 as liberalism’s high water mark. After that, the white South deserted the Democrats over Civil Rights and FDR’s New Deal coalition fell apart. We’re still dealing with the aftershocks of this pivotal moment as we navigate through the less idealistic, more Darwinian terrain of George Bush’s America.Martin Luther King exhorted us to rise above moral expediency and sectarian passion and “live out the true meaning of our creed.” We never rose to the greatness he thought was in us, but his words and example still point the way for the work to be done. Taylor Branch has captured in indelible fashion the grace and heartbreak of King’s life and times.

⭐This third and final volume of Branch Taylor’s trilogy is of all the three the most unambiguously tragic. At times, reading the previous two volumes, I was so heartbroken at the succession of tragic setbacks in the movement that I wondered when and where the great, decisive victories against segregation ended. And ACE is of all the three the one with the most devastating setbacks. It leaves one to ponder if the Civil Rights Movement eventually achieved its immediate goals so sweepingly precisely because the white power structure finally recognized –so to speak–that those goals were compatible with its continued flourishing.For readers interesting in buying this book: bear in mind that this trilogy is to all intents and purposes a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is NOT a hagiography; Branch frequently mentions the roiling emotions and infidelities of MLK. When contemporary observers remark that a particular appearance or speech fell flat, Branch says so. Perhaps Branch knows this narrative technique is more effective at inspiring admiration than unalloyed praise would have been; perhaps not. But in truth, it’s difficult to imagine any sensitive reader not being filled with wonder that such a moral giant like King could even exist.Rather than duplicate the effort of the other reviewers (particularly the excellent review by G. Bestick, posted below on January 24, 2006), I want to comment on something that has not been addressed by the others. I believe the single most important theme in the trilogy was the exposition of King’s doctrine of “nonviolence.” I use quotes because “nonviolence” is such an inadequate word to describe the doctrine. Elsewhere, Branch alludes to King’s opposition to “enemy-ism,” in which King rejects lines of reasoning that culminate in demonization or vilification of one’s adversaries. First, King’s doctrine acknowledged the common humanity of all people; humans deviated in different paths of moral conduct depending on reasons that are compelling–perhaps irresistible–at the time. Perpetrators are also victims. Second, the resolution of injustice through violence was untenable; the oppressor in any relationship would always win any challenge that employed violence, if for no other reason than because the victorious liberator would become a new oppressor. Third, the practice of nonviolence required unusual discipline and courage, and King was able to transmit the latter through the force of his oratory.In POF (please see my review for that, also), the rival doctrine was belligerent posturing as practiced by the Nation of Islam and by the segregationist authorities. The upheaval of the ’64 elections tended to reflect the loss of face of an earlier generation of white elites, and their replacement by redneck “enforcers.” While the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) remained true to the principles of nonviolence, a major ally, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) repudiated nonviolence in favor of Black Power. The new SNCC was utterly ineffectual and quickly vanished. The Black Panthers was doomed from the start with its scorn of all “white” ideologies and its lack of any coherent replacement. New converts to the ideology of self-defensive violence like Charles Evers could not even bring themselves to target known killers; Byron de la Beckwith, universally known to have murdered Ever’s brother Medgar, was never threatened by the SNCC.White supremacist violence now became endemic; before, there were exceptional cases such as the 9/15/63 bombing of a church in Birmingham; but cases of ambush and murder proliferated dramatically after 1965. The destabilization of white supremacist violence now challenged the very survival of American institutions and Southern police forces increasingly intervened against their former Klan allies.Looming over everything was the Vietnam War, which for King was the most urgent injustice he faced. Johnson hated the war (Stanley Karnow’s *Vietnam* confirms this) but was unable to accept defeat in it; King was unable to compromise with a known evil, and the most conservative 60% of white American public opinion dreaded facing up to an unbeatable foe. Frustration and ambient racism further stimulated conservative support for the war, while the fiscal woes inflicted by the war extinguished every remaining trace of Johnson’s Great Society. The failure of progressive initiatives, when void of King’s own nonviolent doctrines, was universal and inevitable. At the time of his death, King was not so much defeated or even overwhelmed, as he was offset in a floodtide of squalid reaction.After King, the depressing deluge; and after that, his stunning achievements, like a field of tulip bulbs, bloomed amid the receding glacier. But the triumph of nonviolence was like the glimmers of lightning in a summer electric storm, flashing without warning in random corners of the sky.

⭐In At Canaan’s Edge, the concluding volume of Taylor Branch’s magisterial study of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A between 1954 and 1968, the focus is on the period framed by the march on Montgomery and Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis: a time span of scarcely more than 3 years, but one full of keynote legislation, clashing ideologies and shattered promises, where triumph and despair became familiar companions. Here we find King endeavouring to deploy the non violent methods honed in struggles across the Deep South on a nationwide crusade for social justice and peace in Vietnam. This is old fashioned storytelling history at its best, which by interweaving the roles of individuals and mass movements creates a narrative which places set piece confrontations like Pettus Bridge and the Watts riots within a broader historical context. Branch is a reliable guide, his grasp of detail and breadth of approach couched within readable prose equally suited to drawing out the drama of a King speech or a Klan murder.Branch is particularly strong on highlighting the root causes of the increasing divisions within Civil Rights Organizations, the developing pride in Black identity and the emergence of groups like the Panthers alongside official attempts to compromise King’s practice of peaceful protest. As events move towards their tragic denouement on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, we are left in no doubt that the assassin’s bullet killed an agenda and not just a leader. However, ironically it is the counterpoint account of the decline and fall of the most progressive post-war America administration led by Lyndon Johnson that packs equal punch. As Johnson’s vision of The Great Society is undermined by burgeoning military estimates and a conservative backlash, Branch’s prose becomes an anguished threnody to American Liberalism. The fortunes of King and Johnson are shown to have startling parallels not least in their increasing isolation from their own constituencies.This final instalment is a worthy conclusion to a trilogy which probably represents the best single study of a momentous period in American history. Here is a book which compels the reader to reflect on the moral, political and ethical dilemmas it so effectively dissects. Strongly recommended to all those with an interest in history or the shaping of the contemporary United States.

⭐Wer nichts von unserer geschichte weiss, tappt blind in der gegenwart umher, unfit für die zukunft. selbst ein so unermesslich faktenreiches werk wie dieses ist, souverän erzählt, spannender als alle fiktion.

⭐

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