Looking Over Jordan
The conclusion of an epic trilogy shows the civil rights movement both succeeding and fraying.
AT CANAAN'S EDGE
America in the King Years 1965-68
  Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 (AP) |
By Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuster. 1,039 pp. $35
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.
