Taylor Branch's AT CANAAN'S EDGE out Jan. 10

[ghost of miles]

Hey all, I'm working on a Night Lights jazz salute to Martin Luther King Jr. and decided to check up on Taylor Branch, author of the phenomenal books PARTING THE WATERS and PILLAR OF FIRE, which form a sort of combined history of both King and the American civil-rights movement. When I finished PILLAR OF FIRE back in 1998, I remember thinking, "Man, I'll buy the last volume the day it comes out." Took a gander at Amazon, and lo and behold!

At Canaan's Edge

Out January 10th... don't miss it. It covers 1965-68 and will undoubtedly make for a harrowing read. What impressed me so much with the first two books was Branch's ability to sustain a potentially quite unwieldy, 18-wheeler of a narrative.

Edited December 28, 2005 by ghost of miles

[Johnny E]

Civil Rights history? Doesn't this belong in the politics section?

[ghost of miles]

Erm--hope not. (And yes, I'm aware of what went down with Brokenback.) It's a history book, and--afaik--everybody here supports civil rights, so I don't see why this thread would turn political. The MLK Day threads often get posted in this forum, so I thought it'd be OK to mention Branch's new book coming out, seeing as how it's a bio of sorts. If I needs be punted, though, then punt away!

[Johnny E]

It's a history book, and--afaik--everybody here supports civil rights, so...

Don't be so sure.

[ghost of miles]

Well, I gotta confess that I'm terribly prejudiced against Kentuckians.

As a Yankee fan, I also feel extraordinarily persecuted by certain members of this board.

[ghost of miles]

Haven't read it yet--it doesn't street till 1/10, though if I do a review for our station I might be able to get an advance copy. Agree w/you on Ellroy; AMERICAN TABLOID gives the reader a better sense of 1958-63 America than most history books, I think. (Love the L.A. QUARTET too.) The COLD SIX THOUSAND follow-up is evidently going to delve into U.S. policy in Latin America circa the early 1970s--what a lovely time that was, eh?

[ghost of miles]

I'm going to pick this up tonight & will try to report back after I've read it... in the meantime, some background on Branch's writing of the trilogy:

Saga ends 'At Canaan's Edge'

King historian finishes trilogy on civil rights

By Bob Minzesheimer | Jan 11, 2006

BALTIMORE -- When Taylor Branch began writing a history of the U.S. civil rights movement, he planned one book that would take three years.

Twenty-four years, three books, 2,849 pages and one Pulitzer Prize later, he has reached a historian's version of the promised land.

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, $35), the final volume in Branch's monumental series, is out this week. The title, as with Branch's earlier works, Parting the Waters (1988) and Pillar of Fire (1998), comes from the Book of Exodus. The scope is nearly biblical, although the complex portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. is far from saintly.

Branch, who turns 59 on Saturday, has mixed feelings about the end of what he calls "the blessing of a life's work." At his home in Baltimore, he feels "giddy, relieved, a sense of loss and a lot of nervousness about how much resonance the story still has."

The civil rights struggle, with all its peaks and valleys, still offers political and moral lessons, he believes, but he doesn't like to lecture. Branch prefers being a storyteller and letting readers draw their own conclusions.

He does say that the more he has learned about King, the more he admires him, as a politician who never ran for office and as a preacher driven by a sense of guilt.

"He really was a threatening character," Branch says. "Many of those close to him were not comfortable with him, but his oratory transcended that. I found no one who criticized him for mixing church and state. He fused the language of religion and politics without being dogmatic about either."

Branch never met King, never even saw him speak or preach, although they shared a hometown: Atlanta.

As a teenager, Branch wasn't "blind to what was happening," but kept a safe distance from civil rights protests. He thought, "It was too scary, but maybe someday, when I was more established."

At 16, he watched TV coverage of protests in Birmingham, where 8-year-old black girls faced fire hoses and police dogs. "It was a pivotal moment. I remember my stupefaction, my questions about where did this come from?"

It's the same basic question his books aim to answer.

As a student at the University of North Carolina, Branch joined protests against the Vietnam War, not the civil rights movement.

Later, "my first original idea" was that anti-war activists "covered the civil rights movement the way Pat Boone covered Little Richard," using "cover" the way musicians do when someone comes along and sings someone else's song.

"We foolishly underestimated its complexity and need for discipline and self-sacrifice."

At Canaan's Edge reaffirms the radical power of non-violence, but the book begins and ends with violence. It opens with a vivid description of armed Klansmen surrounding a black church in Lowndes County, Ala., in 1965.

It ends three years later as King is assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis: "King stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank."

The book is not a biography, although King holds the story together much in the way he held together the civil rights movement. It's a narrative with scores of characters, famous and little known. It constantly shifts from Selma to Vietnam, from the White House to turmoil within King's inner circle.

It deals with King's adultery and depression and with the FBI's campaign to harass and blackmail him. It mines President Johnson's secret White House tapes and the FBI's wiretaps of King. Branch says it's ironic that "something so evil would become so useful" to a historian re-creating that era.

In style and structure, Branch was influenced by Shelby Foote's The Civil War, a three-volume, novel-like military history that "made you feel like you were part of it," Branch says. "Foote was a Mississippian, yet he helped readers sympathize with Sherman."

At Canaan's Edge is apt to prompt readers to sympathize with both King, who was whipsawed by conflicts within the movement, and Johnson, the reluctant warrior, whose alliance with King on civil rights was destroyed by King's growing opposition to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Branch says he tried to make the story "as personal and as human as possible." He's not the first to reveal King's extramarital affairs but discloses that, in early 1965, King confessed to his wife, Coretta, about "the one mistress who meant most to him ... with intensity almost like a second family. The result was painful disaster."

Branch sees a connection "between one's private life and one's public life, but it's very complicated. I don't believe that because someone is a flawed philanderer, that makes that person a hypocrite in everything he does or says."

He also suggests that King's self-reproach and penance for his failure to give up his "illicit consolations" may have driven him to take risks he otherwise wouldn't have.

Branch took his own and lesser risks in a brief taste of the civil rights movement that accidentally led to his career as a writer.

As a graduate student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, he spent the summer of 1969 working for the Voter Education Project, an Atlanta-based civil rights group.

He was assigned to make contacts in rural Georgia, where most blacks still were not registered to vote: "I really didn't know what I was doing. I felt so stupid."

He found most local black leaders too intimidated to challenge the status quo, so he tried recruiting in illegal bars and gambling dens known as juke joints.

He was in Bubba-Doo's Big Apple in Cuthbert when the sheriff of Rudolph County stopped by for his take of the profits, Branch says. The sheriff asked what a white boy was doing in place like that.

Branch says he was arrested, then released when a local businessman, a Princeton graduate, heard a Princeton student was in jail. Branch recalls his words: "No Princeton man belongs in jail, even if you are a communist."

With such stories, Branch compiled a diary about his summer, rather than the policy analysis he was supposed to write. A professor sent the diary to Charles Peters, editor of a new political magazine, The Washington Monthly, which published portions of Branch's diary in three issues.

"I didn't write it to be published, but I became a published writer." He went on to work at Washington Monthly, Harper's and Esquire.

When he approached Alice Mayhew, a legendary editor at Simon & Schuster, about a civil rights book, she rejected his proposal and advised him to get more experience.

He did, ghostwriting an autobiography of Watergate figure John Dean and co-authoring basketball star Bill Russell's.

In 1982, he signed a book deal with Mayhew, who has remained his editor ever since, extending his contract several times.

Branch isn't sure what he'll do next. He doesn't rule out a book about his friendship with Bill Clinton. They met in the student anti-war movement and jointly ran George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign in Texas.

As president, Clinton asked Branch to help write his two inaugural addresses and to conduct a series of 89 late-night oral history interviews about his presidency that Clinton used when he wrote his memoir.

Branch ducks a question about comparing King's and Clinton's womanizing. He says he knows far more about King's private life than about Clinton's.

"It's strange. I feel I've spent much more time with King, whom I never met, than with Clinton, even though we had all that time together in the White House, just the two of us and a tape recorder."

Excerpt "King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years."

[Adam]

PARTING THE WATERS is still one of the best 2or 3 non-fiction books that I've read. This is really good news.

I also just saw a BBC doc on Martin Luther King on the flight from London to Los Angeles, in which Branch was interviewed, along with a variety of other notable figures. Quite well done for a one-hour show.

[ghost of miles]

Started this today & have been reading the account of the brutal "Bloody Sunday" in Selma March '65. Branch is also doing a good job so far of constructing the counter-narrative of LBJ's Vietnam build-up... and how LBJ & his aides KNEW they were screwed going in.

[ghost of miles]

David Levering Lewis has a review in this week's New Yorker. I read the account of LBJ's "we shall overcome" voting-rights speech last night, and it was riveting.

[ghost of miles]

Another review, this one from Anthony Lewis in the NY Times:

The Whirlwinds of Revolt

Review by ANTHONY LEWIS

We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions. That was Martin Luther King Jr.

He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years — from Dec. 5, 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to April 4, 1968, when he was murdered — he changed the face of America.

This is the last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes.

"America in the King Years," Branch's running title for the trilogy, is not a mere conceit, a fancy way of describing a biography. It is not a biography of Dr. King. It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them.

What a different country it was. I lived through those times, but "At Canaan's Edge" made me realize that I did not remember how different. It was before the revolution in women's roles, for example, as Branch tells us in a couple of quick sketches. Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page 1 article in The New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a "dizzy blonde" drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets. In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wondered, in a newsletter, whether an employer could be penalized for refusing to hire "a woman as a dog warden."

But of course it is the virulence of Southern racism at that time that is most striking. This was only 40 years ago, after the passage of the 1964 act, but racist violence and murder were still widespread in the Deep South. Everyone knew who the killers were, but juries would not convict — all-white juries. The openness of the violence was staggering. When Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, came down from Michigan to Selma, Ala., to help in the protest movement, a Ku Klux Klan gang pulled up alongside the car she was driving and shot her dead.

Branch has been working on these books for more than 20 years, exploring endless materials: newspapers, audiotapes, reports, books, personal memories. He has an incredible command of it all, bringing history to life with a few sentences here, extended chapters there on something like the march from Selma to Montgomery. I can pick out only a few themes to indicate the scope of his work.

Selma was about a basic right explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote without discrimination. In Alabama, Mississippi and large parts of other states in the Deep South, the right was a myth for blacks. They were threatened, abused, even murdered if they tried to register or vote; they often lost their homes or their jobs. Armed white mobs menaced them.

It was in the face of those tactics that King decided to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery as a protest for the vote. At the first attempt marchers were brutalized, the march turned back. But they persisted. Branch, usually given to understatement, lets himself go and speaks of "yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge."

Before a second attempt could be made to march to Montgomery, a difficulty intervened. Judge Frank M. Johnson enjoined the march because of likely violence. Johnson was a highly respected federal judge who had made many decisions in favor of civil rights. Justice Department officials pleaded with King not to violate the order lest he sacrifice the movement's reliance on law and the Constitution. But the protesters, many of them, did not want to give way. King did not say what he would do. The march began. He led it onto the Pettus Bridge at the edge of Selma, faced 500 state troopers — and suddenly turned and led the marchers back into Selma. He had made the point and desisted, obeying the law.

There followed a remarkable episode. Judge Johnson was now asked to let the march go forward and enjoin interference with it. But in a telephone conversation with the United States attorney general, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, he said he would not do so unless the federal government undertook to protect the marchers. And he wanted that assurance from the president, he said. Katzenbach gave him the assurance. Lyndon B. Johnson called the Alabama National Guard into federal service and sent regular Army detachments. On their third try, the marchers made it to Montgomery.

King believed that if Americans outside the South were aware of its brutal racism — as few then were — they would want to end it. The violent response to nonviolent protest made the brutality plain. What Americans read in newspapers and saw on television shocked them, and jump-started the political process. Meaningful civil rights legislation made it past Senate filibusters at last.

It was a crucial part of King's thinking to engage the president. As Robert Caro has demonstrated in his biography, Lyndon Johnson had shown streaks of racism in his life. But fundamentally he was for equal rights, and he seized the opportunity presented by the King campaign and the ugly Southern response. In a speech to the nation on March 15, 1965, he memorably adopted the words of the civil rights movement: "It's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome."

L.B.J. is a second object of Branch's penetrating gaze in this volume: not just what he did on civil rights but his whole whirlwind of activity. Here he is on the telephone with Attorney General Katzenbach in Alabama, warning him not to smoke too much during late-night vigils. On one day in 1965 he takes a phone call from Drew Pearson, the columnist, and lectures him for 15 minutes about Vietnam. He receives the British foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, and a delegation, talking long past the scheduled time and telling them — to their confusion — "Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm." He has a conference call with House leaders about the legislation to establish Medicare. He gets a telephone report from Selma.

FOR Johnson, race and Vietnam were preoccupations in tandem. In the same month as the march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965, the first American combat units went ashore at Da Nang. King had had a good relationship with the president, but it broke down over the issue that Johnson rightly feared would overwhelm his reputation on social justice.

Branch's picture of Dr. King on Vietnam is of a man coming slowly, reluctantly, but irresistibly to embrace the issue — against the advice of many supporters. Finally, at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, he called for the United States to "set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement."

The Riverside speech drew heavy criticism. John Roche, a Brandeis University professor who was then on the White House staff, said King had "thrown in with the Commies." He told the president that King was "inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)." A Washington Post editorial said, "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence." But King did not give way. He told a church audience that the press had been "so noble in its praise" when he preached nonviolence toward white oppressors but inconsistently "will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children."

Racism in America was not — and is not — confined to the South. Branch reminds us of that in small ways and large. In 1965, he notes, Mary Travers of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek at a rally. CBS television, which was showing the rally, was besieged by protesting callers, and took the rally off the air for 90 minutes. In the border state of Kentucky, the famous basketball coach Adolph Rupp kept his University of Kentucky team all white. He complained of calls from the university president, "That son of a bitch wants me to get some niggers in here." A little-noted team from Texas Western, with five black players starting, upset Kentucky in the 1966 championship game — a story told just now in the movie "Glory Road." Only slowly, after that, did the bar on black athletes break down in the South. Many people watching college sports on television today would not have dreamed that such a policy ever existed.

Chicago dramatized the reality of antiblack feelings in the North. Marches organized by King to protest segregated housing and unequal government benefits were met with mob taunts and rocks. "Burn them like Jews!" one white group shouted at the marchers. Branch concludes that "the violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners."

The most chilling passages in this book, for me, are about J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director. His hatred of King was not a secret. But Branch shows how far it went — beyond extremity to morbid depravity.

Hoover instructed all in the bureau not to warn King of death threats. He told President Johnson that any requests for federal protection of King would come from subversives, and that King was "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation." He listed King as a prominent target in an order to all F.B.I. offices "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations." There was no basis in fact for the calumnies. The charge of subversion hung on the dubious thread of an allegation that Stanley Levison, an adviser to King, was a Communist agent — an allegation never shown to have any convincing support.

The low point in the Hoover story may have been his performance on the killing of Viola Liuzzo. He tried to conceal the fact that one of the Klansmen who shot at her was an F.B.I. informant, Gary Thomas Rowe — and lied to President Johnson about it. He urged the president not to speak with the Liuzzo family, telling Johnson that "the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party." (Liuzzo's arm was cut by a shard of glass from the shattered car window.) Branch calls Hoover's comments "slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence."

J. Edgar Hoover was either a profoundly disturbed man by this time or that rarity, actual evil. The question that Branch leaves unaddressed is why President Johnson didn't fire him. The familiar explanation is fear of the poison that Hoover would spew out in response. But Lyndon Johnson could have handled that.

Under provocation that hardly any other human being could have resisted, King never gave up on nonviolence. The rise of black-power advocates like Stokely Carmichael did not move him. "I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization," he told a meeting in 1966. "I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of war and conflict in the world. I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hatred. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!"

One cannot read this amazing book without thinking about what King would be saying if he were with us today. He would surely be pointing to the vast racial injustice that remains in this country, and to the growing gap between rich and poor. I think there can be no doubt that he would also be speaking strongly against the war in Iraq, warning that it was killing Americans and Iraqis, nurturing terrorism, eroding the world's regard for America.

This third volume of Branch's trilogy deepens a feeling many have had about Dr. King, a mystery. He moved sometimes as if propelled by a force that others could not see. He rose to make a speech, and extemporaneous biblical eloquence would pour forth. His friends and supporters were often uncertain what he would do. But on the great issues he was right, and brave.

"To the end," Taylor Branch concludes, "he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years."

Anthony Lewis is a former columnist for The Times.

I'm about halfway through, and it's just a maddening book to read. Lewis' characterization of J. Edgar Hoover as "either profoundly disturbed or evil" is right on... in fact, it's hard to believe that Hoover wasn't somehow complicit in MLK's death, when you read the numerous accounts of Hoover ordering that death threats not be passed along, that no protection be provided for King, etc. He clearly wanted MLK dead.

[Tom Storer]

I have "At Canaan's Edge" but in preparation for it I'm first rereading the second book in the trilogy, "Pillars of Fire." Absolutely riveting history. Branch does a brilliant job of keeping many different threads in view and moving at pace. The first volume, "Parting the Waters," is even better. Everyone with even a casual interest in contemporary American history should read this trilogy.