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At Canaan’s Edge concludes
America in the King Years, a three-volume history that
will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race,
violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling
author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account
of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr.,
earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in
the pantheon of American history.
In At Canaan’s Edge, King
and his movement stand at the zenith of America’s defining
story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of
democracy. Branch opens with the authorities’ violent
suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7,
1965. The quest to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge
engages the conscience of the world, strains the civil rights
coalition, and embroils King in negotiations with all three
branches of the U.S. government.
The marches from Selma coincide with the
first landing of large U.S. combat units in South Vietnam.
The escalation of the war severs the cooperation of King and
President Lyndon Johnson after a collaboration that culminated
in the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
After Selma, young pilgrims led by Stokely
Carmichael take the movement into adjacent Lowndes County,
Alabama, where not a single member of the black majority has
tried to vote in the twentieth century. Freedom workers are
murdered, but sharecroppers learn to read, dare to vote, and
build their own political party. Carmichael leaves in frustration
to proclaim his famous black power doctrine, taking the local
panther ballot symbol to become an icon of armed rebellion.
Also after Selma, King takes nonviolence
into Northern urban ghettoes. Integrated marches through Chicago
expose hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi
Klan’s, but King’s 1966 settlement with Mayor
Richard Daley does not gain the kind of national response
that generated victories from Birmingham and Selma. We watch
King overrule his advisers to bring all his eloquence into
dissent from the Vietnam War. We watch King make an embattled
decision to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact
to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers’
strike, and King’s assassination.
Parting the Waters provided an unsurpassed
portrait of King’s rise to greatness, beginning with
the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and ending with the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Pillar of Fire,
theologians and college students braved the dangerous Mississippi
Freedom Summer of 1964 as Malcolm X raised a militant new
voice for racial separatism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
outlawed segregation by race and mandated equal opportunity
for women. From the pinnacle of winning the Nobel Peace Prize,
King willed himself back to “the valley” of jail
in his daunting Selma campaign.
At Canaan’s Edge portrays
King at the height of his moral power even as his worldly
power is waning. It shows why his fidelity to freedom and
nonviolence makes him a defining figure long beyond his brilliant
life and violent end.
Taylor Branch is the bestselling
author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,
1954-63 (which won the Pulitzer Prize), Pillar of Fire:
America in the King Years, 1963-65, and At Canaan’s
Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. The author
of two other nonfiction books and a novel, Branch is a former
staff member of The Washington Monthly, Harper’s,
and Esquire. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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