I hope to someday find time to read this trilogy.

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.

The NYT has posted some of its articles written at the time. The one entitled Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes is especially moving, describing the attack on the peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama:

The troopers rushed forward, their blue uniforms and white helmets blurring into a flying wedge as they moved. The wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it. The first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip and on to the pavement on both sides. Those still on their feet retreated.

The troopers continued pushing, using both the force of their bodies and the prodding of their nightsticks. A cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway. The mounted possemen spurred their horses and rode at a run into the retreating mass. The Negroes cried out as the crowded together for protection, and the whites on the sideline whooped and cheered.

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'At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68,' By Taylor Branch

The Whirlwinds of Revolt

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. had a good relationship until it broke down over Vietnam.

Review by ANTHONY LEWIS

Published: February 5, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05lewis.html?pagewanted=all

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.

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AT CANAAN'S EDGE
America in the King Years, 1965-68.
By Taylor Branch.
Illustrated. 1,039 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.