At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68

last updated 8 January 2015

In 1966, at the peak of his influence, Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Chicago to broaden his fight against social injustice. A clash several months earlier with police in Selma, Ala., had paved the way for passage of the Voting Rights Act. Now the man who led that march was taking aim at economic inequality, moving his family into a slum apartment to mount a campaign against housing and job discrimination. 'œI have never in my life seen such hate,' King said, after a demonstration in a white neighborhood drew jeers and stones. This time, however, his aides were feuding. Younger black leaders were growing impatient with his nonviolent strategies. Mayor Richard J. Daley was outmaneuvering him. Most important, no fresh burst of shame was sweeping across white America.

In the third volume of Taylor Branch's 'œmagisterial' account of the civil-rights era, said Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, the King we mostly see is a 'œconflicted and harried' leader. 'œRunning late to everything, refereeing among squabbling lieutenants, straying from his wife to the end,' he never quite finds the right gesture or words to recapture the magic of 1965. This presents a problem for Branch, said Kevin Boyle in the Chicago Tribune. 'œAs King falters, so does some of the book's narrative drive.' False starts are simply not as compelling as triumphant struggles. But as with the two previous volumes in this 'œmasterwork,' At Canaan's Edge lays bare 'œthe nation's soul.' This is grand-scale history, 'œbursting with outsize figures.' As Branch crosscuts from Lyndon Johnson to Stokely Carmichael to J. Edgar Hoover, not every moment sings. But 'œthe cumulative effect' of his story is 'œdevastating.'

The speech King delivered on the eve of his 1968 assassination was heartbreakingly optimistic, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Putting aside his deep worries about the collapsing anti-poverty movement and the war in Vietnam, he declared that he could still see 'œthe Promised Land.' But On Canaan's Edge ultimately is a 'œsprawling' work that too often resorts to 'œnewsreel-like summaries' of seminal events. Its best pages come early, during the showdown in Selma. And it is most valuable for the 'œkeen' sense it gives us of how 'œso much that occurred in America in the ensuing years' sprang from that moment.