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thedrifter
02-05-06, 10:00 AM
review
March to freedom
Branch trilogy reaches its final chapter with MLK's heroic crusade
By Edward P. Smith
Denver Post Arts & Entertainment Editor
DenverPost.com

We like our heroic leaders uncomplicated. And it helps if they die tragically.

Abraham Lincoln, John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. all fit the mold. The fact that all were complicated men with shortcomings and foibles does not stop us from turning them into icons.

Fortunately for those who like their history served with all the complications of real life, Taylor Branch's final volume of his massive history of the civil rights movement does not disappoint. "At Canaan's Edge," the third of his trilogy, "America in the King Years 1954-1968," is a sweeping portrait of King and many of the key players in the movement, tracking the events from the Selma to Montgomery march through King's assassination in Memphis in April 1968.

This desire for heroes without blemishes comes to mind as early news stories on Branch's book have focused on new revelations about King's extramarital affairs and the fractious relations among members of the movement, as though they diminish his monumental accomplishments.

Mention of the affairs takes up maybe a page. Even with some heightened sensitivity in the wake of last week's death of King's widow, Coretta Scott King, these details do not seem prurient or out of context. As for the arguments among people in the movement, it is at the very heart of the story.

King, who just the year before became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, worked tirelessly to hold together the movement as it plunged into the battle for voting rights, took on racism in the North and was roiled internally by debate over the rising black- power movement and how to handle dissent over the war in Vietnam.

He had become the face of the struggle for civil rights, and that angered many young volunteers, especially those with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who thought he "reaped public glory from their sacrifice."

With the completion of the trilogy, Branch has created a far- reaching look not only at the civil rights movement and King, but of America as it struggled in the post-war period with the most wrenching of social changes. He leaves it to others to debate how far we've come in grappling with issues of social justice, but makes it clear that the fight for rights for black Americans paved the way for the efforts to secure a place in our society for other disenfranchised groups.

The book opens with a nearly 200-page section on the now legendary march from Selma to Montgomery. It was, in fact, three marches in March 1965, the first of which ended shortly after it began at the foot of Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge when local police and Alabama state troopers attacked the marchers, beating them savagely. Photos of the day show now- Rep. John Lewis of Georgia being clubbed to the ground.

The images from that march, and the murder that week in Selma of a minister who had come to join the effort, so shocked the nation that it gave President Lyndon Johnson the opportunity to immediately push through the 1965 Voting Rights Act: "At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom," Johnson told the Congress. "So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomatox. So it was last week in Selma, Ala."

That speech and that month crystallized the great promise and great failure of Lyndon Johnson, who as a senator and president made greater and more effective efforts on behalf of civil rights than any other politician. Yet that same week as the first Selma march he ordered Marines to land at Da Nang, Vietnam, starting down a long tragic road that would rend the country and destroy his presidency. As Branch details, Johnson and King were intertwined, and Vietnam eventually divided them irrevocably.

The second Selma march, this time led by King, ended quickly when he decided to comply with a court order. A subsequent favorable court ruling, however, led to the triumphant march to Montgomery later in the month, an event that maybe even now is underestimated.

As Branch puts it, "the breadth of impact would be felt everywhere from altars and bedrooms to Olympic games. ... All twists ahead would be consequences of, or a reaction to, the ten-year crest of the nonviolent movement" at that march in Alabama.

Branch's book, which relies extensively on FBI wiretaps and presidential recordings, often reads like a suspense novel, possibly shocking even readers who lived through the period and paid attention to the movement. The courage it took to stand up to the beatings, the murders and the relentless intimidation seems hard to fathom.

He takes readers from the Deep South to Chicago, where King and his colleagues decided to use the tools of nonviolence to "nationalize" the movement and show Americans that racial prejudice was not an illness of just the South. The virulent racism and violence the movement encountered there came amid a growing turn toward the black power movement, spurred most prominently by SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael.

Also tearing at the movement in those last years of King's life was a heated debate over what position to take on Vietnam. Privately, King opposed the war pretty much from the beginning, but public opposition risked both alienating Johnson, the movement's most powerful supporter, as well as diluting the mission.

King broke his silence in a legendary speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his death: "I knew that I could never raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. ... Somehow this madness must cease."

In hindsight, King's criticisms of the Johnson administration seem almost mild compared with what came later, but at the time he was attacked in editorials and within the movement. It was a tension that stayed with him for the next year.

At the end, Branch describes King's assassination in Memphis, where he went to march with striking sanitation workers, in gentle, almost poetic terms. He seems loath to focus on the abrupt end of a monumental life.

Instead, he reminds us in his epilogue that to the end of his life King clung to "nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues. ... He grasped freedom seen and unseen ... to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise."

Arts and entertainment editor Edward P. Smith can be reached at 303-820-1767 or at esmith@denverpost.com.