Book Time #4: The Taylor Branch MLK Trilogy
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
by Taylor Branch
Reading 2,309 pages covering 14 years in six weeks is a strange way to experience time. Reading about these 14 years specifically—1954 through 1968—is a disorienting emotional journey through some of America’s most tumultuous years, a crash course on modern America’s most inspiring and despicable citizens, all whirled together into a blender of chaos that only technically fits the definition of a nation.
Actually, I should correct myself. This magisterial trilogy doesn’t cover just the 14 years from 1954 to 1968, roughly the duration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in the public eye. The first volume, Parting The Waters, begins most unusually, with more than 100 pages chronicling an obscure eccentric preacher from the turn of the 20th Century named Vernon Johns who, among other things, once scandalized his parishioners by advertising his watermelon-hawking side hustle during the wedding vows involving one of the church’s most prominent families.
This seemed like an odd choice. Not the watermelon hawking, necessarily, but the editorial strategy. A biography of a man almost long enough to be its own book at the beginning of a trilogy about another man. Only about 2,200 pages later does it make perfect sense. This is the work of an author playing a very long, patient game.
In the preface to the first two volumes, Branch writes that he considers King’s times the most apt encapsulation of the country in which he lived. I would add to this. It is the most apt encapsulation of the country in which we still live, this place we are trapped in, unable to escape this nightmare of a perpetual cage match as opposing, fundamentally irreconcilable views battle each other in almost equal measure year after year, decade after decade, century after century, arguing over the same basic things over and over again, never to be resolved.
Above this din of conflict, one man stood up and dared to see us as something better than that. Perhaps MLK's most defining trait was, until the last year of his life, a relentless optimism that America would fulfill his hopes and dreams of delivering on its promise of freedom and democracy to all its citizens. Most resisted him. For a very brief time, he led a movement of people who believed him. They would all, eventually, realize they were wrong.
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This trilogy is not strictly a biography of King. He more or less disappears for dozens, even hundreds of pages at a time at various points. Aside from the aforementioned long prelude of which King is totally absent, solid chunks of the second volume, Pillar Of Fire, chronicles Malcolm X as the first national black figure to counter King’s prominence and message. The third volume is as much about Vietnam as civil rights, splitting time between President Lyndon Johnson’s morass and King’s failed Chicago effort and doomed Poor People’s Campaign.
Make no mistake: These are difficult books about difficult times. You will stare directly into the soul of America and be disgusted by much of what you see. King and his followers were beaten, jailed, stabbed, and not infrequently killed for doing nothing besides marching and praying. And in the vast majority of cases, no one was ever punished for those crimes. In many instances, the perpetrators confessed in court only to be acquitted by their friends in the jury. This happened in the south; King then went north, and got it even worse.
The final volume, At Canaan’s Edge, is harrowing. All of the main characters, from King to Johnson and everyone in between, spiral into deep troughs of depression as the Vietnam War and urban riots consume America in a bitter, divisive hatred. Seemingly epoch-shifting civil rights wins in '64 and ’65 appear as illusory as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Ed decision which desegregated schools in word much more than in practice. The laws get passed; people continue to be beaten, jailed, and murdered for marching and praying and entering Whites Only spaces. Higher rates of black voter registration result in aggressive gerrymandering rendering their votes inconsequential. Schools and neighborhoods remain segregated. Instead of integrating schools, they're privatized. Instead of integrating parks, they're closed.
At Canaan's Edge is a story of despair. We are plunged into the anguish of a president who doesn’t want to be fighting a war he feels he must, the moral and financial cost of which bankrupts his true passion for reducing poverty. We suffer with the leader of a nonviolent movement powerless to prevent his country from becoming the world’s greatest warmonger, massacring civilians both at home and abroad. His closest confidants and virtually all of the rest of America tell him to stay in his civil rights lane, advice that eats away at his conscience and morale. We see the most powerful man in the world somehow feeling powerless to stop the war he hates—but is commanding—from escalating. We see the most influential spiritual world leader witness in real time the dismissal of his creed from all sides, because calling for the end to violence no longer seems relevant in a world consumed by it. Former allies become advocates of fighting back. Entire black neighborhoods erupt in riots put down by the National Guard with thousands of bullets and dozens of bodies. The media becomes obsessed with tone policing the phrase "Black Power" instead of covering the ongoing civil rights violations in the South. Mike Wallace asks MLK on national television if he doesn't think people are getting tired of hearing about how hard black people have it. King's logically unassailable and historically vindicated speech against the Vietnam War in 1967 is universally decried as somewhere between an historic strategic blunder and outright treason. The last year of his life, from the day of that speech to precisely one year hence, was one of utter and total torment.
This is not the Martin Luther King we’re taught in school, the man with the dream leading a successful bus boycott and marching in Selma. Instead, the triumphs are short-lived and shallow, the anguish profound. Through MLK’s most famous quote, about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice, we’re taught to think of American democracy as an inevitability. In fact, no one knew better than MLK himself that our rights as citizens must be achieved, even earned, through unending suffering and sacrifice.
I say all this not to scare you away from this trilogy. What makes this project such a triumph is the effortlessness with which it reflects life itself. The moments of joy and friendship, the few genuinely great people you meet along the way, are what make it all worthwhile. Branch largely renders it through spartan prose, but picks his spots to surgically inject a turn of phrase to ensure it sticks. The most powerful section in the entire trilogy is King's first momentous speech during the bus boycott. It lasts for about two pages but is now in my pantheon of some of the greatest scene-rendering in non-fiction I've encountered. Elsewhere, Branch gracefully describes Rosa Parks as someone who "represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature."
This is not merely a work about a great man. It is a great work. Reading this trilogy was a profound experience, an all-consuming intellectual endeavor. Branch himself notes as much in the acknowledgements of the final volume. Initially, this was to be a three-year project. Instead, it took 24. Branch’s son, an infant when he first started working on this series, helped him do research for the final volume after graduating from college. Unlike writing the series, reading it is not quite a life’s work, but it will feel like you have experienced a lifetime nonetheless.
[Buy Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 on Bookshop. // Buy Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 on Bookshop. // Buy At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 on Bookshop.]
Related: This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Kay Mills // The Kerner Report (Free PDF) // Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy, Daniel Geary // A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan