A defining figure

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968
By Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuster, 1,039 pp., $35

The civil rights movement that climaxed in 1965 has achieved mythic status, as has its most prominent leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To some degree, King has undergone a secular canonization; his dream of an America that transcends color has, over the decades, been claimed by right and left alike. Two tremendous legislative achievements -- the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act -- serve as fundamental affirmations of our nation's collective ability to live up to its proclaimed ideals, however belatedly. Depicting the civil rights saga as an uplifting, reassuring moral tale, however, comes at the cost of historical precision. It is only by forgetting -- or erasing -- so much that the saga is rendered safe and hence culturally usable.

With the publication of ''At Canaan's Edge" -- the final volume in award-winning writer Taylor Branch's trilogy, ''America in the King Years" -- there should be no good excuse for the perennial substitution of myth for the far messier stuff of history. Numerous other writers, particularly David Garrow, Adam Fairclough, and Nick Kotz, have covered much of this ground before. But Branch's massive and deeply impressive study is bound to attract new and large audiences, and rightly so. Like the times he covers in these pages, the story he skillfully tells so well is unceasingly fascinating and dramatic.

And depressing. The years from 1965 to 1968 witnessed not only the persistence of substantial white violence against grass-roots black activists in the South but the outbreaks of white violence against activists who turned their attention to racial discrimination in the North as well. The federal government's protection of those on the front line of the struggle remained weak at best, fueling the radicalization of younger activists and the general disillusionment of many black urbanites. In retrospect, the changes effected by the 1964 and 1965 laws appear dramatic and substantive; at the time, for those suffering the continued taunts, assaults, arrests, and ''combat fatigue" associated with unending protests, the pace of change appeared glacial. Behind the scenes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did everything it could to make life difficult for civil rights activists, refusing to take action against brutal Southern white police, declining to inform black leaders of real threats against them, spreading nasty stories (some true, many false) about key movement leaders to politicians and the press, and infiltrating and actively disrupting their efforts.

Unlike many academic treatments of the ''black freedom struggle," ''At Canaan's Edge" admirably avoids romanticism. It's not that the book's main protagonist, King, doesn't come across as a larger-than-life figure engaged in cosmic battle with elemental forces of history and politics -- he does. Rather, the book's characters, King included, are unfailingly drawn as genuinely human, complete with ambition, ego, jealousy, confusion, and rage. Running counter to the infatuation with late '60s black radicalism current on some university campuses, Branch's book is dismissive of younger black power advocates' disorganization, hypermasculine bravado, political incoherence, and thoughtlessness. Branch's treatment of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference is indirectly critical as well. Its problems were in part self-inflicted: Its finances were a perpetual disaster; undisciplined organizers were constantly embroiled in personal conflicts; the all-male ministerial leadership at times behaved more like frat boys than men of God; programs were poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. Indeed, it's a wonder that the post-1965 civil rights movement got anywhere at all, given the level of dysfunctionality Branch reveals. King's evolving moral vision and powers of persuasion propelled it steadily forward, always against the odds and often against his own advisers' objections.

Two intertwined issues frame ''America in the King Years" of 1965-1968 for Branch: the uncertain fate of civil rights and black equality on the one hand, and the Vietnam War on the other. Virtually all else is relegated to the margins. President Lyndon Johnson's genuine concerns about black rights and racial inequality were quickly overtaken by his decision to wage a war that he and his advisers knew was a lost cause from the outset. The growing military engagement in Southeast Asia not only drained funds from the War on Poverty, it also drove a growing wedge between the president who had done more to make civil rights a reality than any other in the nation's history and his increasingly critical allies in the civil rights and broader liberal communities.

King, like many others, found that he could not escape ''Vietnam's immense gravitational pull," in Branch's apt phrase. Despite the opposition of some advisers and much of the nation's press, King insisted that Vietnam and civil rights were ''inextricably bound together." The movement could make little progress ''while avoiding the violent propensity of 'a sick nation that will brutalize unjustifiably millions of boys and girls, men and women, in Vietnam.' "

Such a stance hardly endeared him to Johnson or to the political establishment. King's inappropriate fusing of two ''distinct and separate" issues could ''be disastrous for both causes," lectured The New York Times; King had ''diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people," concluded The Washington Post. King's other post-Selma crusades provoked harsh criticism for their purported radicalism: Leading newspapers treated his proposals to carry protests to northern cities as formulas for disorder and discord, chastised him for failing to prevent violence during the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, and insisted that he refrain from ''emotional demonstration in this time of civic unrest." Younger radicals, black power advocates, and more mainstream civil rights leaders also challenged King's authority. At the time of his death, King was a controversial figure whose policies the right, Cold War liberals, and even the left found problematic. ''Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care," a once-sympathetic Andrew Kopkind concluded, while ''blacks hardly listen" to him. ''At Canaan's Edge" reminds us that how we regard King today bears little resemblance to how many Americans, black but especially white, viewed him four decades ago.

Although not always the most elegant of writers, Branch is always an engrossing storyteller. In this he is helped by his source material. However appalling (and illegal) the government's flouting of the basic civil liberties of activists was, the paper trail left behind is a historian's dream. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's penchant for wiretapping, unlawful bugging, and other forms of illicit surveillance, as well as Johnson's surreptitious recording of his own conversations, have bequeathed to posterity countless hours of the innermost and otherwise guarded thoughts of principal government officials and movement activists. No invented or presumed dialogue is necessary when the real thing is available in abundant quantities.

Branch excels more as a compelling chronicler of the times than as their analyst. Allowing personalities and the relentless flow of events to drive his narrative, he rarely pauses to explore ideas, philosophies, or even the political underpinnings of specific legislative programs. How and why Johnson's advisers crafted the particular antipoverty programs they did, how those programs succeeded or failed, what black power advocates actually believed, how liberalism defined and proposed to solve the racial and economic crises it confronted -- these are matters that don't overly concern Branch. Nor is he much interested in exploring, much less assessing, King and other civil rights leaders' evolving understandings of race, economics, politics, and poverty. But what he does do -- convey the era's hope and despair, the exhausting pace of the struggle, the interconnectedness of Vietnam and civil rights, and the tragedy of political polarization -- he does very well.

''At Canaan's Edge" offers a needed corrective to popular misconceptions of King's life, not merely restoring his powerful moral critique of Vietnam and poverty in America but also reminding us just how much the now-celebrated King was criticized, dismissed, and harassed in his final years.