He had a dream

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Jan 15, 2006, Page 18

AT CANAAN'S EDGE: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS 1965 TO 1968 By Taylor Branch 1039 pages Simon and Schuster

Four decades ago, on March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies brutally attacked a group of civil rights demonstrators who were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, setting upon them with clubs, bullwhips, cattle prods and tear gas. The violent clash, broadcast natio-nally on television, rocked the country, setting in motion a series of events that would change the political and social landscape of America and send out cultural shock waves that reverberate to this day.

Two weeks later, with federal protection, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would lead a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery -- an event that galvanized the nation and provided the momentum for the passage, later that year, of the Voting Rights Act.

Selma, in many respects the high-water mark of the civil rights movement, stands as the narrative anchor of At Canaan's Edge, the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental history of the life and times of King. As familiar as the epochal Selma showdown may be to readers, it is recounted here with enormous dramatic verve -- and a keen understanding of both its historic significance and the ways in which so much that occurred in America in the ensuing years "would be a consequence of, or reaction to" it.

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Because the remainder of this bulky book tries to chronicle the post-Selma fragmentation of the civil rights movement, along with a host of other developments-from the riots in Watts to the rise of the black power movement and a growing white backlash -- the volume is a sprawling and less cohesive production than the preceding installments of the author's trilogy. In aspiring to capture a myriad of momentous events that occurred during some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, Branch has ranged far and wide across the political and social landscape, often resorting to newsreel-like summaries of developments, while pelting the reader with incidents and facts in the place of analysis and perspective.

Branch is less concerned in this volume with King's inner turmoil and sense of spiritual mission than with his day-to-day handling of political crises and internal movement disputes. And what Canaan's Edge makes indelibly clear is the daunting burdens of leadership cast upon King's shoulders.

Branch not only shows King's inspirational and managerial skills in dealing with the Selma crisis -- walking a tightrope between maintaining the movement's momentum and maintaining hopes of an alliance with the federal government -- but he also shows the continuing, day-by-day balancing act that King continually had to perform: trying to reconcile the demands of grass-roots groups with larger, national agendas; trying to mediate between more radical figures like Stokely Carmichael and more conservative ones like Roy Wilkins; trying to work with the federal government on the War on Poverty while protesting that same government's prosecution of the war in Vietnam; trying to continue to promote his faith in nonviolence in the face of growing militancy on the part of a younger generation.

In the weeks and months before his death, King was weary and depressed. Depressed by the lackluster response to his antipoverty drive. Depressed about the war in Vietnam and its implications for the country. Depressed that violence was becoming "a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments."

In the famous speech he gave on the eve of his assassination, however, King put aside his own doubts and fatigue, cast off threats against his own life, and rallied the crowd to the cause he had taken up so many years before -- a cause that would see the end of segregation in the South, secure the vote for black citizens and goad the country as a whole, both South and North, into a reconsideration of its prejudices and its past.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now," he said. "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop and I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, and He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight; I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."