At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.

In At Canaan's Edge, King and his movement stand at the zenith of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965. The quest to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge engages the conscience of the world, strains the civil rights coalition, and embroils King in negotiations with all three branches of the U.S. government.

The marches from Selma coincide with the first landing of large U.S. combat units in South Vietnam. The escalation of the war severs the cooperation of King and President Lyndon Johnson after a collaboration that culminated in the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

After Selma, young pilgrims led by Stokely Carmichael take the movement into adjacent Lowndes County, Alabama, where not a single member of the black majority has tried to vote in the twentieth century. Freedom workers are murdered, but sharecroppers learn to read, dare to vote, and build their own political party. Carmichael leaves in frustration to proclaim his famous black power doctrine, taking the local panther ballot symbol to become an icon of armed rebellion.

Also after Selma, King takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes. Integrated marches through Chicago expose hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi Klan's, but King's 1966 settlement with Mayor Richard Daley does not gain the kind of national response that generated victories from Birmingham and Selma. We watch King overrule his advisers to bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War. We watch King make an embattled decision to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and King's assassination.

Parting the Waters provided an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness, beginning with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and ending with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Pillar of Fire, theologians and college students braved the dangerous Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 as Malcolm X raised a militant new voice for racial separatism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation by race and mandated equal opportunity for women. From the pinnacle of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King willed himself back to the valley of jail in his daunting Selma campaign.

At Canaan's Edge portrays King at the height of his moral power even as his worldly power is waning. It shows why his fidelity to freedom and nonviolence makes him a defining figure long beyond his brilliant life and violent end.

"The engrossing final installment of Branch's three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. maintains the high standards set in the previous volumes, the first of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Moving from the protest at Selma and the 1966 Meredith March through King's expanding political concern for the poor to his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tenn., Branch gives us not only the civil rights leader's life but also the rapidly changing pulse of American culture and politics. The America we find in this last chapter of King's life is on fire — the Republican Party has begun to court white Southern voters; the Civil Rights movement itself has fractured; King sees bold challenges to his teaching of nonviolence in the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. King himself has evolved, spreading his interests beyond civil rights to become a more outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and of poverty. A turning point in King's legacy, says Branch, was his housing actions in Chicago in the summer of 1966. This work 'nationalized race,' showing that it wasn't just a Southern problem, and ensured that King would go down in history as much more than a regional leader. As a literary work, Branch's biography is masterful. About midway through, the author begins to foreshadow King's death — by, for example, quoting his 1965 statement to a filmmaker: 'I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right.' If Branch indulges in predictable throat clearing about the lessons from King's life that endure in America today — well, that is to be expected. This magisterial book is a fitting tribute to a magisterial man. 24 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. 150,000 first printing; first serial to Time magazine; 15-city author tour. (Feb. 1) Audio reviews reflect PW's assessment of the audio adaptation of a book and should be quoted only in reference to the audio version." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch offers a moving and panoramic view of America during the last three years of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr....[A] deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy..." James T. Patterson, The Washington Post

"[A] celebratory, elegiac, profoundly inspired...triptych which in the fullness of time will be compared fairly and favorably to Carl Sandburg's meditations on Abraham Lincoln....[O]nly Dr. King's own words bring me more powerfully into his presence than do the words of Taylor Branch." Providence Journal

"[M]assive and deeply impressive....Like the times he covers in these pages, the story [Branch] skillfully tells so well is unceasingly fascinating and dramatic." Boston Globe

"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." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"[T]he cumulative effect of Branch's story is devastating....Branch has shown us that despite all the darkness, all the violence — not only in the 1960s but in our own times as well — there is reason to hope." Chicago Tribune

"[O]ffers disappointingly little new or original historical information....Nor does [Branch] emphasize how King came to advocate redistributive economic policies that would appear vastly more radical today than they did in the political climate of the late 1960s." Los Angeles Times

"At Canaan's Edge completes one of the most heavily researched, best-written, compelling biographies in the history of book publishing. Is it a lot to absorb? You bet....The crowning achievement of Branch's King trilogy is to show anew the moral power of non-violence." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"With a little patience, readers will find this an immensely rewarding book that persuasively shows that King fully deserves his iconographic status in history." San Francisco Chronicle

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (which won the Pulitzer Prize), Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65, and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968. The author of two other nonfiction books and a novel, Branch is a former staff member of the Washington Monthly, Harper's, and Esquire. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Introduction

I. SELMA: THE LAST REVOLUTION

1. Warning
2. Scouts
3. Dissent
4. Boxed In
5. Over the Bridge
6. The Call
7. Devil's Choice
8. The Ghost of Lincoln
9. Wallace and the Archbishop
10. And We Shall Overcome
11. Half-Inch Hailstones
12. Neutralize Their Anxieties
13. To Montgomery
14. The Stakes of History
15. Aftershocks
16. Bearings in a Whirlwind

II. HIGH TIDE

17. Ten Feet Tall
18. Leaps of Faith
19. Gulps of Freedom
20. Fort Deposit
21. Watts and Hayneville
22. Fragile Alliance
23. Identity

III. CROSSROADS IN FREEDOM AND WAR

24. Enemy Politics
25. Inside Out
26. Refugees
27. Break Points
28. Panther Ladies
29. Meredith March
30. Chicago
31. Valley Moments
32. Backlash
IV. PASSION
33. Spy Visions
34. Riverside
35. Splinters
36. King's Choice
37. New Year Trials
38. Memphis
39. Requiem

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index