At Canaan's Edge

The Voting Rights Act did what a decade of appeals to conscience had not. Federal examiners went into the Deep South, the literacy tests fell, and Black Southerners registered in numbers that redrew the region's politics within a few years. Branch stays close to the ground on this, following organizers into rural Mississippi and Alabama where sharecroppers who had never been permitted near a ballot box learned to read the forms, walked to the courthouse under threat of eviction, and in some counties built their own political party from nothing. The abstraction of a federal law becomes, in these pages, a specific person risking a home and a livelihood.

But the victory did not settle the movement; it split it. The cost of nonviolence was patience, and patience was wearing thin among the young field workers who had absorbed the beatings year after year while the country applauded King. In June 1966, on a march through Mississippi, a SNCC organizer named Stokely Carmichael, freshly out of jail again, began calling out two words to a crowd: Black Power. The phrase electrified some and alarmed others, and Branch traces the way it fractured a coalition that had held, however uneasily, since the sit-ins.

In 1966 King took his campaign to Chicago, and the ground shifted under him. In the South the enemy had a face and a sheriff's badge; the injustice was written into statute, and a camera could capture it. In the Northern city the machinery was quieter. There were no whites-only signs on the tenements of the West Side, only the fact that Black families paid more for worse housing and could not move into white neighborhoods without meeting a mob. Branch follows King into a movement whose target was harder to photograph and harder to name.

When King led marches into white neighborhoods on Chicago's Southwest Side, the reaction stunned him. Crowds hurled bricks and bottles; a rock struck King in the head and dropped him to one knee. He said afterward that he had never seen mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as those in Chicago, not even in Mississippi. The remark is one of the book's quiet hinges. The comfortable Northern conviction that bigotry was a Southern disease did not survive the summer of 1966.

On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before he died, King stood at Riverside Church in New York and denounced the Vietnam War in the plainest terms, calling his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. The speech cost him. Newspapers that had praised him turned scornful, allies in the administration felt betrayed, and even some within his own organization thought he had strayed dangerously from his lane. Branch presents the decision as of a piece with everything else: King could not keep preaching nonviolence at home while staying silent about the violence his country was exporting abroad.

The dissent and the turn toward poverty were the same movement of mind. King had concluded that the deepest injustices were now economic, and he began planning a Poor People's Campaign to bring the destitute of every color to Washington and refuse to leave until the government acted. It was his most ambitious and least popular idea, and it was still half-built when a strike by sanitation workers pulled him to Memphis in the spring of 1968.

Branch's three thousand pages amount to an argument about how a democracy changes. The movement's great weapon was the capacity to make the country look at itself: Selma worked because the violence was visible and the cause was plainly just, and a nation confronted with its own reflection reached for its lawbooks. The Voting Rights Act was the fruit of that method at full strength. What the last years showed was the method's edge. Poverty had no sheriff to photograph, and Northern prejudice wore no uniform, and a country that would rewrite a statute under moral pressure was far slower to rearrange the ordinary arithmetic of who lived where and earned what.