description: FROM THE AUTHOR OF PARTING THE WATERS AND PILLAR OF FIREAt 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.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. From there we follow King as he takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes exposing hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi Klan's. We watch King bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War, and decide to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and ultimately King's assassination.At Canaan's Edge shows 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.
language: English
title: At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
titlecomplete: At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
characters: Martin Luther King Jr., Stanley Levison, Jonathan Daniels, John Doar, James Bevel, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Moyers, Bernard Lafayette, John Robert Lewis, Albert Raby, Bob Moses, McGeorge Bundy, Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, J. Edgar Hoover, LeRoy Collins, Viola Liuzzo, Richard J. Daley, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Hosea Williams, Hubert Humphrey, Deke DeLoach, Ralph Abernathy, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Robert F. "Bobby"  Kennedy, George Wallace, Diane Nash, Harry H. Wachtel, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, Nicholas Katzenbach, John Hulett, James Forman, Arthur Goldberg, Harry Belafonte, Richmond Flowers Sr., James Reeb, Lady Bird Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Richard B. Russell, Jr., Harry McPherson
genres: Biography, American, United States, Politics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, American History, Race, History, African American
ratings_count: 1794
series: America in the King Years
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
category: Nonfiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Dayton Literary Peace Prize
category: Nonfiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Biography, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Nonfiction
publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio