This is the second volume of Taylor Branch's trilogy America in the King Years. The first volume, Parting the Waters, published in 1988, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Pillar of Fire provides a detailed and frank portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., during these two years as he struggled to hold the nonviolent civil rights movement together.
Branch tells the stories of the front line heros of the movement and other national figures.
He weaves the lives of King, Malcolm X, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kenned throughout the book in a way that makes for a compelling and readable history. Mr. Ehrenhalt examines three Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s and how earlier generations fostered a sense of community by accepting limits in their lives and deferring to authority figures to enforce those limits. The first community he visits is the working class Catholic community of St. Nick's parish, the second is Bronzeville, a black neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, and the third is the suburb of Elmhurst. In each of these communities he tells the stories of the individual people who lived there and the institutions that held their neighborhoods together. This is an important study for anyone interested in understanding why neighborhoods and communities worked so much more effectively 40 years ago than they do today.