Writing in the early days of the Trump administration, I am reminded by this book that the most worrisome terrorists are the homegrown variety and encouraged by the precedent of citizens standing up to corrupt power and prevailing. Lyndon Johnson emerges as a pivotal figure, ever mindful of political reality but favorable toward black suffrage in a way that Kennedy wasn’t. Edgar Hoover’s status as one of the great villains of modern American history, with his underhanded and unconstitutional persecution and surveillance of King, even, at one point, sinking to the depths of having evidence of his infidelities sent to him along with a message urging him to commit suicide. This book is one more argument toward solidifying J. The forces arrayed against him were formidable. Throughout his career, he was beset by criticism, rivalry, and divisiveness from both within and without his ranks. Branch often embeds events in an avalanche of detail about day-to-day goings-on that can be somewhat deadening but serves to make the point that there was no inevitability to the ultimate triumph of King. King’s commitment to nonviolence in the face of overwhelming provocation is stunning.
and the Civil Rights movement covers so many momentous events, such as the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, King’s Nobel Prize, and America’s entry into Vietnam, that it is difficult to believe that it spans a mere two years that also witnessed the exodus of black America from the Republican party to the Democratic.
The second volume of Taylor Branch’s towering trilogy about Martin Luther King, Jr.
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