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Discriminations-Minorit. USA History
By Adrian Walker
It takes a deep devotion to spend more than two decades of your life on a single topic, and the passion that has kept historian Taylor Branch going for all these years comes through clearly when he discusses his life’s work: the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Branch has spent the past 24 years researching, analyzing, and chronicling King, whose life spanned just 39 years. ’’At Canaan’s Edge," the third and concluding volume of his grand trilogy on America in the King years, has just been published.
I’d called Branch because I was curious about what he now makes of King’s legacy, whether his admiration for him had survived more than two decades of intense scrutiny, and what he thinks the MLK holiday means to Americans.
His admiration, to begin with, has only grown with deeper knowledge. ’’He’s a much deeper, more complex, and more heroic figure to me now," Branch said by phone from his home in Baltimore. ’’I have to confess that I had a 1960s student activist view. We tended to think of King as an earnest southern preacher who got carried away with ’turn the other cheek’ and got carried away [fighting] something that was relatively easy, segregation in the South. I’ve long since given that up. My regard for King as a political thinker and activist has skyrocketed."
’’At Canaan’s Edge" tells the story of the final three years of King’s life, from the great stand of the Civil Rights movement in Selma through King’s opposition to the Vietnam War to his assassination in Memphis. Selma aside, this was arguably not the most successful period of King’s crusade. Many of his followers had grown weary of his signature strategy of nonviolence, some were confused by his embrace of issues beyond racial discrimination. It was a movement slowly moving away from its most visible leader.
’His Nobel acceptance speech said that the triple evils are racism, poverty, and war," Branch noted. ’’And that nonviolence and democracy are equipped to address these both politically and spiritually." Not everyone agreed. ’’He became more and more lonely, in my view."
Part of the problem was that the doctrine of nonviolence imposed a burden that King’s followers were, understandably, increasingly reluctant to bear.
’’People from the beginning of the Black Power era decided that [King’s approach] was too weak or a stigma for black people, that only black people were expected to be nonviolent," Branch said. ’’There was a lot of resentment over this burden."’
King believed intellectual consistency demanded that violence could not be met with violence. And, as he worked through the struggles of the movement, he began to relate them to broader issues of class and gender, and to adopt an increasingly international perspective. What had begun as a bus boycott had become a much larger struggle.
That expansive philosophy is part of what we celebrate today, but part of Branch’s achievement over three thick volumes has been to remind us of the agony that accompanied King’s victories.
The MLK holiday should be another reminder of that, but it usually isn’t. Say what you will for holidays, they aren’t great teachers of history.
’’I think this holiday has failed right up there with July 4 to serve as an occasion of how rare and precious and fragile democracy is in the world and what it means," Branch said.
’’King was a modern founding father for our time," he continued. ’’A lot of people stand on the shoulders of this movement, and if we used this holiday better we would appreciate those blessings and appreciate democracy and citizenship in greater detail."
I wondered if Branch, after all these years, would miss King’s constant presence in his life. ’’I’m giddy that I don’t have to get up at 5 in the morning and stew about this thing," he said. ’’But I feel a little lost without it, and I’m not sure what I’ll do without it."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com