Searching for the promised land

The voice of Martin Luther King echoed loud in a society of racist violence and murder, in a country whose FBI director lied to the president to protect the Ku Klux Clan and where the bias of all-white juries and the media was blatant. Author Taylor Branch, rather than writing a biography of King himself, paints a picture of the country he tried to change. By Anthony Lewis

We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions.

That was Martin Luther King Jr. He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years – from 5 December 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to 4 April 1968, when he was murdered – he changed the face of America.

This is the last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes.

America in the King Years, Branch's running title for the trilogy, is not a mere conceit, a fancy way of describing a biography. It is not a biography of Dr King. It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them.

What a different country it was. I lived through those times, but At Canaan's Edge made me realise that I did not remember how different. It was before the revolution in women's roles, for example, as Branch tells us in a couple of quick sketches. Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page one article in the New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a "dizzy blonde" drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets. In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wondered, in a newsletter, whether an employer could be penalised for refusing to hire "a woman as a dog warden".

But of course it is the virulence of Southern racism at that time that is most striking. This was only 40 years ago, after the passage of the 1964 act, but racist violence and murder were still widespread in the Deep South. Everyone knew who the killers were, but juries would not convict – all-white juries. The openness of the violence was staggering. When Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, came down from Michigan to Selma, Alabama, to help in the protest movement, a Ku Klux Klan gang pulled up alongside the car she was driving and shot her dead.

Branch has been working on these books for more than 20 years, exploring endless materials: newspapers, audiotapes, reports, books, personal memories. He has an incredible command of it all, bringing history to life with a few sentences here, extended chapters there on something like the march from Selma to Montgomery. I can pick out only a few themes to indicate the scope of his work.

Selma was about a basic right explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote without discrimination. In Alabama, Mississippi and large parts of other states in the Deep South, the right was a myth for blacks. They were threatened, abused, even murdered if they tried to register or vote; they often lost their homes or their jobs. Armed white mobs menaced them.

It was in the face of those tactics that King decided to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery as a protest for the vote. At the first attempt marchers were brutalised, the march turned back. But they persisted. Branch, usually given to understatement, lets himself go and speaks of "yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge". Before a second attempt could be made to march to Montgomery, a difficulty intervened.

Judge Frank M Johnson enjoined the march because of likely violence. Johnson was a highly respected federal judge who had made many decisions in favor of civil rights. Justice Department officials pleaded with King not to violate the order lest he sacrifice the movement's reliance on law and the Constitution.

But the protesters, many of them, did not want to give way. King did not say what he would do. The march began. He led it onto the Pettus Bridge at the edge of Selma, faced 500 state troopers – and suddenly turned and led the marchers back into Selma. He had made the point and desisted, obeying the law. There followed a remarkable episode.

Judge Johnson was now asked to let the march go forward and enjoin interference with it. But in a telephone conversation with the United States attorney general, Nicholas deB Katzenbach, he said he would not do so unless the federal government undertook to protect the marchers. And he wanted that assurance from the president, he said. Katzenbach gave him the assurance. Lyndon B Johnson called the Alabama National Guard into federal service and sent regular Army detachments. On their third try, the marchers made it to Montgomery.

King believed that if Americans outside the South were aware of its brutal racism – as few then were – they would want to end it. The violent response to nonviolent protest made the brutality plain. What Americans read in newspapers and saw on television shocked them, and jump-started the political process. Meaningful civil rights legislation made it past Senate filibusters at last.

It was a crucial part of King's thinking to engage the president. As Robert Caro has demonstrated in his biography, Lyndon Johnson had shown streaks of racism in his life. But fundamentally he was for equal rights, and he seized the opportunity presented by the King campaign and the ugly Southern response. In a speech to the nation on 15 March, 1965, he memorably adopted the words of the civil rights movement: "It's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And – we – shall – overcome."

LBJ is a second object of Branch's penetrating gaze in this volume: not just what he did on civil rights but his whole whirlwind of activity. Here he is on the telephone with Attorney General Katzenbach in Alabama, warning him not to smoke too much during late-night vigils. On one day in 1965 he takes a phone call from Drew Pearson, the columnist, and lectures him for 15 minutes about Vietnam. He receives the British foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, and a delegation, talking long past the scheduled time and telling them – to their confusion – "Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm." He has a conference call with House leaders about the legislation to establish Medicare. He gets a telephone report from Selma.

For Johnson, race and Vietnam were preoccupations in tandem. In the same month as the march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965, the first American combat units went ashore at Da Nang. King had had a good relationship with the president, but it broke down over the issue that Johnson rightly feared would overwhelm his reputation on social justice.

Branch's picture of Dr King on Vietnam is of a man coming slowly, reluctantly, but irresistibly to embrace the issue – against the advice of many supporters. Finally, at Riverside Church in New York on 4 April, 1967, he called for the United States to "set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement". The Riverside speech drew heavy criticism.

John Roche, a Brandeis University professor who was then on the White House staff, said King had "thrown in with the Commies". He told the president that King was "inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)". A Washington Post editorial said, "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence." But King did not give way. He told a church audience that the press had been "so noble in its praise" when he preached nonviolence toward white oppressors but inconsistently "will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children". Racism in America was not – and is not – confined to the South. Branch reminds us of that in small ways and large. In 1965, he notes, Mary Travers of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek at a rally.

CBS television, which was showing the rally, was besieged by protesting callers, and took the rally off the air for 90 minutes. In the border state of Kentucky, the famous basketball coach Adolph Rupp kept his University of Kentucky team all white. He complained of calls from the university president, "That son of a bitch wants me to get some niggers in here". A little-noted team from Texas Western, with five black players starting, upset Kentucky in the 1966 championship game – a story told just now in the movie Glory Road. Only slowly, after that, did the bar on black athletes break down in the South. Many people watching college sports on television today would not have dreamed that such a policy ever existed.

Chicago dramatised the reality of anti-black feelings in the North. Marches organised by King to protest segregated housing and unequal government benefits were met with mob taunts and rocks. "Burn them like Jews!" one white group shouted at the marchers. Branch concludes that "the violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners".

The most chilling passages in this book, for me, are about J Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. His hatred of King was not a secret. But Branch shows how far it went – beyond extremity to morbid depravity.

Hoover instructed all in the bureau not to warn King of death threats. He told President Johnson that any requests for federal protection of King would come from subversives, and that King was "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation". He listed King as a prominent target in an order to all FBI offices "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist hate-type organisations". There was no basis in fact for the calumnies. The charge of subversion hung on the dubious thread of an allegation that Stanley Levison, an adviser to King, was a Communist agent – an allegation never shown to have any convincing support.

The low point in the Hoover story may have been his performance on the killing of Viola Liuzzo. He tried to conceal the fact that one of the Klansmen who shot at her was an FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe – and lied to President Johnson about it. He urged the president not to speak with the Liuzzo family, telling Johnson that "the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party". (Liuzzo's arm was cut by a shard of glass from the shattered car window.) Branch calls Hoover's comments "slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence".

J Edgar Hoover was either a profoundly disturbed man by this time or that rarity, actual evil. The question that Branch leaves unaddressed is why President Johnson didn't fire him. The familiar explanation is fear of the poison that Hoover would spew out in response. But Lyndon Johnson could have handled that.

Under provocation that hardly any other human being could have resisted, King never gave up on nonviolence. The rise of blackpower advocates like Stokely Carmichael did not move him. "I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilisation," he told a meeting in 1966. "I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of war and conflict in the world. I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hatred. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!"

One cannot read this amazing book without thinking about what King would be saying if he were with us today. He would surely be pointing to the vast racial injustice that remains in the US, and to the growing gap between rich and poor. I think there can be no doubt that he would also be speaking strongly against the war in Iraq, warning that it was killing Americans and Iraqis, nurturing terrorism, eroding the world's regard for America.

This third volume of Branch's trilogy deepens a feeling many have had about Dr King, a mystery. He moved sometimes as if propelled by a force that others could not see. He rose to make a speech, and extemporaneous biblical eloquence would pour forth. His friends and supporters were often uncertain what he would do. But on the great issues he was right, and brave.

"To the end," Taylor Branch concludes, "he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years."

Anthony Lewis is a former columnist for The Times

©2006 The New York Times