At Canaan's edge

by Taylor Branch

This book concludes a 3-volume history of American race, violence, and democracy. As the book begins, King and his movement are one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. The quest to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 engages the conscience of the world, strains the civil rights coalition, and embroils King with the U.S. government. After Selma, freedom workers are murdered, but sharecroppers learn to read, dare to vote, and build their own political party, while Stokely Carmichael leaves the movement in frustration to proclaim his famous Black Power doctrine. King takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes, exposing hatreds and fears no less virulent than those in the South. We watch King bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War, and make an embattled decision to concentrate on poverty; we reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and King's assassination. - Publisher.