The Black Power Movement, Democracy, and America in the King Years

Abstract

Taylor Branch's^ a/lr/C/i in the King Years stands as a singular achievement in civil rights historiography. Collectively, the trilogy covers the years 1954-1968, the time in which Martin Luther King, Jr. became a national civil rights leader and a global icon for human rights and racial justice. For Branch, King was nothing less than a heroic, race-transcending political leader who fundamentally transformed American democracy through an innovative nonviolent ethos rooted in Gandhism, the African American church, and Judeo-Christian traditions of militantly passive resistance. But America in the King Years is more than a conventional biography of King. The trilogy presents a panoramic portrait of postwar America during the civil rights movement's heroic age. Branch documents the activities of rural and urban black leaders, white volunteers and clergymen, and far-flung personalities engaged in po litical struggles away from the center of media attention. Unglamorous local leaders, obscure sharecroppers, religious scholars, street speakers, and ordinary citizens thrust into the maelstrom of the era receive varying degrees of attention throughout.1 America in the King Years particularly revels in finely grained portraits of the presidents and powerbrokers whose iconography continues to shape the public's his torical memory of this period. Figures such as John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson loom large in the proceedings, as does King's ability to move back and forth, at times almost effortlessly, between America's political elites and its racial underclass. Branch's trilogy thus weaves together social and political history to produce a striking historical tapestry that greatly enriches contemporary under standing of the modern civil rights era.2 Professional historians have, for the most part, been relatively silent regarding