At Canaan’s Edge

At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.

King and his movement stand at the zenith of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965. From there we follow King as he takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes exposing hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi Klan's. We watch King bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War, and decide to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and ultimately King's assassination.

At Canaan's Edge shows King at the height of his moral power even as his worldly power is waning. It shows why his fidelity to freedom and nonviolence makes him a defining figure long beyond his brilliant life and violent end.