At Canaans Edge, Taylor Branch
At Canaans Edge, Taylor Branch
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At Canaan's Edge
America in the King Years, 1965-68

Author: Taylor Branch

Narrator: Joe Morton

Abridged: 9 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/01/2006


Synopsis

At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 is the final volume in Taylor Branch's magnificent history of America in the years of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, recognized universally as the definitive account and ultimate recognition of Martin Luther King's heroic place in the nation's history.

The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north.

At Canaan's Edge traces a seminal era in our defining national story, freedom. The narrative resumes in Selma, crucible of the voting rights struggle for black people across the South. The time is early 1965, when the modern Civil Rights Movement enters its second decade since the Supreme Court's Brown decision declared segregation by race a violation of the Constitution.

From Selma, King's non-violent Movement is under threat from competing forces inside and outside. Branch chronicles the dramatic voting rights drives in Mississippi and Alabama, Meredith's murder, the challenge to King from the Johnson Administration and the FBI and other enemies. When King tries to bring his Movement north (to Chicago), he falters. Finally we reach Memphis, the garbage strike, King's assassination.

Branch's magnificent trilogy makes clear why the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed King's leadership, are among the nation's enduring achievements.

About Taylor Branch

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.


Reviews

Goodreads review by CoachJim on April 11, 2025

One of the greatest casualties of the Vietnam War was the Civil Rights movement. Prior to the escalation of the war in 1965 the Civil Rights Movement had garnered favorable public attention. Congress was debating and passing laws protecting the Civil and Voting rights of all Americans, and the news......more

Goodreads review by Lee Anne on January 09, 2015

I just finished (finally!). Either I'm older (and smarter), or this was the most readable volume in the trilogy. I didn't cry at the very end, but the "Mountaintop" speech did me in, and I'm glad to live in an internet age, since I could immediately go to YouTube and listen to the speech in its enti......more

Goodreads review by Richard on February 09, 2021

"At Canaan's Edge" is the final volume of the trilogy of Taylor Branch's masterful telling of the tumult occurring on the social and political scene in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. The important civil rights-related struggles of 1965 to 1968 are covered. The most troubli......more

Goodreads review by Jonna on October 15, 2022

Absolutely fabulous. I had a reasonably "good" historical education in school, and have read widely since, but knew embarrassingly little (nothing, really) about the civil rights movement. Here's what I learned from the trilogy: 1. Stokely Carmichael and the other nonviolent workers in the South were......more

Goodreads review by Michael on September 11, 2013

Finishing this final book in Branch's King trilogy took me several months. I greatly enjoyed it but also got fatigued. The first section, discussing Selma, and the final section, discussing Memphis, are both gripping and fascinating. There is, oh course, also a lot of trees in this forest. King's sc......more