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DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF KING?: A REVIEW ESSAY, THE

Encounter, Summer 2006 by Burrow, Rufus Jr

Taylor Branch has completed his monumental trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States. Not unlike the previous two volumes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 195463 (1988) and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 (1998), volume 3 tries to capture as many eyewitness accounts as possible through extensive research and numerous interviews.1 Together these three volumes are unquestionably the definitive political biography on King. I highlight "political" because this series pays scant attention to things which are as fundamental to who King was as his political ideas and practice, such as the influence of black Southern culture on his entire life, as well as the values instilled in him by his family, church, and as a student at Morehouse College. In my estimation, then, the definitive biography or study on King would have to give a prominent place to theological and ecclesial considerations, in addition to the political.

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At Canaan's Edge is comprised of four parts totaling thirty-nine chapters, and more than two hundred pages of notes. Moreover, in a helpful way, each chapter begins with the year and dates that cover the period under discussion. This enables the reader to retain some sense of place in a very long book that tries to make sense of a massive amount of detail on the local, national, and international levels. In addition, the method of presentation is an alternating back and forth between political and social happenings and the civil rights movement, in addition to the relationship between events in each area.

The Young Martyrs of the SNCC

Branch includes an intricate and detailed discussion of the Selma, Alabama, movement and the quest for voting rights. He contends that one cannot adequately understand the 1965 Selma campaign without also understanding the roles and the struggles of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that was organized in 1961. One gets a clear sense of the inner workings and internal turmoil of that organization and how its members did much of the early, tough, dangerous-sometimes deadly-grassroots work in Selma, for example, before King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were invited in by local black leaders. When the Selma campaign took off, and later the "March against Fear" in Mississippi, King knew that the youth of the SNCC were battle tested and had earned the right to have an independent voice. He privately conceded this to his advisors (491-92).

Branch gives the SNCC a much more prominent place in the civil rights movement than other studies on King. Although King was viewed by many as the central figure in the civil rights movement, Branch's book is a clear reminder that there were other important figures and organizations, of which the SNCC was but one. Whether in the Mississippi Delta (discussed at length in Pillar of Fire), Selma, Chicago, the beginnings of the black power movement, or planning for the poor people's campaign, At Canaan's Edge reveals the imprint of the SNCC on these initiatives. Branch is second only to Clayborne Carson2 in detailing the contributions and sacrifices of both black and white members of the SNCC and how their rhetoric and practice pushed and challenged King, the SCLC, and other more accepted civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League.

A few young members of the SNCC made the ultimate sacrifice for their conviction about civil and human rights for all people. For example, Branch recounts the journeys of white Northern students Jonathan Daniels and Judith Upham, who went to Selma when King called for clergy and others throughout the country to join them in the march to Montgomery. So committed were they that once the marchers finally reached Montgomery, Daniels and Upham decided to remain in Selma with the SNCC to continue their dangerous voter registration work. As the result of an ambush, Daniels, a student at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who earned the respect and appreciation of his SNCC peers as well as black residents of Selma, was murdered. Another young white priest, Richard Morrisroe, was critically wounded by the same white man who shot Daniels (303-5). Then there is the case of Sammy Younge, a Tuskegee Institute student who joined SNCC to work in Selma. Smitten by the struggle there, he found it impossible to return to school. He too was murdered (406). As in the case of the Daniels murder, the culprit was acquitted by an all white-male jury.

Branch also brings to life the story of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker and deacon who, having been denied voter registration five times, was subsequently fatally wounded by a white policeman. Jackson was the first martyr of the voter-rights campaign in Selma. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, answered King's call and became the second martyr of the Selma movement when a Klansman bludgeoned him to death with a baseball bat. While Reeb's murder drew national attention, including flowers from the White House for Reeb's widow and a presidential C-140 airplane to fly her and her father-in-law back to Boston, the Jackson family received no such accolades (83, 85, 89).

DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF KING?: A REVIEW ESSAY, THE

Encounter, Summer 2006 by Burrow, Rufus Jr

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