DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF KING?: A REVIEW ESSAY, THE

1 At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. By Taylor Branch. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. 1,039 pages.

2 See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

3 For Disciples readers it may be of interest to note that in August 1965 King was to have addressed a Disciples convention in Puerto Rico (289). Although Branch does not confirm that King actually kept this engagement, Laurence Kirkpatrick's letter of April 27, 1965, extends the invitation to King to address the World Convention of Churches of Christ (Disciples), and a subsequent letter notes that King accepted the invitation to speak on August 14. We also know that on August 24 King's secretary, Dora McDonald, wrote Kirkpatrick to inform him of King's expenses of $483.40 for roundtrip airfare for him and his aide, Bernard Lee. Both of these documents are in the King Library and Archives. In addition, it is noteworthy that King addressed the International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) in Dallas, Texas, on September 25, 1966. The title of his address was "Beyond Discovery, Love." This document is also in the King Library and Archives.

4 Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 590.

5 My colleague at Elizabethtown College, King scholar Michael Long, read and commented on an earlier draft of this review and informed me that an even better treatment of the King and Johnson relationship is found in Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

6 Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 471.

7 Young, 471.

8 Ibid., 470.

9 See a much fuller discussion in chapter 8 of my God and Human Dignity: The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

10 King took the movement north to Chicago against the advice of some of his advisors. Although by most accounts the Chicago movement was an abysmal failure for King, it is also the case that the decision to go to Chicago proved that racism was not confined to the South (513-14, 523). This truth was only magnified by the little time that King spent in Los Angeles after the Watts riots. Moreover, King found racism in the North-especially in Chicago-to be worse than what he had experienced in Alabama and Mississippi (511).

11 Here I follow Andrew Young's line of thought in An Easy Burden, 331-32.

12 Rabbi Marx's story is important inasmuch as he stood on the sidelines as an observer for the Chicago Federation of Reform Jewish congregations during the march through Chicago's Marquette Park. The venomous and hateful expressions on the faces of white residents and their vicious treatment of the nonviolent marchers in effect convicted and converted Marx, causing him to vow never again to merely be an observer in future marches for civil and human rights. Marx was overwhelmed by having "seen in the raging fears of ordinary parents and children 'how the concentration camp could have occurred and how man's hatred could lead them to kill.' Marx wrote a pained confession about the difficulty of being a prophet close to home. Ι was on the wrong side of the street. I should have been with the marchers'" (508-9). Marx was not only among the marchers during the march through Gage Park but was among those struck by rocks (510).