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Photo © J. Brough Schamp

About the Book
This book concludes Branch’s three-volume history, America in the King Years, which traces American race, violence and democracy during the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

About the Author
Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (which won the Pulitzer Prize and was a Finalist for the National Book Award) and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. He is also the author of two other nonfiction books and a novel. A former staff member of The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and Esquire, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Suggested Links

www.taylorbranch.com

Excerpt from Chapter 34, At Canaan’s Edge
MLK’s Vietnam address at the Riverside Church,
New York, April 4, 1967

A standing ovation died down to cavernous tension before King imposed deeper quiet with a meditation on hesitant voices. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” he said. …He still felt the forceful admonishment to leave Vietnam policy alone, King allowed, but it left him “nevertheless greatly saddened” that so many people considered the topic a senseless and disconnected shift from civil rights. That presumption fitted those who “have not really known me” or understood the movement, he lamented. “Indeed,” said King, “their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

He undertook to explain “why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church…leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.” Seven reasons began with two lesser ones confined to race. Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the historic momentum for justice since the bus boycott, he asserted. Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.” King derived a third theme from young rioters who had countered his pleas for nonviolence with quips that the nation itself relied on “massive doses of violence” to solve social problems. “Their questions hit home,” he intoned, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

This naked pronouncement further hushed Riverside as King moved through reasons centered in patriotism, his Nobel Prize commission, and religious imperative. Just as the movement always had adopted America’s larger, defining purpose of a more perfect democratic union—helping to spread concentric ripples of freedom behind rights for black people, liberating white Southerners themselves from segregation—so King argued by reverse synergy that a hardening climate of war could implode toward fearful subjugation at home. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he warned, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’” He marveled that religious leaders so readily evaded their core convictions to excuse violence. “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?” he asked. “What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?”

…The Riverside crowd embraced King’s message as though relieved to hear biting reflection sustained with nuance so devoid of malice, and perhaps also because his candid doubts of practical impact rang humbly true. Theey clapped for his endorsement of draft resistance and again for his praise of seventy declared conscientious objectors thus far from his Morehouse alma mater alone. He said each listener should weigh methods by individual conscience and collective promise—“But we must all protest.” Witness to belief was more important than immediate results, he told them to more applause, “and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned committees for the next generation.”

Backlist

• At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
• Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (Simon & Schuster)
• Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster)
• Labyrinth (With Eugene M. Propper (Viking)
• The Empire Blues (fiction) (Simon & Schuster)
• Second Wind (With Bill Russell) (Random House)
• Blind Ambition (ghostwriter for John Dean) (Simon & Schuster)
• Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest (With Charles Peters) (Praeger)