This Week's Good Book: The Martin Luther King Trilogy: "Parting the Waters,54-63", "Pillar of Fire,63-65", "At Canaan's Edge,65-68" - by Taylor Branch

Taylor Branch spent 24 years of his life researching and writing this trilogy on Martin Luther King. His America in the King Years series is both a biography of Martin Luther King and a history of his age. No timeline can do justice to its wide cast of characters and its intricate web of incidents. This is not for the casual reader. It totals over 2200 pages. The series actually begins back in the early 1800's with the black churches founded by slaves in the South. It is fascinating and reveals much history of which I was unaware. The absolute brutality and violence against blacks in the post-reconstruction era extending into the 1960's is portrayed in great detail. The reader can feel the hopelessness of the blacks in the South because the racism was government-sanctioned. Imagine living in the state of Mississippi where a black was murdered and a white jury sets the murderers free. Imagine the local sheriff, sworn to uphold the law, is involved in murdering civil rights workers. Another frustration that I experienced in reading was that the FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, was out to get Martin Luther King. The FBI had him illegally wire-tapped for years. I can't understand why Hoover was so against King. Then, when some of the racist murderers are tracked and caught, the FBI took such great credit for it. A favorite cop-out was to hint that the civil rights movement was communist-backed. This series should be a must for history teachers and students of American History. It is the most thorough and detailed writing about the civil rights struggle.