At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

He preached again on Lazarus and Dives. (“Hell is the pain you inflict upon yourself for refusing God’s grace.”) “I want you to go back and tell our brothers and sisters to wait until the next morning—don’t give up too early,”

At a far pole from accountable public trust, or constitutional duty, Hoover corrupted the FBI to wage political war.

“Unfulfilled Dreams,” clinging to the Bible’s message of consolation when King David of Israel realized he would never live to see a temple built in Jerusalem: “You did well that it was in your heart.” King identified with crushed hopes. Bullets had ended Gandhi’s hope to witness independent India, he said, and “Paul never got to Spain.” People con

King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting

“What I am trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” King declared. “His generosity may feed his ego and his piety may feed his pride. So, without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”

Incumbents and courthouse ties stretched out through the next political generation a wholesale partisan realignment of Southern white voters, marked from the Goldwater-Johnson divide of 1964. By 1996, when Charles “Chip” Pickering succeeded Montgomery, Southern Republicans not only supplanted the “solid” Democrats of the segregation era but also su

the Kerner Commission, which found no political conspiracy behind the urban riots of 1967, and traced them primarily to racial deprivation. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” declared the report. “White institutions created it, white instit

Over the next decade, a few journalists would regret their failure to expose firsthand evidence of Hoover’s penchant for spy vendettas above public service. (“I didn’t do my job,” recalled David Kraslow of the Los Angeles Times. “I should have blown the thing sky high, but I didn’t.”)

Together with Tet, the report left in near ruins both his war and his peace paths to advance freedom.