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

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

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”

“It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the Times review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.”

No one, including President Johnson, foresaw America’s first loss of a war, any more than the day’s tear gas victims pictured Selma as the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism. It was a turning point. The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would r

Many of the early Wilcox settlers brought from South Carolina the zeal of its famous “fire-eaters,” who championed slavery and secession toward the Civil War in an era when one isolated Unionist balefully observed that his state was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

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

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

“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

“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.”