by Taylor Branch
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Product Description
In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage.
Amazon.com Review
Pillar of Fire is the second volume of Taylor Branch's magisterial three-volume history of America during the life of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Branch's thesis, as he explains in the introduction, is that "King's life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years," but this is not just a biography. Instead it is a work of history, with King at its focal point. The tumultuous years that Branch covers saw the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the beginnings of American disillusionment with the war in Vietnam, and, of course, the civil rights movement that King led, a movement that transformed America as the nation finally tried to live up to the ideals on which it was founded. Timeline of a Trilogy Taylor Branch's 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 incident, but here are some of the highlights, which might be useful as a scorecard to the trilogy's nearly 3,000 pages. | | |  | | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 | | | May: At age 25, King gives his first sermon as pastor-designate of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. | 1954 | May: French surrender to Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board outlaws segregated public education. | | December: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott, which King is drafted to lead. | 1955 | | | October: King spends his first night in jail, following his participation in an Atlanta sit-in. | 1960 | February: Four students attempting to integrate a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter spark a national sit-in movement.
April: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded.
November: Election of President John F. Kennedy | | May: The Freedom Rides begin, drawing violent responses as they challenge segregation throughout the South. King supports the riders during an overnight siege in Montgomery. | 1961 | July: SNCC worker Bob Moses arrives for his first summer of voter registration in rural Mississippi.
August: East German soldiers seal off West Berlin behind the Berlin Wall. | | March: J. Edgar Hoover authorizes the bugging of Stanley Levinson, King's closest white advisor. | 1962 | September: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi under massive federal protection. | April: King, imprisoned for demonstrating in Birmingham, writes the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
May: Images of police violence against marching children in Birmingham rivet the country.
August: King delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech before hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington.
September: The Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church kills four young girls. | 1963 | June: Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers assassinated.
November: President Kennedy assassinated. | |  | | Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 | | | | | November: Lyndon Johnson, in his first speech before Congress as president, promises to push through Kennedy's proposed civil rights bill. | March: King meets Malcolm X for the only time during Senate filibuster of civil rights legislation.
June: King joins St. Augustine, Florida, movement after months of protests and Klan violence.
October: King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and campaigns for Johnson's reelection.
November: Hoover calls King "the most notorious liar in the country" and the FBI sends King an anonymous "suicide package" containing scandalous surveillance tapes. | 1964 | January: Johnson announces his "War on Poverty."
March: Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam following conflict with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
June: Hundreds of volunteers arrive in the South for SNCC's Freedom Summer, three of whom are soon murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
July: Johnson signs Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
August: Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military force in Vietnam. Democratic National Convention rebuffs the request by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated in favor of all-white state delegation.
November: Johnson wins a landslide reelection. | | January: King's first visit to Selma, Alabama, where mass meetings and demonstrations will build through the winter. | 1965 | February: Malcolm X speaks in Selma in support of movement, three weeks before his assassination in New York by Nation of Islam members. | |  | | At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 | | March: Voting rights movement in Selma peaks with "Bloody Sunday" police attacks and, two weeks later, a successful march of thousands to Montgomery.
August: King rebuffed by Los Angeles officials when he attempts to advocate reforms after the Watts riots. | | March: First U.S. combat troops arrive in South Vietnam. Johnson's "We Shall Overcome" speech makes his most direct embrace of the civil rights movement.
May: Vietnam "teach-in" protest in Berkeley attracts 30,000.
June: Influential federal Moynihan Report describes the "pathologies" of black family structure.
August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, the Watts riots begin in Los Angeles.
| January: King moves his family into a Chicago slum apartment to mark his first sustained movement in a Northern city.
June: King and Stokely Carmichael continue James Meredith's March Against Fear after Meredith is shot and wounded. Carmichael gives his first "black power" speech.
July: King's marches for fair housing in Chicago face bombs, bricks, and "white power" shouts. | 1966 | February: Operation Rolling Thunder, massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, begins.
May: Stokely Carmichael wins the presidency of SNCC and quickly turns the organization away from nonviolence.
October: National Organization for Women founded, modeled after black civil rights groups. | April: King's speech against the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside Church raises a storm of criticism
December: King announces plans for major campaign against poverty in Washington, D.C., for 1968. | 1967 | May: Huey Newton leads Black Panthers in armed demonstration in California state assembly.
June: Johnson nominates former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.
July: Riots in Newark and Detroit.
October: Massive mobilization against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. | March: King joins strike of Memphis sanitation workers.
April: King gives his "Mountaintop" speech in Memphis. A day later, he is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. | 1968 | January: In Tet Offensive, Communist guerillas stage a surprise coordinated attack across South Vietnam.
March: Johnson cites divisions in the country over the war for his decision not to seek reelection in 1968. | |
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Branch's Pillar of Fire, 2008-05-22
This is an intense book filled with many facts. Often far too many facts to process well and comprehend the story. That may seem a bit much but the purpose of Branch's book seems to be to write down as much as possible. Still, the events are exciting and not to be missed. The time period begins with an assassination of a president and ends with the assassination of a......what was Malcolm X anyway? A very interesting yet troubling man? I have yet to figure out and may never. I do know he was there.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The Angle of Moment, 2007-03-15
With 30 other reviews for this book (so far), it would seem that everything that needs to be said about this book has been said already. And I would second the praise for the book. It is vital reading for any student of American history. It is well written; indeed, I felt the writing style was more literary and more suspenseful than PTW. The allocation of styles is sensible; the straightforward, conservative narrative style of PTW is helpful for readers new to the subject, while POF follows with a somewhat more daring style of narration, for readers now familiar with the main characters.
What I believe other reviews have not really done is assess the book's treatment of the subject matter, or what alternative choices Mr. Branch could have made. Readers would be advised to note this is essentially a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr, and not so much an account of the civil rights movement. Not only that, unlike Garrow's *Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Perennial Classics)*, it addresses MLK as a thinker and philosopher of nonviolence[*], not as a political actor. Every element in Branch's books is marshaled to illustrate or test King's doctrine of nonviolence. While Branch possibly had other motives, a lot of the criticisms of his book can be explained away with this hypothesis.
(Examples of criticism include the meager attention to other characters in the Civil Rights Movement, brief references to the women, or lack of any sort of radical analysis. While Branch has responded to criticism of his male-centric account of this period, I will merely add that women--white or black--seldom posed a challenge to nonviolence. Likewise, Branch does not attempt to assess the forces driving racism itself, and what caused those forces suddenly to weaken or capitulate. This is about a philosophical approach.)
The rival approach to King's philosophy of nonviolence, during this period, was a posture of confrontation (adopted by the Nation of Islam and by King's adversaries in Florida and Mississippi). "Posturing" is an intermediate stance between violence and nonviolence, and it was the choice of a surprising number of white adversaries still hoping to bluff their way out of a violent confrontation. At this time, the appeal to "states rights" had proven to be a legalistic shell game of evasion, and one doomed to end badly for the segregationists. At the same time, the Nation of Islam was adopting militant rhetoric it could not seriously dream of putting into practice. By adopting a discipline of confrontation and central control, the NOI was able to create an entirely new conception of the African American in the minds of white Americans, as a potentially fierce and truculent contender in America's endless civic brawls.
In both cases, the strategy of posturing violence was to collapse in internal struggles. The whites who sought to discourage King's soul power in Mississippi pushed the envelope of posturing--of intimidation and belligerent confrontation--to the point that the ruling white caste began to lose face and succumbed to the enforcer "rednecks." The NOI split along personality lines, with Malcolm X being driven from the inner circle of Elijah Muhammad, then forming a charismatic dissenting ummah of non-sectarian Muslims, and exposing the deep contradictions in the NOI's radical pretensions.
While the NOI plays a smaller role in the book than I have implied, it is fitting that the book begins with a NOI confrontation with the police, and ends with a deadly confrontation between NOI and its most famous ex-member, Malcolm X. The ideal of establishing Black Pride through a personality cult was to prove an unmitigated disaster for the NOI, while the ideal of defeating nonviolent action through constant state harassment was to severely wound the South's ruling class.
___________________________________________________
[*] In my review of *At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (America in the King Years)* I address King's doctrine of "nonviolence" in more detail; but "nonviolence" is a very inadequate term to describe the concept.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Branch's Trilogy, 2006-08-11
Volume one of Branch's biography of King, though interesting most of the time, suffers from Branch's sometime tortuous syntax and lack of focus, it seems. _Parting the Waters_, overall, was excellent, but I only wish that it flowed always when it only flowed some of the time.
Beginning now to read _Pillar of Fire_, volume two of the trilogy, I am again struck with Branch's convoluted and twised syntax, which smooths itself out at some point only to become twisted once more. Also, volume two seems, at the start, to be extremely disjointed, hopping from place to place with no cohesive story. Most of the first 100 pages of _Pillar of Fire_ is a repeat of information already convered in volume one of the Trilogy.
I expected volume two to begin right off with how the new Johnson Administration was going to approach the Civil Right's Movement, and what further things good ol' Hoover was going to work up. But so far-- after 100 pages-- the book still sits, apparently, in the Kennedy Administration, with very little referencing of King, the Kennedy Administration, or Hoover. Instead, volume two simply rehashes, in sometime tortuous syntax, old information.
Nevertheless, I will continue to read volume two. The trilogy is very good, for the most part. Style is a thing the reader adapts to, after a few hours of reading. The only problem with Branch is that though I have accustomed myself to Branch's stylitical quirks, it seems I am forever going in and out of catching his tempo and flow.
Alan Bernardo
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Impossible not to be a letdown, 2006-07-20
Any follow up to Parting the Waters is destined to be anticlimatic. Concedingly, there are a few drawbacks to Pillar of Fire. Nonetheless, this is another classic work from Branch.
General Remarks:
1. About half of the first section of the book is a summary about the "tides" leading to the Birmingham campaign in 1963. Accordingly, it has a text book feel and it quite bland, especially if you just finished reading Parting the Waters. However, the summary will be beneficial if you need a memory jogger to prepare for the history to continue.
2. Fortunately, mixed in with the summary is fresh narrative ranging from "Muslims in Los Angeles" to "LBJ in St. Augustine"
3. The second section, "Freedom Summer," is a return to vintage Branch. The author's presentation of history is captivating. Branch somehow smoothly intertwines all perspectives and every angle in his depiction of freedom summer, zooming out to global standpoints and in for microscopic analyses of King's conscience.
4. Like Parting the Waters, Pillar is rife with suspense, plot turns, romance, treachery, violence, sex, and political intrigue. Even if this were a novel its literary value would merit reading it. But this stuff is true, amazingly, and contains a ton of documentation to prove it.
5. Better yet, this book is philosophically stimulating, inspirational, educational, and utterly poignant.
6. Ironically, this book should have been much longer. Character development could stand to be more thorough in places. Accordingly, some defining episodes (especially St. Augustine) seem rushed.
Final comment: Branch provides an in depth, intimate portrait of the movement and its principal actors. Pillar of Fire is a rich mix of fascinating biography and political intrigue, captured within a multi-dimensional approach to history (intellectual, social, cultural, political, religious), and held together with a concentration on Martin Luther King.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Keeps the Fire Aflame...Pillared Story of the Shaping of America, 2006-05-15
Taylor Branch has certainly done better work with his first Pulitzer Prize winning Civil Rights movement work, "Parting the Waters,' but that doesn't mean you should be brushing aside this good history writing in "Pillar of Fire." There's a quote out there...that I can't seem to find right now...that says something to the effect of, "If we don't learn from history, we will find ourselves repeating mistakes already made." In the realm of social justice and American Civil Rights history there is no finer capturing of our society's mistakes and the heroic struggle undertaken by civil rights movement leaders than the history written by Taylor Branch on the subject. The entire trilogy should be required reading for all liberal arts majors (all other under grad majors for that matter) as an education in the important history that shaped the America we know today.
"Pillar of Fire," captures just three years of the Civil Rights movement from 1963-1965, but they were chock-filled with pivital and formative events. Highlights from Branch's book are the FBI-wrangling led by J. Edgar Hoover, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, assassinations of Malcom X and Medgar Evars, the mission creep of Vietnam, and the beginnings of tying in the civil rights movement protest to a larger anti-war protest movement. My criticism, though minor may it be, of "Pillar of Fire," is that whereas Branch's first work, "Parting the Waters," read like a deftly crafted geniusly written page turner of a suspense novel, "Pillar of Fire," comes across more like a traditional history book. Branch's writing genius lies in his ability to bring together seemingly disparate events while mixing in elements of pop culture and everyday life to give you a good feel for the "sign of the times," at that time. Where Branch was able to tie in the events in America pre-1965 and do it with panache in "Parting the Waters," his efforts in "Pillar of Fire," aren't so focused. Call it a sophomore slump if you will, but "Pillar of Fire," got a little too bogged down in White House and Capital Hill wankerings and didn't focus on the immediacy of the drama of what was happening on the street down South during those years. Don't let this deter you from reading "Pillar of Fire," though...its just a minor Branch-ian misstep.
Where Branch's work really shines is his recounting of the odd and gangster and cult-like machinations of the Nation of Islam. He also captures the juxtaposition of Malcom X's approach to Civil Rights versus MLK's non-violent warfare approach quite nicely. In hindsight it seems MLK's method of bringing about social justice change through sacrifice and love proved more lasting and effective. Also of interest is J. Edgar Hoover's odd fixation on MLK's personal life and using that to try to bring down the man and the movement. If people are concerned about the "Patriot Act," today infringing on personal rights and intelligence oversight...just read what America was like in the 60's with the Hoover-led FBI getting into everybody's business.
All in all, Branch's "Pillar of Fire," is a high quality read and well-written piece of history...a history that is integral to the fabric of America today. The Civil Rights movement was nothing short of a revolutionary and/or civil war in America and the re-telling of this history reveals it as such. Run, don't walk, to get a hold of all of Branch's books from Amazon to get up to speed on all things Civil Rights movement.
--MMW
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