Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 [Hardcover]

Taylor Branch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 1998

In "Pillar of Fire", the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, "Parting the Waters", won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of the narrative, Branch recounts the climactic struggles as they commanded the national and international stage.

"Pillar of Fire" covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1963 to 1965-- Dallas, St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. And it provides a frank, revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr.-- haunted by blackmail, factionalism, and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls.

Branch's gallery of historic characters also includes:

Malcolm X, who challenged King's vision of nonviolent integration and lived under threat of death from the Nation of Islam.

Lyndon Johnson, who believed racial conflict was destroying his political base in the South and threatening his dream to end poverty.

J. Edgar Hoover, under whose direction the FBI, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy's approval, spied on King with wiretaps and bugs, and yet solved the most heinous racial crimes of the era.

Diane Nash, the passionate leader behind sit-ins and Freedom Rides, whose determination shaped the Selma voting rights movement.

Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic theologian who bonded with King in devotion to the Hebrew prophets.

Robert Moses, the Mississippi SNCC leader who finally came undone over the human suffering caused by his Freedom Summer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who commanded a powerful voice for the unlettered.

"Pillar of Fire" takes readers inside the dramas that shook every American institution, from the local pulpit to the Presidency. We disappear with courageous young people into Mississippi's feudal Parchman Penitentiary. We absorb the shock of a single Presidential election in 1964 that revolutionized the structure of partisan politics. We follow Northern rabbis summoned by King, and Mary Peabody, mother of the governor of Massachusetts, into the segregated jails of St. Augustine, Florida. We witness the Shakespearean conflicts between Lyndon Johnson and King and Hoover and Robert Kennedy.

Branch brings to bear fifteen years of research-- archival investigation; nearly two thousand interviews: new primary sources, from FBI wiretaps to White House telephone recordings-- in a seminal work of history. "Pillar of Fire" captures the intensity of the legendary King years, when the movement broke down walls between races, regions, sexes, and religions, and between America and the larger world. Its struggle to rescue and redeem, its victories and defeats, its failings and sacrifices gave rise to opposing tides that still dominate the national debate about justice and democratic government. The story of this movement is an incandescent chapter in America's distinctive quest for freedom.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Library Journal

Following Parting the Waters (LJ 1/89), his magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Civil Rights years 1954-63, Branch's second volume of a projected trilogy takes the story through the heady years that saw the Southern Freedom Rides, Congressional battles over the Civil Rights acts, the March on Washington, the Birmingham bombing, and the assassinations of John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Once more, Branch's national epic is knit together by the charismatic figure of Dr. King. We only think we know this story, which in Branch's masterly version seems freshened and newly impressive, told without cant or cliche.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition ~1st Printing edition (February 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684808196
• ISBN-13: 978-0684808192
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #115,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More 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), Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65, and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. The author of two other nonfiction books and a novel, Branch is a former staff member of The Washington Monthly, Harper's, and Esquire. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars High Quality but not Branch's best, January 19, 2001

By 

Pete Agren (Twin Cities, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65 (Paperback)

As most other reviewers, I too was eager to get into Pillar of Fire after a friend recommended his first book to me, Parting the Waters. Although POF is an excellent, thoroughly written book by Branch, it just misses the superb quality of PTW. What PTW gave us about the backgrounds of the central figures and the story line of key incidents, I felt POF was missing some of that and that Branch just couldn't get himself out of the White House documents. Not that I'm trying to dimiss JFK and LBJ's civil rights commentary as frivilous, but I wanted more of the front line drama out of St. Augustine, Florida, Meridian, Mississippi and other hot spots. The other thing I wish Branch would have included was more about Malcom X's background and how he became a muslim in prison.

Aside from my nit-picking, I really enjoyed this book and will definitely read the third installment. Although the White House chapters were a bit too long at times, it was fascinating to learn of Hoover's under-handed tactics to try and quell the movement and hunt out the 'Communists' that influenced MLK. I guess we had our very own NKVD police force right here in America during Hoover's days in power. I had heard inklings of the black-mail suicide tape Hoover sent MLK and was glad Branch gave the full story. Another great aspect of Branch's writings is how he touches on all of the movement groups such as SNCC, CORE, SCLC, etc. Branch gives Bob Moses' actions in Mississippi the credit it deserves whereas so many other writers just seem to gloss over his contributions.

Contrary to a few reviewer's complaints, Branch's writing style is NOT hard to follow (even though he jumps around quite a bit) and this is NOT a hard book to read. It reads like any other high-quality historical work so if you're expecting it to read like Harry Potter, you might want to stick to Brokaw's history books. Normally, I'd give a book like this five stars but because I know Branch can do better (like Parting the Waters), I can only give it four.

On a side note, if any reader wants a better idea on who Taylor Branch is, check out Spike Lee's documentary "4 Little Girls" on the Birmingham church bombing. Branch does some commentary work in it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More tangled than Parting the Waters but just as good, December 14, 1999

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65 (Paperback)

The rather straight line story of the civil rights movement that is told in Parting the Waters becomes much more tangled and complex in Taylor Branch's second book. Here the movement begins to intersect more directly with the other currents of social unrest in the country and the conflicts both within and outside of the movement blur the lines of clear right and wrong.

This is a great piece of social history with the civil rights movement and MLK as the focus. The more success King achieved the more pressure he was under - both from his enemies and his supporters. This was a difficult time for the country and for all those who were - in whatever way - trying to change it. Branch does an invaluable job in trying to distill the mass of detail and the great complexity of the sociopolitical scene into a coherent story. It's harder to do here than in the first book, but he manages nicely. Good job. Worth reading carefully.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific Second Volume In Planned Three-Volume Series!, January 24, 2001

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65 (Paperback)

Presenting an authentic and comprehensive picture of the mammoth civil rights movement in the United States in the post WWII era is a daunting task, yet noted author and journalist Taylor Branch has succeeded masterfully with this, the second of a planned three-volume history of the struggle of blacks in America to find justice, equality and parity with the mainstream white society. Detailing the final desperate years of the mature and charismatic Rev. Martin Luther King, Branch sets the stage for a wide range of events, personalities, and public issues. This is truly a wonderful read, fascinating, entertaining, and endlessly detailed in its description of people and events, and quite insightful in its chronicling of the fortune of those social forces that created, sustained, and accomplished the single most momentous feat of meaningful social action in our nation's contemporary history.

His range of subjects is necessarily wide and deep, and we find coverage of every aspect of the tumultuous struggle as it reaches into the final desperate efforts of the mature Martin Luther King, a man haunted by efforts at blackmail, internal bickering and dissension, and racist hatred as he continues the efforts to rectify the social evils of segregation and works toward greater civil rights and justice under the law. As in the first volume, this work at times borders on becoming a biography of Martin Luther King and his times, yet Branch so extends his coverage of the eddies and currents of the movement itself that it appears to be by far the most comprehensive and fair-minded treatment of the civil rights movement published to date. Indeed, in detailing these critical years of the movement, Branch offers a wonderfully recreated portrait of all of the participants in this momentous and historical struggle, illustrating just how close to the breaking point our society came during these fateful years, and therefore memorably engages the reader with every element of this and a thousand other personalities, issues, and events that helped to carve out the history of our country for almost twenty years.

Here one finds a very detailed coverage of the rise of black firebrand Malcolm X and how he influenced the ongoing movement, of J. Edgar Hoover, perpetually obsessed with King and his sexual exploits, and of Lyndon Johnson, who, acting out of his concern for his dream for the Great Society, forcefully twisted the forces of the U.S. Congress toward accepting meaningful civil rights legislation. So too, do we find lesser known names and personalities covered, from Diane Nash to Robert Moses to Fannie Lou Hamer, all of who played critical and fateful roles in the unfolding of the civil rights movement. The names and places and events described here are legion, and one gets the sense that anyone who had a conscience was involved, and many of the names mentioned later went on to greater accomplishment and further noteworthy contribution in their public lives and careers.

This, then, is a stupendous second book in a wonderful planned three-volume history of the civil rights movement in the United States; the first volume covered the period from the late 1950s when the first rumblings of the movement were sounded until just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November of 1963. This second volume picks up the thread thereafter, extending out through the Johnson years and including aspects of the coalescence of the movement with the Vietnam anti-war protest. This is a wonderful book, and one I would consider essential reading for anyone with an interest in American history in the 20th century. I highly recommend both of the books already published, and I hope you appreciate reading them as much as I did while we wait for the arrival of the third and final volume. Enjoy!