Quotes of the Day

TIME: This is almost a dual biography of two lions—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon Johnson—very powerful men who are being marginalized. Why did you decide to do it that way?

Taylor Branch: Well, of course, some of that is imposed by the history. I mean, there's the fact that the first Marine combat units land within hours of the first march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge [in Selma. Ala.] You've got the march in Selma and the landing of the troops in Danang, both with garlands around their necks, to me it's very poignant about an era of two different choices about how you foster democracy but starting off with such hope and promise. I didn't realize when I started the book, how closely the two things were going to parallel, but essentially Johnson's presidency is destroyed over Vietnam, and to have him essentially give up and King killed in the same week, you know, I think history itself is telling us these are parallel stories. You put these two stories together and try to examine Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement as models for America, where did we go right, where did we go wrong.

TIME: I was struck by the meeting between Bobby Kennedy and Johnson when basically Kennedy is trying to elicit an endorsement [in his run for the Presidency].

TB: Right, or at least a neutralization. It's the very day before King is killed. In that incredible week. In the great sweep of things, Bobby Kennedy and Johnson agreed about a heck of a lot more than they disagreed about, and once they're no longer rivals, you feel that. Whereas in history, we don't think of that. We think of them as complete opposites and, to me, that's the measure of our cynicism, that we don't really care about the substance of politics. We care about the rivalries and the spitballs.

TIME: Do you think people have a real sense of King's life, or has it become mythologized ?

TB: I think a certain amount of mythology is inevitable when you have great overarching figures like this, but I think there's more than normal with King because he didn't come from mainstream culture and because a lot of people were profoundly uncomfortable with what he was doing, there's a greater need to make him a comfortable mythological figure. And of course, in one sad way to me, there is a tendency to make him a leader of his people, to reduce him to just doing something for black people. When you see him interacting with Johnson and negotiating with congressmen and marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, we realize how ecumenical he was. The overall lesson here is he's a leader, and the movement is leading all of America. And that's the real emotional resonance that you get even with Rosa Parks, where we have this paradox that we have an emotional connection, that we know they did something significant but because the tradition is not that it was significant for all of America but was somehow compartmentalized for black people, we falsify and simplify the myth.

TIME: This volume is so sad, not just because of King's death but because it seems as though he was being marginalized—everything was being heaped on him. The FBI is getting uglier with its dirty tricks, his most loyal lieutenants are scrabbling and pulling back. Do you think he would have recovered his strength, his force, because here he seems besieged from all sides?

TB: I don't know, that's a hypothetical, would he have survived. I don't really know. I think a lot of his message and a lot of the energy from his movement really went overseas after he died, more than here in the U.S., but South Africa, the end of the Berlin Wall. I think the energy went there and it certainly would have very likely drawn his attention as well. Whether his health would have withstood—talk about a candle burning on both ends—on top of all the psychological pressures, just his schedule was a killer. TIME: Incredible.

TB: And so I don't really know, but I do think that the vision and what he was talking about, if he survived his health—his health and his sanity—through the end of the movement period, I think he would have had a lot to say about the world and about the end of apartheid in South Africa.

TIME: Why was he so steadfast about nonviolence?

TB: It was surprising to me how he emphasized it more and more as other people emphasized it less and less. I didn't really expect that. I think maybe he emphasized it more and more because it was the bridge between the two footholds of his message to America, the spiritual one and the patriotic one, what I call equal souls and equal boats. A mark of King oratory is that he would always offer you two entry points, one through patriotic documents about all men are created equal. Equal votes is the heritage of our country. And the other through the prophetic notion from the Hebrew prophets of equal souls before God. [He is saying], we will win our freedom because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

TIME: Except that in both the patriotic and the scriptural tradition, there has been violence. Patriots who fight for their country, the Crusaders marching on for the cross. But he still maintained that there was a nonviolent way.

TB: Yes, but what I'm saying is I think he had a strong conviction that what mediated between those two things is nonviolence. A vote is a piece of nonviolence. That's what it is, and the heart of the religious tradition that made the prophets say, put down your swords and ploughshares and you, even a King, will be measured by the way you treat widows and orphans because they have equal souls before God, is kind of a root basis for democracy and politics. So, I have a line in there where he put one foot in the Constitution, one foot in the Scriptures, and both in nonviolence because he found a foothold in each tradition through nonviolence.

So I just think that was his balance. He had oratorical gifts, but he also had a great gift for balance. And he knew that he was becoming more isolated and that's why you sense that in his rhetoric. He was very aware that his Poor People's Campaign may not win, but [he felt] it's the direction I want to point toward and it is nonviolent and I may not get there with you, which of course accounts for the title [of the book]—all my titles come out of Exodus—like Moses, he got right up to the edge and was allowed to see a vision where equality is the leading spirit in America and the Freedom Movement, but it's coming apart, and he's not allowed to go there. Like Moses, he doesn't get to the promised land, he gets to the edge of it.

TIME: Is there any guidance from the work that he was doing then, that could be applied now, as people are wrestling with how do we change conditions for poor people in the wake of Katrina?

TB: What he said was, the important thing is that first, we have to believe we can do something about this. We're putting this on the agenda because we think we can do something, not necessarily solve it, but freedom has worked miracles before. Nobody had thought that people in Lowndes County, Ala., would ever be able to vote, and they are, and there's no terror there, and that came because somebody dreamed that it was possible when others thought that it wasn't. He was saying, let's put these wretched conditions of poverty on the table and as a national agenda of hope. And that's really a distinctive thing about King. He had a language of hope in really terrible empirical conditions.

TIME: So many people over the years have said why aren't there any more Martin Luther Kings? Why has there not emerged another leader?

TB: I don't know. I get that question all the time. Usually what I say is they're rare. Any kind of overarching leader. Why aren't there more Abraham Lincolns? They're very rare. They're a product of the times, and of course, King's time was a time when we were wrestling with what the free world meant. Our survival stands on what its inner meaning is, and also of course, he arrived because he was a surprise. Nobody expected an overarching leader of American freedom to be a black man. I mean people did not see that. He was the leader of the whole country. The movement was leader of the whole country, and so, the next Martin Luther King probably won't be black, but he'll be a surprise. Or she'll be a surprise.

TIME: What was it that first brought you to this whole project of King's life?

TB: My childhood. I grew up in Atlanta and in the '50s and was not interested in politics, but I was kind of stupefied by this movement and what it meant and how nervous it made me and all of my friends and how it turned knees to jelly. Really the Birmingham demonstrations in '63 were the first events that turned me political. I was 16, and I had just gotten to the point where I was saying, well, gosh, when I get impossibly old and secure, like 30, maybe this is an important enough issue that I would stick my toe in the water and try to help, and then lo and behold, I look on TV, and there are eight-year-old girls—mostly girls—marching into those dogs and fire hoses and then not turning around. I'm saying, well, what's making them do it, now? They don't have advantages and they're doing it, and they're singing songs that are very much like the songs I sing in Sunday School. How can this be and where is it coming from? And so my whole career has basically been kind of answering that moment.

TIME: Was it difficult for you to get people to talk who were at that time questioning him, to talk about that?

TB: It was difficult to get some people to talk, just because a lot of people think that the realities of the movement are so far removed from whatever the myth was, that it's not worth talking, or that I'm not worth talking to, or whatever, but, the movement was filled with self-confident men and women to be able to do what they did, and for most of them, whether it was [black power advocate] Stokely Carmichael or Captain Joseph, Malcolm X's guy, giving their raw-boned opinions is a trifle compared with what they had done before. So they were pretty comfortable in their criticisms of King.

TIME: I was interested in how King continued to turn to [attorney] Stanley Levison. What was it about that relationship that seemed to make him so comfortable? What was the role that Levison filled for him?

TB: I just think that he's somebody that he always listened to and the thing about King was that he was comfortable in having—essentially having a circular gunfight with him in the middle with all these very big egos, yelling and screaming at one another, and he always wanted Stanley to be part of that, and he did, it is true, talk to him more than any of the others one-on-one. He would call him and talk to him in private. He had a confidence that Stanley didn't want anything. He had no ulterior motives and agendas, and that's something which is very rare, as you see. You see how much he's different from everybody else, including [March on Washington coordinator] Bayard Rustin and lots of other people who are brilliant, brilliant people, but they all have their own angles, and also Stanley criticized King unvarnished and straight-on as opposed to in great rhetorical sermons, and that sort of thing. He would tell him, you know, Martin, I think you're making a profound error here. Nobody else said things like that.

TIME: One of the things that the book does is without being sensational, is talk about King's affairs and his chauvinistic attitude towards women. Was that a difficult decision to put those things into the book?

TB: Yes. It was difficult how much weight to give it. But the people who traveled with him were pretty frank. Martin was a chauvinist. Some of them described it almost just as a way of simplifying his world. He had to have rules about what kind of meetings he was having with people, and he tended to want to have business meetings with the men and social meetings with the women, although at the same time, he also knew that the movement lived and breathed on the labor of women.

TIME: If I read the book correctly, the genesis of the idea for the Poor People's Campaign comes from Marian Wright [who, under her married name, Marian Wright Edelman, later became head of the Children's Defense Fund]. TB: Absolutely, and the genesis to go to Selma comes from Diane Nash. In many respects, Diane was the most unsung heroine of the whole movement because in earlier times, she was right up there on the Freedom Ride. She's an innovator in nonviolence, and King gave her his highest award and I think he recognized her, but at the same time, she was kind of trampled and lost and neglected, and not appreciated. He knew that she was doing pioneer things, and that the women did, but the tradition of pulpit leadership was so male and that standard, he was just comfortable with that.

TIME: This is hypothetical, but might he have evolved, become a feminist?

TB: Well, I always think there's hope for anybody, and the Women's Movement—he was discussing that. I mean he was talking about it. He recognized it as an issue not only of politics but of his own mental health toward the end of his life, but I don't think that he transformed his life.

TIME: His own mental health, meaning?

TB: This is an issue—the way I think of and treat women is an issue of my own identity and health. Because he was discussing that. There are little hints of that. But his life was cut short. There was a transitional time really for everybody on things that his movement had set in motion. He was cut down, so we don't know what he would have become privately.

TIME: You've spent two decades working on these books. What's going to be your next project?

TB: Well, I don't know. I just finished this one. I know the next thing won't be this long. It's not going to be another three volumes, but my guess is it's going to grow out of it. It's been such a profound education for me to live with this for almost 24 years, that there is a lot there and I hope to wrestle with some of the themes. Maybe not some of the people, but some of the ideas in it. But I want to get back to books that only take a year or two.

• The author of At Canaan's Edge discusses the life and legacy of Martin Luther King with TIME Assistant Managing Editor Janice C. Simpson