At Canaan's Edge Read Online Free

then hit me!” Nash shouted, so angry that she remained dry-eyed all night, which surprised her as a departure from her habit of crying privately through anxiety before demonstrations. She went instead to a lawyer, but the harsh realities of divorce made her hesitate. Nash remained partly under the spell of Bevel, who, always on the offensive, folded the conflict into a teaching tool for their ongoing commitment to answer the Birmingham church bombing. Citing Nash herself, ironically, he presented nonviolence as a kind of nuclear science by which truth properly applied could release stupendous healing energy in the larger society.
    King knew there was calculated political strategy in Bevel’s method, beyond his mystical exuberance and personal demons, and that the real target of the proposed journey to Montgomery was not Governor Wallace but the national government in Washington. For nine years now, since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, King’s cohorts had experimented with the spiritual and political arts required to nurture a small inspiration, such as the arrest of Rosa Parks, into a movement of sufficient scope to make America “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” as he put it in his signature “dream” speech. For King, this meant steering a course that took account not only of Bevel’s state of mind and the residual strength of the jailgoers in Selma, plus the likely effect of Lorenzo Harrison’s flight into the mass meeting, but also the response from national leaders a world apart.

    B Y FAR the most critical figure for him to read was President Lyndon Johnson, whose relations with King contrasted sharply with President John F. Kennedy’s sympathetic, sophisticated aloofness. Whereas Kennedy had charmed King while keeping him at a safe distance, harping in private on the political dangers of alleged subversives in the civil rights movement, Johnson in the White House was intensely personal but unpredictable—treating King variously to a Texas bear hug of shared dreams or a towering, wounded snit. After the assassination in Dallas, Johnson had burst with urgent intimacy in a telephone call, promising to show King “how worthy I’m going to try to be of all of your hopes,” and the new President indeed played skillfully upon national mourning to enact the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure. Having consciously alienated the century-old segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do with his own nominating convention, and lashed out privately at both King’s Negroes and white Southerners. Just as suddenly, after his landslide election in November, Johnson had rushed past King’s congratulations to confide a crowning ambition to win the right for Negroes to vote. “That will answer seventy percent of your problems,” he had said in January, rehearsing at breakneck speed speeches he urged on King to dramatize the idea that every American should “have a right to vote just like he has a right to fight, and that we just extend it whether it’s a Negro or whether it’s a Mexican or who it is.” King, on his heels, had mumbled approval. He did not mention that he was headed to Selma for that very purpose—knowing that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street protest—and the President kept pressing him to aim higher than conventional civil rights goals such as a Negro Cabinet officer. “There’s not gonna be anything, though, doctor, as effective as all of ’em votin’,” Johnson had told King. “That’ll get you a message that all the eloquence in the world won’t bring…. I think this will be bigger, because it will do things that even that ’64 act couldn’t do.”
    More recently, Johnson’s mood had turned prickly again. When a haggard King