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

Amos—“when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”

Martin Luther King glumly observed from Birmingham’s Thomas Jefferson Hotel that “white Alabamians are desperately grasping for a way to return to the old days of white supremacy.”

it may be said of the Reconstruction Era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow…a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man better than the black man.”

“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

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.”

At a far pole from accountable public trust, or constitutional duty, Hoover corrupted the FBI to wage political war.

King himself upheld nonviolence until he was nearly alone among colleagues weary of sacrifice. To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting

He preached again on Lazarus and Dives. (“Hell is the pain you inflict upon yourself for refusing God’s grace.”) “I want you to go back and tell our brothers and sisters to wait until the next morning—don’t give up too early,”