King and his movement stand at the zenith of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965. From there we follow King as he takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes exposing hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi Klan's. We watch King bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War, and decide to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and ultimately King's assassination.