"At Canaan’s Edge" (Simon & Schuster; $35), the third and final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental chronicle, “America in the King Years,” covers the period from 1965 to 1968, and charts civil-rights history as the parallel biographies of two tragic titans—Martin Luther King, Jr., the modern Moses, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be Lincoln. The tape of Johnson’s phone call to King has inspired speculation about their collusion in the design and execution of the Selma-Montgomery campaign; one student of the period recently called it the Johnson-King voting-rights “pas de deux.” Branch doesn’t go this far, but he briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. For King’s purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal—studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention.

"We who believe in freedom cannot rest".

Taylor Branch's books (now three of them) have been on my to-read list for a while now--I haven't yet read anything by him, though.

Now that all three volumes of this history are out, I'd pay good money for a slipcased box of the books in hardcover, but that might be wishful thinking.

He pointed out that, in the five Southern states that Johnson lost to Goldwater in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of eligible African-Americans were registered to vote. A voting-rights act would produce a coalition of blacks and white moderates, changing the electoral map of the South. Johnson liked that. It could be his greatest achievement, he said—“It will do things that even that ’64 Act couldn’t do.”

Instead, the Goldwater campaign activated the conservative/white-supremacist voting block across the nation, thereby leading to the Reagan realignment in the 1980 election following the Dixicrats bolting the Democratic Party and forming the basis on the new Republican controlling majority.

"So other than that, Mrs. King, how was Memphis?"

The exodus of white supremacists from the Democrats to the Republicans would have happened much earlier, feelers for a mass defection were already out in late 1972, but the Watergate scandal and the threat of impeachment delayed the shift until the Carter administration.

Two books detail this curiously unreported feature of the Reagan realignment, Godfrey Hodgson's http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395822939/103-1294047-5579046?v=glance&n=283155 and Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm. To my knowledge, Hodgson is one of the few political observers to grasp the significance the Dixiecrat defection.

In other words, the "Regan Democrats" were really white supremacists crossing the aisle, and the voters followed the political elites, not the other way around.