Taylor Branch (born January 14, 1947, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American author and historian best known for his award-winning trilogy of books chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and some of the history of the American civil rights movement. The third and final volume of the 2,912-page trilogy ... collectively called America in the King Years ... was released in January 2006. Branch lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife, Christina Macy, and their two children, Macy (born 1980) and Franklin (b. 1983).
Branch graduated from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta in 1964. From there, he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead Scholarship. He graduated in 1968 and went on to earn an M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1970.
He was a lecturer in politics and history at Goucher College from 1998 to 2000.
Career
Branch served as an assistant editor at The Washington Monthly from 1970 to 1973; he was Washington editor of Harper's from 1973 to 1976;and he was Washington columnist for Esquire Magazine from 1976 to 1977. He also has written for a wide variety of other publications, including The New York Times Magazine; Sport; The New Republic; and Texas Monthly.
In 1972, Branch worked for the Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Some of Branch's coworkers in the effort were Bill Clinton, at the time his roommate and later to be president of the United States, Hillary Rodham, Bill's then-girlfriend and Yale Law School classmate and later his wife, first lady of the United States and U.S. Secretary of State, and Houston lawyer Julius Glickman.
In October 1976, Simon & Schuster published Blind Ambition, which purports to be, mainly, a Watergate-related memoir by John Dean, the former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon. On several occasions, Taylor Branch has publicly stated that he was the ghostwriter for this book. John Dean has denied this, though in 1995 gave sworn-deposition testimony that Taylor Branch actually wrote large sections of the book without his (Mr. Dean's) participation, knowledge, or approval. John Dean claimed furthermore that these sections written by Taylor Branch were partially fictional. Taylor Branch has, in turn, denied John Dean's claims, and continues to assert, including on his website (cited below under "External links"), that he was, in fact, the ghostwriter for "Blind Ambition," and that all of the book's content originated with Dean.
Branch's book on former president Bill Clinton, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With The President, was written from many tape-recorded interviews and conversations between the two, most of which occurred in the White House during Clinton's two terms in office and which were not disclosed publicly until 2009 at the time of the book's publication.
Taylor Branch received a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (also known as a "genius grant") in 1991 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
In 2008, Taylor Branch received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to him by special guest Edwin C. Moses.
Controversial Statements
In his 1992 essay "Blacks and Jews: The Uncivil War", Branch said that the Jews have been "perpetrators of racial hate", citing an example where he claims that Black Hebrew Israelites were denied citizenship under the Israeli law of return because of alleged anti-Black sentiment among Israeli Jews. Branch was criticized by Seth Forman, who said the claims seem baseless, particularly in light of Israel's airlift of thousands of black Ethiopian Jews in the early 1990s. A group of American civil rights activist led by Bayard Rustin investigated and concluded that racism was not the cause of Black Hebrews' situation.
