I remember listening to Taylor Branch's trilogy on MLK via audiobooks. It seems to get a lot of praise, but I honestly didn't feel that impressed. For starters it says 'America in the King Years', but there never seemed to be much analysis on a national scale. Figures of the civil rights movement who didn't fall into MLK's non-violent position didn't really get much attention (I was expecting a lot more on Malcolm X).

It also seemed like the structure of the book failed to really do justice to the racist, white, Jim Crow supporters. What they did was terrible, I agree. But I would have liked to come away from a study of the period having understood their racist ideology and its roots a little better. As it is it just seemed like they were the antagonists, like in a novel, whose psychological motivations are never really explained. At least not to my satisfaction.

I've been told, when I brought this up with people who liked the book, that the issue is that Branch was writing in the 80s when King hadn't been as canonized as a positive historical figure as he is today. Thus it was important not just to detail MLK's life but also turn the biography into a quasi-hagiography.

What to historians specializing in the period think about the trilogy today? What books should I read instead?