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America in the King Years #1
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
In Parting the Waters , the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a “compelling…masterfully told” ( The Wall Street Journal ) account of Martin Luther King’s early years and rise to greatness.
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.
Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.
Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
1064 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 1988
About the author
Taylor Branch
39 books207 followersTaylor Branch 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).
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March 15, 2024
“The crowd retreated into stunned silence as [Martin Luther King, Jr.] stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few seconds passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him. Dexter members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that. [Ralph] Abernathy remained behind, reading negotiating demands from the pulpit. The boycott was on. King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live…”
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters is a true rarity. It is a book that is vitally important to our national understanding, but reading it does not feel like a duty or a chore. It dwells in some extremely dark valleys, but also manages to be uplifting, finding those parts of humanity that glitter through the doom. It takes on a complex, under-presented chunk of American history, and gives it the treatment it so richly deserves. This is an extremely well-researched and wide-ranging book that also happens to read with the vitality of a great novel.
This is, in other words, an exceptional intersection of scholarship and narrative.
Parting the Waters is the first mammoth volume of a monumental trilogy. It consists of 922-pages of text, and once you’ve finished, you’ve still got around 2,000 pages to go. The fact that this makes me happy, rather than daunted, is a testament to Branch’s accomplishment.
First published in 1988, Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and has been justly celebrated ever since. It begins in 1954, with the emergence of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the public stage, and ends in 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before his proposed Civil Rights Act could come to a vote. Between those two bookends is an epic struggle of righteousness and racism, of courage and cowardliness, and of a dream worth life itself.
The chief focus of Parting the Waters, unsurprisingly, is Dr. King himself. However, though he definitely provides the through-line, Parting the Waters is not a traditional biography. After a certain point, Branch barely mentions aspects of Dr. King’s personal life except in reference to the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, Dr. King’s serial adultery – which might have gotten more play in a standard bio – is barely mentioned here, except to the extent it demonstrates the utter illegality of the wiretaps used against him. This is not so much reticence as an acknowledgment that Branch has bigger goals for this book. While Dr. King looms large, he was not the entire show. To that end, Parting the Waters can more accurately be described as the biography of a crusade, rather than of an individual.
Nevertheless, Dr. King dominates the early stages of Parting the Waters.
In Robert Caro-like fashion – the highest compliment I can give an author-historian – Branch devotes his early chapters to Dr. King’s forerunner, Vernon Johns, and the history of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King first preached. These sections are deep background, but give an idea of the importance of the church in black communities, where preachers were often the exemplars of the middle class. More than that, it was Dr. King’s choice to take a job at Dexter, rather than with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, that positioned him to step forward when Rosa Parks refused to get up.
Branch also spends significant time on Dr. King’s studies, as he consumed and digested the thinkers and theologians who would define his philosophy. It is striking, especially today, to see how strongly religion and theology underpinned the Civil Rights Movement.
Parting the Waters really hits its stride with its first big set-piece: the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Having heard of the boycott since I was in first grade, but having never studied it before, it was truly thrilling to read about here. As Branch painstakingly shows, it was not simply a matter of folks not using a segregated city service. People depended on the busses, and if they couldn’t ride the bus, they couldn’t get to and from work. Beyond a moral undertaking, the boycott was a huge logistical operation that required volunteer drivers, automobiles, and a lot of money to pay for gas, maintenance, and legal bills. For all of that, it was a near run thing.
From Montgomery onward, the tale broadens in scope, as Branch tries to cover all the flashpoints of the Civil Rights Movement, from the high, to the low, to the unknown. Space is devoted to the Freedom Rides (to integrate interstate bussing); Robert Moses’s voter registration drive in McComb, Mississippi (where he earned a reputation as a preternatural student of nonviolence); James Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss; Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail; the Children’s Crusade (where youngsters lined up to be incarcerated); and ultimately, the March on Washington (where Dr. King gave one of the most famous speeches the world has ever heard).
Along the way, we witness savage beatings, mass arrests, midnight bombings, and a lot of infighting, including an extended section devoted to the power struggle at the National Baptist Convention.
We are also introduced to a huge cast of characters, from the famous to the relatively unknown, including Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis (who later went to Congress); the aforementioned Bob Moses (not to be confused with the city-segregating asshole from NYC); co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Ralph Abernathy; Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth; civil rights lawyer John Doar (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012); and activist leader Bayard Rustin (who was a onetime communist, gay, and indispensable).
When narrative history is done right, it can be an extraordinary way to demonstrate that history was not inevitable, however much it might look that way in hindsight. The Civil Rights Movement was not a single upward march, but a brutal back-and-forth, with one small victory matched by three defeats. Everyone knows about Dr. King in Montgomery and Birmingham. Less known is his troubles in Albany, Georgia, where many – including black members of the Albany Movement – did not exactly welcome his presence.
Parting the Waters eventually coalesces around two big conflicts. The first was between the Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedys. Despite supporting the Civil Rights platform during the election, President Kennedy saw foreign affairs as his main role. To that end, Civil Rights were a distraction. After all, it was hard to chide the Soviets for their illiberalism when his own citizens were marching in the streets because they were not allowed to vote or use integrated restrooms. Both Kennedys provided help, but it was always grudging, and seldom enough. Branch is scrupulously fair – though at times blisteringly critical – with regard to the roles played by both Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
(Quirkily enough, it was President Eisenhower – less-than-openly-friendly to Civil Rights – who was willing to use federal troops to enforce integration orders. He also nominated a bunch of the judges who wrote the orders killing legal segregation, including his “biggest damn fool mistake,” Earl Warren. Meanwhile, President Kennedy, who talked a good game, hesitated to use troops, going so far as to corral Border Patrolmen and prison guards to reinforce the U.S. Marshals in the Ole Miss protests. Tethered to Southern Democrats, he also nominated a string of racist, segregationist district court judges who obstructed progress by ignoring clear Supreme Court precedents).
In the end, constant pressure from black leaders pushed President Kennedy to announce a new Civil Rights Act. How that might have played out is anyone’s guess, as Kennedy went to Dallas and never came back, leaving the task to an unlikely torchbearer.
The other big conflict was within the Civil Rights Movement itself. The movement – like the black community it represented – was not monolithic. It was made up of a lot of different people proposing a lot of different ideas to achieve a lot of different goals. Some wanted to focus on marches, sit-ins, and civil disobedience, while others sought to increase voter registration or bring court cases. While Dr. King is as close to a public saint as we have in America today, he was often criticized by his contemporaries as too timid, too worried about the limelight, too much a celebrity. For example, there was no small amount of friction between Roy Wilkinson of the NAACP and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as both vied for control of the way forward.
Even in a book this big, there is never enough room. While the scope is admirably broad, it still isn’t quite broad enough. Branch frequently leaves Dr. King to follow other threads, but he never gets too far away. That means that certain pivotal figures get short shrift. Thurgood Marshall merits only a few brief mentions, while Malcolm X gets even fewer. As a whole, I think that Branch vastly underplays the role of federal court decisions, never giving the lawyers – such as Marshall – enough credit. (The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, was not simply a moral victory, but a legal one).
Slight flaws such as this are easy to forgive. Indeed, they do not even need to be pardoned. Not in a book this overwhelmingly good. On top of everything else, Branch is a writer with some real literary skill. Not only is he able to marshal his vast research (including hundreds of personal interviews), but he is able to mold it into something breathtakingly readable. There are moments when he describes things just perfectly, as when comparing President Kennedy’s speech in Berlin with Dr. King’s own speech in Detroit:
Jim Crow and segregation is a national stain that will never be removed. Reading about it – from petty cruelty to the murder of children – can make you a bit sick. The moments of despair in these pages are too numerous to count.
At the same time, the history of the Civil Rights Movement is an inseparable part of American history, not some parallel track. That means it is something of which we can be enormously proud. At the very least, in this time of empty plinths dotting parks and street corners, Parting the Waters presents some very good ideas about what statues we should raise.
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters is a true rarity. It is a book that is vitally important to our national understanding, but reading it does not feel like a duty or a chore. It dwells in some extremely dark valleys, but also manages to be uplifting, finding those parts of humanity that glitter through the doom. It takes on a complex, under-presented chunk of American history, and gives it the treatment it so richly deserves. This is an extremely well-researched and wide-ranging book that also happens to read with the vitality of a great novel.
This is, in other words, an exceptional intersection of scholarship and narrative.
Parting the Waters is the first mammoth volume of a monumental trilogy. It consists of 922-pages of text, and once you’ve finished, you’ve still got around 2,000 pages to go. The fact that this makes me happy, rather than daunted, is a testament to Branch’s accomplishment.
First published in 1988, Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and has been justly celebrated ever since. It begins in 1954, with the emergence of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the public stage, and ends in 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before his proposed Civil Rights Act could come to a vote. Between those two bookends is an epic struggle of righteousness and racism, of courage and cowardliness, and of a dream worth life itself.
The chief focus of Parting the Waters, unsurprisingly, is Dr. King himself. However, though he definitely provides the through-line, Parting the Waters is not a traditional biography. After a certain point, Branch barely mentions aspects of Dr. King’s personal life except in reference to the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, Dr. King’s serial adultery – which might have gotten more play in a standard bio – is barely mentioned here, except to the extent it demonstrates the utter illegality of the wiretaps used against him. This is not so much reticence as an acknowledgment that Branch has bigger goals for this book. While Dr. King looms large, he was not the entire show. To that end, Parting the Waters can more accurately be described as the biography of a crusade, rather than of an individual.
Nevertheless, Dr. King dominates the early stages of Parting the Waters.
In Robert Caro-like fashion – the highest compliment I can give an author-historian – Branch devotes his early chapters to Dr. King’s forerunner, Vernon Johns, and the history of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King first preached. These sections are deep background, but give an idea of the importance of the church in black communities, where preachers were often the exemplars of the middle class. More than that, it was Dr. King’s choice to take a job at Dexter, rather than with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, that positioned him to step forward when Rosa Parks refused to get up.
Branch also spends significant time on Dr. King’s studies, as he consumed and digested the thinkers and theologians who would define his philosophy. It is striking, especially today, to see how strongly religion and theology underpinned the Civil Rights Movement.
Parting the Waters really hits its stride with its first big set-piece: the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Having heard of the boycott since I was in first grade, but having never studied it before, it was truly thrilling to read about here. As Branch painstakingly shows, it was not simply a matter of folks not using a segregated city service. People depended on the busses, and if they couldn’t ride the bus, they couldn’t get to and from work. Beyond a moral undertaking, the boycott was a huge logistical operation that required volunteer drivers, automobiles, and a lot of money to pay for gas, maintenance, and legal bills. For all of that, it was a near run thing.
From Montgomery onward, the tale broadens in scope, as Branch tries to cover all the flashpoints of the Civil Rights Movement, from the high, to the low, to the unknown. Space is devoted to the Freedom Rides (to integrate interstate bussing); Robert Moses’s voter registration drive in McComb, Mississippi (where he earned a reputation as a preternatural student of nonviolence); James Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss; Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail; the Children’s Crusade (where youngsters lined up to be incarcerated); and ultimately, the March on Washington (where Dr. King gave one of the most famous speeches the world has ever heard).
Along the way, we witness savage beatings, mass arrests, midnight bombings, and a lot of infighting, including an extended section devoted to the power struggle at the National Baptist Convention.
We are also introduced to a huge cast of characters, from the famous to the relatively unknown, including Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis (who later went to Congress); the aforementioned Bob Moses (not to be confused with the city-segregating asshole from NYC); co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Ralph Abernathy; Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth; civil rights lawyer John Doar (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012); and activist leader Bayard Rustin (who was a onetime communist, gay, and indispensable).
When narrative history is done right, it can be an extraordinary way to demonstrate that history was not inevitable, however much it might look that way in hindsight. The Civil Rights Movement was not a single upward march, but a brutal back-and-forth, with one small victory matched by three defeats. Everyone knows about Dr. King in Montgomery and Birmingham. Less known is his troubles in Albany, Georgia, where many – including black members of the Albany Movement – did not exactly welcome his presence.
Parting the Waters eventually coalesces around two big conflicts. The first was between the Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedys. Despite supporting the Civil Rights platform during the election, President Kennedy saw foreign affairs as his main role. To that end, Civil Rights were a distraction. After all, it was hard to chide the Soviets for their illiberalism when his own citizens were marching in the streets because they were not allowed to vote or use integrated restrooms. Both Kennedys provided help, but it was always grudging, and seldom enough. Branch is scrupulously fair – though at times blisteringly critical – with regard to the roles played by both Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
(Quirkily enough, it was President Eisenhower – less-than-openly-friendly to Civil Rights – who was willing to use federal troops to enforce integration orders. He also nominated a bunch of the judges who wrote the orders killing legal segregation, including his “biggest damn fool mistake,” Earl Warren. Meanwhile, President Kennedy, who talked a good game, hesitated to use troops, going so far as to corral Border Patrolmen and prison guards to reinforce the U.S. Marshals in the Ole Miss protests. Tethered to Southern Democrats, he also nominated a string of racist, segregationist district court judges who obstructed progress by ignoring clear Supreme Court precedents).
In the end, constant pressure from black leaders pushed President Kennedy to announce a new Civil Rights Act. How that might have played out is anyone’s guess, as Kennedy went to Dallas and never came back, leaving the task to an unlikely torchbearer.
The other big conflict was within the Civil Rights Movement itself. The movement – like the black community it represented – was not monolithic. It was made up of a lot of different people proposing a lot of different ideas to achieve a lot of different goals. Some wanted to focus on marches, sit-ins, and civil disobedience, while others sought to increase voter registration or bring court cases. While Dr. King is as close to a public saint as we have in America today, he was often criticized by his contemporaries as too timid, too worried about the limelight, too much a celebrity. For example, there was no small amount of friction between Roy Wilkinson of the NAACP and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as both vied for control of the way forward.
Even in a book this big, there is never enough room. While the scope is admirably broad, it still isn’t quite broad enough. Branch frequently leaves Dr. King to follow other threads, but he never gets too far away. That means that certain pivotal figures get short shrift. Thurgood Marshall merits only a few brief mentions, while Malcolm X gets even fewer. As a whole, I think that Branch vastly underplays the role of federal court decisions, never giving the lawyers – such as Marshall – enough credit. (The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, was not simply a moral victory, but a legal one).
Slight flaws such as this are easy to forgive. Indeed, they do not even need to be pardoned. Not in a book this overwhelmingly good. On top of everything else, Branch is a writer with some real literary skill. Not only is he able to marshal his vast research (including hundreds of personal interviews), but he is able to mold it into something breathtakingly readable. There are moments when he describes things just perfectly, as when comparing President Kennedy’s speech in Berlin with Dr. King’s own speech in Detroit:
In those few days, a president of Irish descent went abroad to Germany while a preacher of African descent went inland to Detroit, both to stir the divided core of American identity. The proconsul defended the empire of freedom while the prophet proclaimed its soul. They inspired millions of the same people while acknowledging no fundamental differences in public. Together, they traced a sharp line of history. Where their interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade. Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War.
Jim Crow and segregation is a national stain that will never be removed. Reading about it – from petty cruelty to the murder of children – can make you a bit sick. The moments of despair in these pages are too numerous to count.
At the same time, the history of the Civil Rights Movement is an inseparable part of American history, not some parallel track. That means it is something of which we can be enormously proud. At the very least, in this time of empty plinths dotting parks and street corners, Parting the Waters presents some very good ideas about what statues we should raise.
January 23, 2014
This is simply an unparalleled work of history that makes one appreciate and understand the civil rights movement in a way no other work can. It consistently astounds and amazes, which is itself impressive for a tale so often told.
To tell the truth, I've never been very interested in the "classical" civil rights movement, the one we read about in all the US history textbooks, from the Birmingham bus boycott of 1955 up through the march to Selma in 1965. I thought it was perhaps the most important event in 20th century US history, sure, but the stark dichotomy of it all, with a saintly Martin Luther King and the non-violent movement arrayed against a host of bigoted Southern sheriffs, seemed almost too pat and too obvious a morality play. It seemed like a victory so obvious, with the moral standing of the two sides so clear, that there was nothing to wonder or debate about. This book can't help but blow those ideas out of the water.
For one, it shows how impossible the civil rights movement seemed, even right up until 1963. The fact that Southern blacks were being murdered and beaten for trying to vote didn't make it into the nation's newspapers, barely garnered a discussion in congressional or presidential contests, and seemed almost natural to most Americans, who were more than happy to ignore the issue in any case. The system of oppression was so tight, in fact, that many thought the low voter turnout among blacks in the South, and segregation more generally, was just a kind of mutual accommodation made by the two races in the South. Only with the 1963 marches to the courthouse and downtown department stores in Birmingham did the movement really attract national attention, and lead to a wave of other protests and finally the beginnings of a presidential response by Kennedy. Before, even sympathetic Northern papers and commentators wondered about the morality of "sit-ins" at segregated stores, marches that were designed to get people arrested, and boycotts generally. Even if many were sympathetic, many also thought that the methods the civil rights movement used were questionable at best.
And the methods are what this book is all about. It constantly reminds me of the old saying that good generals study strategy while great generals study logistics. This book shows the mind-numbing complexity of organizing these movements, from gathering money for bail (always, always, raising money for bail), to keeping marching formation, to keeping the appropriate number of waves of protesters to overload southern jails, to trying to coordinate with federal marshals or prosecutors to protect the defenseless people who insisted on protesting even when everyone counseled caution. (It's hard to remember that even King himself, after the "sit-in" movement started in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, was worried about the morality of getting himself arrested, as opposed to just boycotting). At all times everyone in the movement was subject to merciless beatings or murder. This book, told with the help of countless interviews with the main participants, makes one feel that immediacy and courage of the movement in a way I've never imagined before. I can't recommend it enough.
To tell the truth, I've never been very interested in the "classical" civil rights movement, the one we read about in all the US history textbooks, from the Birmingham bus boycott of 1955 up through the march to Selma in 1965. I thought it was perhaps the most important event in 20th century US history, sure, but the stark dichotomy of it all, with a saintly Martin Luther King and the non-violent movement arrayed against a host of bigoted Southern sheriffs, seemed almost too pat and too obvious a morality play. It seemed like a victory so obvious, with the moral standing of the two sides so clear, that there was nothing to wonder or debate about. This book can't help but blow those ideas out of the water.
For one, it shows how impossible the civil rights movement seemed, even right up until 1963. The fact that Southern blacks were being murdered and beaten for trying to vote didn't make it into the nation's newspapers, barely garnered a discussion in congressional or presidential contests, and seemed almost natural to most Americans, who were more than happy to ignore the issue in any case. The system of oppression was so tight, in fact, that many thought the low voter turnout among blacks in the South, and segregation more generally, was just a kind of mutual accommodation made by the two races in the South. Only with the 1963 marches to the courthouse and downtown department stores in Birmingham did the movement really attract national attention, and lead to a wave of other protests and finally the beginnings of a presidential response by Kennedy. Before, even sympathetic Northern papers and commentators wondered about the morality of "sit-ins" at segregated stores, marches that were designed to get people arrested, and boycotts generally. Even if many were sympathetic, many also thought that the methods the civil rights movement used were questionable at best.
And the methods are what this book is all about. It constantly reminds me of the old saying that good generals study strategy while great generals study logistics. This book shows the mind-numbing complexity of organizing these movements, from gathering money for bail (always, always, raising money for bail), to keeping marching formation, to keeping the appropriate number of waves of protesters to overload southern jails, to trying to coordinate with federal marshals or prosecutors to protect the defenseless people who insisted on protesting even when everyone counseled caution. (It's hard to remember that even King himself, after the "sit-in" movement started in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, was worried about the morality of getting himself arrested, as opposed to just boycotting). At all times everyone in the movement was subject to merciless beatings or murder. This book, told with the help of countless interviews with the main participants, makes one feel that immediacy and courage of the movement in a way I've never imagined before. I can't recommend it enough.
May 9, 2011
I first read this book years ago and was so impressed that I put it on the shelf to read again. In the meantime, I discovered that this is only the first of three books Taylor Branch has written on the Civil Rights struggle and this time I intend to take them all in.
From any perspective, Parting of the Waters is a masterpiece. Branch doesn't let a person come into the story without a lively introduction including the character traits that will help the reader keep track of one person among so many that stand out during the years described. This book is encompassed by the life of Vernon Johns. Who? I couldn't begin to describe him, you should find out for yourself.
Branch includes just enough information on the events outside of the Civil Rights Movement to place what happens within parts of history that every American alive at the time would recall, from Cold War incidents to popular songs.
But his ability to draw vivid pictures of people interacting, in concord or conflict, while giving a respectful account of each makes this book come to life in a way I've never seen equaled by any other historian. I was enthralled.
Though M.L. King, Jr. is the central figure, the book is truly the story of "America in the King Years" described in the subtitle. Branch is not an acolyte or a judge. He presents King and everyone else with their flaws along with their virtues in a way that left me feeling I was an intimate friend of those I read about - listening to them voice their doubts, fears and even hatreds along with their hopes, aspirations and ideals. No incident is too insignificant if it helps us understand the nature of personal relationships. King was an intellectual, so of course we get a capsule summary of the thoughts of Reinhold Niebuhr in shaping King's thoughts. This book has it all.
This "eye of God" manner of writing can only be successful if the writer's knowledge is both wide-ranging and comprehensive. The writing must illuminate and follow themes drawn from what would otherwise be a bewildering flood of information. At no time in the 900 pages was I lost. Rather I could feel the building momentum, the excitement of the successes when they came and the humbling, depressing moments when all seemed lost.
So vivid is Branch's prose that I was deeply moved when he painted the scene of a huge crowd gathered at night, overflowing into the street between two black churches where singing from one sanctuary was answered with a response from another. The electric mix of excitement and hope put such a lump in my throat that I had to pause in my reading to let my awe subside. What it would have been like to be there!
Branch often takes a few paragraphs to deconstruct events in the light of personality conflicts and dilemmas faced by individuals that tell the reader so much about the stresses and seemingly insurmountable problems that arrived continually. How to keep the movement(s) going when public interest would lag? What was the relationship of the Southern Christian Leadership Council to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP? What was going on in the Kennedy administration far behind what the press could see? One is taken so deep inside these groups that the press of egos and the limitations on what people can do becomes clear along with the impressive possibilities there to exploit - if only they can be seen through the chaotic march of events. Is it any wonder that many prayed "help me Lord" in the mix of bureaucracy, uncertainty, and grave danger?
You'll end the book with a strong impression of what an amazing period it was and what remarkable acts came forth from King and so many others. King was by no means the director of events, only the most prominent spokesman for so many who had had enough. The time was right and the man, men and women came along to match it. We know human beings can hate easily, but when you consider the feats of courage and determination we are capable of, it takes your breath away. The uneasiness felt in the presence of injustice should be a prompt to all of us that we can act beyond expectations, transcending comfort and convenience to find our greatest possibility - but it won't be easy!
The humanity revealed in Parting of the Waters easily makes it one of the best books I have ever read, I can't think of one more powerful.
From any perspective, Parting of the Waters is a masterpiece. Branch doesn't let a person come into the story without a lively introduction including the character traits that will help the reader keep track of one person among so many that stand out during the years described. This book is encompassed by the life of Vernon Johns. Who? I couldn't begin to describe him, you should find out for yourself.
Branch includes just enough information on the events outside of the Civil Rights Movement to place what happens within parts of history that every American alive at the time would recall, from Cold War incidents to popular songs.
But his ability to draw vivid pictures of people interacting, in concord or conflict, while giving a respectful account of each makes this book come to life in a way I've never seen equaled by any other historian. I was enthralled.
Though M.L. King, Jr. is the central figure, the book is truly the story of "America in the King Years" described in the subtitle. Branch is not an acolyte or a judge. He presents King and everyone else with their flaws along with their virtues in a way that left me feeling I was an intimate friend of those I read about - listening to them voice their doubts, fears and even hatreds along with their hopes, aspirations and ideals. No incident is too insignificant if it helps us understand the nature of personal relationships. King was an intellectual, so of course we get a capsule summary of the thoughts of Reinhold Niebuhr in shaping King's thoughts. This book has it all.
This "eye of God" manner of writing can only be successful if the writer's knowledge is both wide-ranging and comprehensive. The writing must illuminate and follow themes drawn from what would otherwise be a bewildering flood of information. At no time in the 900 pages was I lost. Rather I could feel the building momentum, the excitement of the successes when they came and the humbling, depressing moments when all seemed lost.
So vivid is Branch's prose that I was deeply moved when he painted the scene of a huge crowd gathered at night, overflowing into the street between two black churches where singing from one sanctuary was answered with a response from another. The electric mix of excitement and hope put such a lump in my throat that I had to pause in my reading to let my awe subside. What it would have been like to be there!
Branch often takes a few paragraphs to deconstruct events in the light of personality conflicts and dilemmas faced by individuals that tell the reader so much about the stresses and seemingly insurmountable problems that arrived continually. How to keep the movement(s) going when public interest would lag? What was the relationship of the Southern Christian Leadership Council to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP? What was going on in the Kennedy administration far behind what the press could see? One is taken so deep inside these groups that the press of egos and the limitations on what people can do becomes clear along with the impressive possibilities there to exploit - if only they can be seen through the chaotic march of events. Is it any wonder that many prayed "help me Lord" in the mix of bureaucracy, uncertainty, and grave danger?
You'll end the book with a strong impression of what an amazing period it was and what remarkable acts came forth from King and so many others. King was by no means the director of events, only the most prominent spokesman for so many who had had enough. The time was right and the man, men and women came along to match it. We know human beings can hate easily, but when you consider the feats of courage and determination we are capable of, it takes your breath away. The uneasiness felt in the presence of injustice should be a prompt to all of us that we can act beyond expectations, transcending comfort and convenience to find our greatest possibility - but it won't be easy!
The humanity revealed in Parting of the Waters easily makes it one of the best books I have ever read, I can't think of one more powerful.
August 19, 2021
"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "ni**er," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
I don't know what's crazier - that there was a time when our country was like this, or that our country was able to progress as far as it has from such a terrible place in the six decades since. I thought I knew about the Civil Rights Movement, but this book was a revelation (and it only covers the first nine years).
On the surface this is a history of how civil rights happened, but on another level it's a story about heroes and villains. Heroes like John Lewis and Bob Moses and black college students across the south who for the most part had to stand in the shadows of larger figures in the movement, but had to bear the majority of the load on their shoulders. Villains like Bull Connor, the NAACP who spent the first several years of the movement standing in the way, J. Edgar Hoover who kept throwing wrenches into the movement seemingly only out of spite, and the Kennedy Administration who sometimes spoke a good game but behind the scenes appointed racist federal judges and made secret deals to benefit their own careers at the expense of black people.
Somewhere in between is Martin Luther King, Jr. He's the through line by which this story has to be told, but he's certainly not the story's hero. As a matter of fact, Branch adds a chapter covering a few months time that slyly contrasts the dangerous civil rights work being done by regular people while MLK is spending that same time in the middle of nonsense church politics.
But Branch really never tries to canonize/villainize anybody, he just lets all the stories spool out, and the facts speak for themselves. And at times it's incredibly hard to put down. The chapters on the Freedom Rides blew my mind. (The only time the story slows at all is when Branch gets into the weeds of friction between the various organizations - SNLC, NAACP, SCLC, etc - but that is a small complaint.)
The very first chapter of this book is the greatest first chapter of any history book I've ever read, and it hooks you into the book immediately. It's a fascinating story of the history of black Baptist churches in Montgomery Alabama, tied to the story of Vernon Johns - a preacher who sets the stage for what comes later in Montgomery (and then reappears almost like a ghost in a neat coda toward the end of the book), and Barbara Johns - a high school girl in Virginia who might be one of the most electric characters in American history.
This book will make you angry, make you sad, make you laugh. There are a lot of highs and lows. Branch has written a great encapsulation of the era.
Notes:
- Billy Graham makes an interesting appearance in this book as a kind of advisor to King, giving him tips on how to use Graham's crusade playbook to help shape the Civil Rights Movement.
- Eisenhower famously didn't do much to help move civil rights forward while he was president, but it was Eisenhower-appointed judges who kept federal anti-segregation lawsuits moving through the courts when Kennedy-appointed Democrats in the south tried to slow things down. Kennedy had some excellent lawyers in his civil rights division (like John Doar) but the administration was always hamstrung by politics.
- Branch does a great job putting the March on Washington in the context of the times. It's a moment that has been mythologized to the point that it was almost not real to me, but the actual history of the event is really interesting.
- While the United States tried to spread democracy in a battle of ideas with authoritarian governments around the world, the rest of the world kept pointing back at the atrocities happening in Montgomery and Birmingham and small towns across Georgia and Mississippi. The things that our country allowed to happen in the south were a black eye on everything we said we stood for during the early years of the Cold War.
- There was apparently not one American enemy - the mob, Nazis, communists - that Kennedy wasn't in a compromising spot with because of sex. Branch makes space for all of it here because it helps highlight the difficult relationship the administration had with Hoover's FBI, the part of government that should have been helping enforce laws protecting blacks in the south.
- In one of the biggest surprises of the book, Branch makes the case that Kennedy won election in 1960 because of one event that happened in Georgia to MLK. Not only is the case he makes compelling, but it seems to have been the agreed-on reason for the win at the time. I had never heard of any of it.
- This is the nicest paperback book I've ever owned. The book opens up flat, but even at 1000+ pages the binding never creases. And when you close it back it goes right back into shape like it's brand new. I wish every paperback book was made of whatever this one is made of.
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
I don't know what's crazier - that there was a time when our country was like this, or that our country was able to progress as far as it has from such a terrible place in the six decades since. I thought I knew about the Civil Rights Movement, but this book was a revelation (and it only covers the first nine years).
On the surface this is a history of how civil rights happened, but on another level it's a story about heroes and villains. Heroes like John Lewis and Bob Moses and black college students across the south who for the most part had to stand in the shadows of larger figures in the movement, but had to bear the majority of the load on their shoulders. Villains like Bull Connor, the NAACP who spent the first several years of the movement standing in the way, J. Edgar Hoover who kept throwing wrenches into the movement seemingly only out of spite, and the Kennedy Administration who sometimes spoke a good game but behind the scenes appointed racist federal judges and made secret deals to benefit their own careers at the expense of black people.
Somewhere in between is Martin Luther King, Jr. He's the through line by which this story has to be told, but he's certainly not the story's hero. As a matter of fact, Branch adds a chapter covering a few months time that slyly contrasts the dangerous civil rights work being done by regular people while MLK is spending that same time in the middle of nonsense church politics.
But Branch really never tries to canonize/villainize anybody, he just lets all the stories spool out, and the facts speak for themselves. And at times it's incredibly hard to put down. The chapters on the Freedom Rides blew my mind. (The only time the story slows at all is when Branch gets into the weeds of friction between the various organizations - SNLC, NAACP, SCLC, etc - but that is a small complaint.)
The very first chapter of this book is the greatest first chapter of any history book I've ever read, and it hooks you into the book immediately. It's a fascinating story of the history of black Baptist churches in Montgomery Alabama, tied to the story of Vernon Johns - a preacher who sets the stage for what comes later in Montgomery (and then reappears almost like a ghost in a neat coda toward the end of the book), and Barbara Johns - a high school girl in Virginia who might be one of the most electric characters in American history.
This book will make you angry, make you sad, make you laugh. There are a lot of highs and lows. Branch has written a great encapsulation of the era.
Notes:
- Billy Graham makes an interesting appearance in this book as a kind of advisor to King, giving him tips on how to use Graham's crusade playbook to help shape the Civil Rights Movement.
- Eisenhower famously didn't do much to help move civil rights forward while he was president, but it was Eisenhower-appointed judges who kept federal anti-segregation lawsuits moving through the courts when Kennedy-appointed Democrats in the south tried to slow things down. Kennedy had some excellent lawyers in his civil rights division (like John Doar) but the administration was always hamstrung by politics.
- Branch does a great job putting the March on Washington in the context of the times. It's a moment that has been mythologized to the point that it was almost not real to me, but the actual history of the event is really interesting.
- While the United States tried to spread democracy in a battle of ideas with authoritarian governments around the world, the rest of the world kept pointing back at the atrocities happening in Montgomery and Birmingham and small towns across Georgia and Mississippi. The things that our country allowed to happen in the south were a black eye on everything we said we stood for during the early years of the Cold War.
- There was apparently not one American enemy - the mob, Nazis, communists - that Kennedy wasn't in a compromising spot with because of sex. Branch makes space for all of it here because it helps highlight the difficult relationship the administration had with Hoover's FBI, the part of government that should have been helping enforce laws protecting blacks in the south.
- In one of the biggest surprises of the book, Branch makes the case that Kennedy won election in 1960 because of one event that happened in Georgia to MLK. Not only is the case he makes compelling, but it seems to have been the agreed-on reason for the win at the time. I had never heard of any of it.
- This is the nicest paperback book I've ever owned. The book opens up flat, but even at 1000+ pages the binding never creases. And when you close it back it goes right back into shape like it's brand new. I wish every paperback book was made of whatever this one is made of.
March 25, 2016
This book is the first of three volumes that comprise America in the King Years, a history of the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch which he wrote between 1982 and 2006. The three individual volumes have won a variety of awards, including the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for History. This book covers the history of the civil rights movement between the years of 1954 to 1963.
This book has over a thousand pages, so I need to confess that I listened to an abridged audio version that is about 6.5 hours long. This is probably 20% of the unabridged length. I didn't realize I had listened to the abridged version until I went to the library to borrow the paper copy and discovered it was two inches thick! The quotations contained in this review are taken from the unabridged book.
One of my motivations for selecting this book was to learn about the context in which the Letter from Birmingham Jail was written. Great Books KC, a book group I belong to, is going to discuss this letter on January 30, and in preparation for that I listened to this book in order to learn about the historical situation in which Martin Luther King wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail. Below is an extended excerpt from this book in which the writing of the letter is discussed. This excerpt follows descriptions of how criticism of the Birmingham campaign was coming from many sources including some people traditionally sympathetic to the cause. Time Magazine called it a "poorly timed protest.": "To many Birmingham Negroes, King's drive inflamed tensions at a time when the city seemed to be making some progress, however small, in race relations." Many others voiced criticism as well, but what really motivated King to begin writing was a letter published in the Birmingham paper signed by eight local clergymen that asked him to end the protest marches.
(Begin excerpt from Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. (p.737-740)) __________________
King read these press reactions as fast as Clarence Jones could smuggle newspapers into his cell. They caused him the utmost dismay, especially since a diverse assortment of friends and enemies were using the same critical phrases almost interchangeably. King could have addressed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to almost any of these—to Mayor Boutwell or Burke Marshall or A.G. Gaston, to the Birmingham News or The New York Times. He gave no thought to secular targets, however, after he saw page 2 of the April 13 Birmingham News. There, beneath two photographs of him and Abernathy on their Good Friday march to jail, appeared a story headlined “White Clergymen Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” After attacking the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely,” and commending the news media and the police for “the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled,” the clergymen invoked their religious authority against civil disobedience. “Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’ ” they wrote, “we also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”
The thirteen short paragraphs transfixed King. He was being rebuked on his own chosen ground. And these were liberal clergymen. Most of them had risked their reputations by criticizing Governor Wallace’s “Segregation Forever!” inauguration speech in January. They were among the minority of white preachers who of late had admitted Andrew Young and other Negroes to specially roped off areas of their Sunday congregations. Yet to King, these preachers never had risked themselves for true morality through all the years when Shuttlesworth was being bombed, stabbed, and arrested, and even now could not make themselves state forthrightly what was just. Instead, they stood behind the injunction and the jailers to dismiss his spirit along with his body. King could not let it go. He sat down and began scribbling around the margins of the newspaper. “Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas,” he began.
By the time Clarence Jones visited the jail again that Tuesday, King had pushed a wandering skein of ink into every vacant corner. He surprised Jones by pulling the newspaper surreptitiously out of his shirt. “I’m writing this letter,” he said. “I want you to try to get it out, if you can.” To Jones, the “letter” was an indistinct jumble of biblical phrases wrapped around pest control ads and garden club news. He regarded the surprise as a distraction from the stack of urgent business he had brought with him—legal questions about King’s upcoming criminal trials, plus money problems, Belafonte and Kennedy reports, and a host of movement grievances assembled by Walker. Waving these away, King spend most of the visit showing a nonplussed Jones how to follow the arrows and loops from dead ends to new starts. “I’m not finished yet,” King said. He borrowed a number of sheets of note paper from Jones, who left with a concealed newspaper and precious few answers for those awaiting King’s dispositions at the Gaston Motel.
King wrote several scattered passages in response to the criticism that his demonstrations were “untimely.” He told the white clergymen that “time is neutral,” that waiting never produced inevitable progress, and that “we must use time creatively, and forever realized that the time is always ripe to do right.” He feared that “the people of ill-will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will,” and pointed out that Negroes already had waited more than three hundred years for justice. “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ ” Then, in a sentence of more than three hundred words, he tried to convey to the white preachers a feeling of time built upon a different alignment of emotions:
By degrees, King established a kind of universal voice, beyond time, beyond race. As both humble prisoner and mighty prophet, as father, harried traveler, and cornered leader, he projected a character of nearly unassailable breadth. when he reached the heart of his case, he adopted an authentic tone of intimacy toward the very targets of his wrath—toward men who had condemned him without mentioning his name. Almost whispering on the page, he presented his most scathing accusations as a confession:
The following link is a quotation from this book about the young Martin Luther King changing his name:
http://www.delanceyplace.com/view-arc...
This book has over a thousand pages, so I need to confess that I listened to an abridged audio version that is about 6.5 hours long. This is probably 20% of the unabridged length. I didn't realize I had listened to the abridged version until I went to the library to borrow the paper copy and discovered it was two inches thick! The quotations contained in this review are taken from the unabridged book.
One of my motivations for selecting this book was to learn about the context in which the Letter from Birmingham Jail was written. Great Books KC, a book group I belong to, is going to discuss this letter on January 30, and in preparation for that I listened to this book in order to learn about the historical situation in which Martin Luther King wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail. Below is an extended excerpt from this book in which the writing of the letter is discussed. This excerpt follows descriptions of how criticism of the Birmingham campaign was coming from many sources including some people traditionally sympathetic to the cause. Time Magazine called it a "poorly timed protest.": "To many Birmingham Negroes, King's drive inflamed tensions at a time when the city seemed to be making some progress, however small, in race relations." Many others voiced criticism as well, but what really motivated King to begin writing was a letter published in the Birmingham paper signed by eight local clergymen that asked him to end the protest marches.
(Begin excerpt from Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. (p.737-740)) __________________
King read these press reactions as fast as Clarence Jones could smuggle newspapers into his cell. They caused him the utmost dismay, especially since a diverse assortment of friends and enemies were using the same critical phrases almost interchangeably. King could have addressed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to almost any of these—to Mayor Boutwell or Burke Marshall or A.G. Gaston, to the Birmingham News or The New York Times. He gave no thought to secular targets, however, after he saw page 2 of the April 13 Birmingham News. There, beneath two photographs of him and Abernathy on their Good Friday march to jail, appeared a story headlined “White Clergymen Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” After attacking the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely,” and commending the news media and the police for “the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled,” the clergymen invoked their religious authority against civil disobedience. “Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’ ” they wrote, “we also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”
The thirteen short paragraphs transfixed King. He was being rebuked on his own chosen ground. And these were liberal clergymen. Most of them had risked their reputations by criticizing Governor Wallace’s “Segregation Forever!” inauguration speech in January. They were among the minority of white preachers who of late had admitted Andrew Young and other Negroes to specially roped off areas of their Sunday congregations. Yet to King, these preachers never had risked themselves for true morality through all the years when Shuttlesworth was being bombed, stabbed, and arrested, and even now could not make themselves state forthrightly what was just. Instead, they stood behind the injunction and the jailers to dismiss his spirit along with his body. King could not let it go. He sat down and began scribbling around the margins of the newspaper. “Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas,” he began.
By the time Clarence Jones visited the jail again that Tuesday, King had pushed a wandering skein of ink into every vacant corner. He surprised Jones by pulling the newspaper surreptitiously out of his shirt. “I’m writing this letter,” he said. “I want you to try to get it out, if you can.” To Jones, the “letter” was an indistinct jumble of biblical phrases wrapped around pest control ads and garden club news. He regarded the surprise as a distraction from the stack of urgent business he had brought with him—legal questions about King’s upcoming criminal trials, plus money problems, Belafonte and Kennedy reports, and a host of movement grievances assembled by Walker. Waving these away, King spend most of the visit showing a nonplussed Jones how to follow the arrows and loops from dead ends to new starts. “I’m not finished yet,” King said. He borrowed a number of sheets of note paper from Jones, who left with a concealed newspaper and precious few answers for those awaiting King’s dispositions at the Gaston Motel.
King wrote several scattered passages in response to the criticism that his demonstrations were “untimely.” He told the white clergymen that “time is neutral,” that waiting never produced inevitable progress, and that “we must use time creatively, and forever realized that the time is always ripe to do right.” He feared that “the people of ill-will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will,” and pointed out that Negroes already had waited more than three hundred years for justice. “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ ” Then, in a sentence of more than three hundred words, he tried to convey to the white preachers a feeling of time built upon a different alignment of emotions:
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.King assumed a multitude of perspectives, often changing voice from one phrase to the next. He expressed empathy with the lives of millions over eons, and with the life of a particular child at a single moment. He tried to look not only at white preachers through the eyes of Negroes, but also at Negroes through the eyes of white preachers (“The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations . . . So let him march sometime, let him have his prayer pilgrimages:). To the white preachers, he presented himself variously as a “haunted,” suffering Negro (“What else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?”), a pontificator (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”), a supplicant (“I Hope, sirs, you can understand . . .”), and a fellow bigshot (“If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else”). He spoke also as a teacher: “How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? . . . To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. . . . All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality . . . Let me give another explanation . . . And he spoke as a gracious fellow student, seeking common ground: “You are exactly right in your call for negotiation . . . I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue.”
By degrees, King established a kind of universal voice, beyond time, beyond race. As both humble prisoner and mighty prophet, as father, harried traveler, and cornered leader, he projected a character of nearly unassailable breadth. when he reached the heart of his case, he adopted an authentic tone of intimacy toward the very targets of his wrath—toward men who had condemned him without mentioning his name. Almost whispering on the page, he presented his most scathing accusations as a confession:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.Back at the Gaston Motel, deciphering what he called King’s “chicken-scratch handwriting,” Wyatt Walker became visibly excited by these passages. “His cup has really run over with those white preachers!” Walker exclaimed. Long frustrated by what seemed to him King’s excessive forbearance, Walker thrilled to see such stinging wrath let loose. He knew that the history of the early Christian church made jail the appropriate setting for spiritual judgments—that buried within most religious Americans was an inchoate belief in persecuted spirituality as the natural price of their faith. Here was the early church reincarnate, with King rebuking the empire for its hatred, for its fearful defense of worldly attachments. For this, Walker put aside his clipboard. Long into the night, he dictated King’s words to his secretary for typing.
The following link is a quotation from this book about the young Martin Luther King changing his name:
http://www.delanceyplace.com/view-arc...
July 9, 2013
A monumental history of America and the Civil Rights movement. Superlatives abound! It is amazing how Mr. Branch can go from the top (King, Kennedy, Hoover) to people at the very roots of the Civil Rights movement (Rosa Parks, John Lewis, William Moore, Louis Allen…). The cast of characters who made things happen and broke down barriers is astonishing.
Dr. King is portrayed as a man of moral fibre who knew what was wrong and right in society and deeply tolerant of other people’s shortcomings – particularly his segregationist adversaries. King never preached or condoned hate.
The Kennedy’s are seen as blowing alternately hot and cold for the Civil Rights movement. Both would speak emotionally and persuasively of human equality but back off from passing the essential legislation. Between the Kennedy’s and King stood the evil silent presence of J. Edgar Hoover - surely one of the most ominous and manipulative man in 20th century American history. Hoover’s F.B.I. fiefdom was used to pulling power strings in Washington. The word “communist” was used on anyone who was Hoover’s adversary. Hoover used sex as a way to pull the strings of the Kennedy’s – who were responsible for first setting up wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s advisor Stanley Levison and ultimately on Dr. King himself.
Mr. Branch is equally eloquent when outlining the vicious segregationist violence in the Southern States. Robert Moses is an oasis of reason and calm in a sea of senseless hostility. He was part of a group educating and attempting to empower Mississippi blacks to register to vote.
King is also seen as a troubled man, unsure of the next step – sensing that sometimes he was taking the easy way by going on speaking tours and avoiding decisions on whether to march, to go to jail, to post bail… King never made money from Civil Rights; except for buying good clothes he did not accumulate wealth. He was underestimated by his opponents (the federal and state governments) who did not see King as understanding the vicissitudes of power. But they did not realize that growing up in the Baptist preacher organization gave him an understanding of how to manoeuvre and manipulate men and women in power.
This is truly a required book for understanding those tumultuous years of America history. It is the first volume of three. It is great reading.
Dr. King is portrayed as a man of moral fibre who knew what was wrong and right in society and deeply tolerant of other people’s shortcomings – particularly his segregationist adversaries. King never preached or condoned hate.
The Kennedy’s are seen as blowing alternately hot and cold for the Civil Rights movement. Both would speak emotionally and persuasively of human equality but back off from passing the essential legislation. Between the Kennedy’s and King stood the evil silent presence of J. Edgar Hoover - surely one of the most ominous and manipulative man in 20th century American history. Hoover’s F.B.I. fiefdom was used to pulling power strings in Washington. The word “communist” was used on anyone who was Hoover’s adversary. Hoover used sex as a way to pull the strings of the Kennedy’s – who were responsible for first setting up wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s advisor Stanley Levison and ultimately on Dr. King himself.
Mr. Branch is equally eloquent when outlining the vicious segregationist violence in the Southern States. Robert Moses is an oasis of reason and calm in a sea of senseless hostility. He was part of a group educating and attempting to empower Mississippi blacks to register to vote.
King is also seen as a troubled man, unsure of the next step – sensing that sometimes he was taking the easy way by going on speaking tours and avoiding decisions on whether to march, to go to jail, to post bail… King never made money from Civil Rights; except for buying good clothes he did not accumulate wealth. He was underestimated by his opponents (the federal and state governments) who did not see King as understanding the vicissitudes of power. But they did not realize that growing up in the Baptist preacher organization gave him an understanding of how to manoeuvre and manipulate men and women in power.
This is truly a required book for understanding those tumultuous years of America history. It is the first volume of three. It is great reading.
May 29, 2018
“One of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King’s left cheek. He staggered backward and spun half around. The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham’s first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back. Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd, which, as one delegate wrote, surged for a moment as one person toward the stage. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium. The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King’s transcendent calm. King dropped his hands ‘like a newborn baby’ she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts. "
The 1950’s and 60’s were a violent and transformative era for American race relations. Segregation ruled the land and many Black Americans felt powerless to do anything to make a dent in it lest the the smoldering currents of racial violence be unleashed against them. This is not to say that groups like the NAACP for example were not making progress, as they were, but their aim was to achieve equality through the courts. As with examples such as school integration, this was a lengthy and difficult process that often saw rare legal victories simply disregarded by recalcitrant states who simply ignored court rulings or simply shut down all the schools in a county rather than see them integrated.
This book follows the rise of Martin Luther King and his impatience with the glacial progress of the NAACP and his calls to direct action. From the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, to finally the March on Washington, it is all written here in incredibly vivid detail. There were times when reading this book where the hate of White Mississippians permeated my bones as they dragged young men and women from buses and brutally assaulted them. There were times when I could almost hear the voice of Bull Connor as he unleashed dogs and fire hoses on men, women and children. There were times as Martin Luther King went into his final refrain of his I Have a Dream Speech that I could feel the hope of the crowd and the anticipation that a new day had truly arrived. It’s truly a book that you don’t simply read. You feel every page as it unfolds in all of its glory and brutality. It’s a also a book of heroes. Martin Luther King to be sure but so many others that posterity has never truly given their just due. Men like Fred Shuttlesworth, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Stanley Levinson and so many, many others who without their contributions none of this would have been possible. It is also a book of villains and cowards like George Wallace, small town Southern sheriffs, The Kennedy brothers and their inaction in the face of racial violence and injustice, and at times the NAACP, whose chief Roy Wilkins was openly disdainful (and perhaps jealous) of King’s movement and often worked at cross-purposes that threatened to derail both of them. Chief among villains was J. Edgar Hoover and his relentless obsession with discrediting King that took the form of wiretaps, constant surveillance, and later leaked innuendo and violence. King was far from a saint in his personal life but no man deserved the harrassment he received at the hands of the FBI.
The one common strain that runs throughout this book however is nonviolence. In the face of some of the worst brutality human beings could face, hundreds of thousands of brave men and women risked pain and death for the sake of a cause they saw as larger than themselves. Dr. King was the leader of this movement and it is in the end his story but it is just as much the story of love triumphing over injustice and of the human spirit’s capacity to transcend fear and prejudices. This was an incredible first volume and I’m very much looking forward to reading the next two volumes. This is history writing of the highest order.
The 1950’s and 60’s were a violent and transformative era for American race relations. Segregation ruled the land and many Black Americans felt powerless to do anything to make a dent in it lest the the smoldering currents of racial violence be unleashed against them. This is not to say that groups like the NAACP for example were not making progress, as they were, but their aim was to achieve equality through the courts. As with examples such as school integration, this was a lengthy and difficult process that often saw rare legal victories simply disregarded by recalcitrant states who simply ignored court rulings or simply shut down all the schools in a county rather than see them integrated.
This book follows the rise of Martin Luther King and his impatience with the glacial progress of the NAACP and his calls to direct action. From the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, to finally the March on Washington, it is all written here in incredibly vivid detail. There were times when reading this book where the hate of White Mississippians permeated my bones as they dragged young men and women from buses and brutally assaulted them. There were times when I could almost hear the voice of Bull Connor as he unleashed dogs and fire hoses on men, women and children. There were times as Martin Luther King went into his final refrain of his I Have a Dream Speech that I could feel the hope of the crowd and the anticipation that a new day had truly arrived. It’s truly a book that you don’t simply read. You feel every page as it unfolds in all of its glory and brutality. It’s a also a book of heroes. Martin Luther King to be sure but so many others that posterity has never truly given their just due. Men like Fred Shuttlesworth, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Stanley Levinson and so many, many others who without their contributions none of this would have been possible. It is also a book of villains and cowards like George Wallace, small town Southern sheriffs, The Kennedy brothers and their inaction in the face of racial violence and injustice, and at times the NAACP, whose chief Roy Wilkins was openly disdainful (and perhaps jealous) of King’s movement and often worked at cross-purposes that threatened to derail both of them. Chief among villains was J. Edgar Hoover and his relentless obsession with discrediting King that took the form of wiretaps, constant surveillance, and later leaked innuendo and violence. King was far from a saint in his personal life but no man deserved the harrassment he received at the hands of the FBI.
The one common strain that runs throughout this book however is nonviolence. In the face of some of the worst brutality human beings could face, hundreds of thousands of brave men and women risked pain and death for the sake of a cause they saw as larger than themselves. Dr. King was the leader of this movement and it is in the end his story but it is just as much the story of love triumphing over injustice and of the human spirit’s capacity to transcend fear and prejudices. This was an incredible first volume and I’m very much looking forward to reading the next two volumes. This is history writing of the highest order.
June 19, 2018
Wow! Whew! I finally finished!!
This is a superbly researched book and was a great read. It really humanizes MLK for me as well as showing me just what an incredible era my parents lived through.
Though an intimidating doorstop of a book, it was actually written in quite an accessible way. I highly recommend it for people who are students of history or just want to know more.
I also recommend it to those who don't see anything wrong with the continuing litany of deaths of black men by the police and who are horribly outraged by the black men kneeling during the national anthem as a protest.
We need to see these people as our equals. Maybe if we see where we've come from, things will change.
This is a superbly researched book and was a great read. It really humanizes MLK for me as well as showing me just what an incredible era my parents lived through.
Though an intimidating doorstop of a book, it was actually written in quite an accessible way. I highly recommend it for people who are students of history or just want to know more.
I also recommend it to those who don't see anything wrong with the continuing litany of deaths of black men by the police and who are horribly outraged by the black men kneeling during the national anthem as a protest.
We need to see these people as our equals. Maybe if we see where we've come from, things will change.
February 19, 2024
― “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Tired after spending the day as a seamstress at a Montgomery department store, Rosa Parks boarded a bus for home on a cold December evening in 1955. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. The rows designated for white passengers were full. When a white man boarded, the bus driver ordered four black passengers to move to the back of the bus so the white passenger could sit. Three riders reluctantly complied, but Parks refused. She was arrested and fined $10.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat on the afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, it is unlikely that she fully realized the forces she was setting into motion and the controversy that would soon swirl around her. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Rosa Parks was an unlikely activist, but her sense of justice inspired her to speak out against racism and injustice. Her arrest sparked a 13-month bus boycott against Jim Crow practices in Montgomery, Alabama.
The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports. On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president.
― “E.D. Nixon, the first to be arrested under the boycott indictment, did not wait for the deputies to come for him. On Bayard Rustin’s suggestion, he walked inside the county courthouse to the sheriff’s office and said, ‘Are you looking for me? Well, here I am!’”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
King became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott was a reflection of King’s Gandhi-inspired beliefs that nonviolent mass protest could successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed.
― “He appealed to history, summoning his listeners to behave so that the sages of the future would look back to the Negroes of Montgomery and say they were ‘a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to defeat the boycott. After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycott, the MIA organized a carpool. In early 1956, the home of King was bombed, but King was able to calm the crowd that gathered at his home. City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott. King and Ralph Abernathy were arrested. But Montgomery’s black residents stayed off the buses through 1956.
On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling. City officials reluctantly agreed to comply with the Court Ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott. But the boycott had placed Martin Luther King Jr. in the national spotlight. He became the acknowledged leader of the nascent civil rights movement.
Similar actions flared up in other cities. Black Americans boldly declared to the rest of the country that their movement would be peaceful, organized, and determined. Another nonviolent movement began in the South when activists, usually students, would go to segregated lunch counters, sit in all available spaces, request service, and then refuse to leave when denied service because of their race. Although the first lunch-counter sit-in began with just four participants, the attention paid to the protest created a movement that spread across the South, eventually including 70,000 participants, both Blacks and Whites. It affected 20 states and resulted in the desegregation of many local businesses in those communities.
― “The Nashville students—destined to establish themselves as the largest, most disciplined, and most persistent of the nonviolent action groups in the South—extended the sit-in movement into its third state. Their success helped form the model of the student group.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Branch includes the incredibly violent attacks by white mobs on the Freedom Riders, who tested the Federal ban on segregation in interstate transportation and public facilities. Far from deterring such demonstrations, the savage attacks by whites created still more converts, who adopted nonviolence and joined the movement. He also reveals the personal rivalries that nearly doomed the Montgomery movement. He covers the efforts to register black voters in Mississippi and Albany, Georgia. These efforts led to some of the most violent reprisals.
Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch provides an unmatched portrait of the early years of the Civil Rights movement. While he gives an account of Martin Luther King’s early years, he also illuminates the actions of many who were engaged in this effort. You will find all of the important members of the movement: the fearless Diane Nash; the eccentric James Bevel; the courageous John Lewis; the focused heroism of Bob Moses; the multitalented Bayard Rustin; the brilliant Ella Baker; the outsider Stanley Levison; Medgar Evers; and the praiseworthy work of Septima Clark. Parting the Waters also reveals the action taking place in the national political area, including King's first meeting with a President Eisenhower in 1958 and King’s attempts to get President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to use the power of the administration to bring an end to segregation, including the efforts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s machinations behind the scenes. Branch is a masterful storyteller, chronicling one of the nation's most crucial periods. It is all the more important because the fight continues.
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Tired after spending the day as a seamstress at a Montgomery department store, Rosa Parks boarded a bus for home on a cold December evening in 1955. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. The rows designated for white passengers were full. When a white man boarded, the bus driver ordered four black passengers to move to the back of the bus so the white passenger could sit. Three riders reluctantly complied, but Parks refused. She was arrested and fined $10.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat on the afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, it is unlikely that she fully realized the forces she was setting into motion and the controversy that would soon swirl around her. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Rosa Parks was an unlikely activist, but her sense of justice inspired her to speak out against racism and injustice. Her arrest sparked a 13-month bus boycott against Jim Crow practices in Montgomery, Alabama.
The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports. On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president.
― “E.D. Nixon, the first to be arrested under the boycott indictment, did not wait for the deputies to come for him. On Bayard Rustin’s suggestion, he walked inside the county courthouse to the sheriff’s office and said, ‘Are you looking for me? Well, here I am!’”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
King became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott was a reflection of King’s Gandhi-inspired beliefs that nonviolent mass protest could successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed.
― “He appealed to history, summoning his listeners to behave so that the sages of the future would look back to the Negroes of Montgomery and say they were ‘a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to defeat the boycott. After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycott, the MIA organized a carpool. In early 1956, the home of King was bombed, but King was able to calm the crowd that gathered at his home. City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott. King and Ralph Abernathy were arrested. But Montgomery’s black residents stayed off the buses through 1956.
On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling. City officials reluctantly agreed to comply with the Court Ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott. But the boycott had placed Martin Luther King Jr. in the national spotlight. He became the acknowledged leader of the nascent civil rights movement.
Similar actions flared up in other cities. Black Americans boldly declared to the rest of the country that their movement would be peaceful, organized, and determined. Another nonviolent movement began in the South when activists, usually students, would go to segregated lunch counters, sit in all available spaces, request service, and then refuse to leave when denied service because of their race. Although the first lunch-counter sit-in began with just four participants, the attention paid to the protest created a movement that spread across the South, eventually including 70,000 participants, both Blacks and Whites. It affected 20 states and resulted in the desegregation of many local businesses in those communities.
― “The Nashville students—destined to establish themselves as the largest, most disciplined, and most persistent of the nonviolent action groups in the South—extended the sit-in movement into its third state. Their success helped form the model of the student group.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63
Branch includes the incredibly violent attacks by white mobs on the Freedom Riders, who tested the Federal ban on segregation in interstate transportation and public facilities. Far from deterring such demonstrations, the savage attacks by whites created still more converts, who adopted nonviolence and joined the movement. He also reveals the personal rivalries that nearly doomed the Montgomery movement. He covers the efforts to register black voters in Mississippi and Albany, Georgia. These efforts led to some of the most violent reprisals.
Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch provides an unmatched portrait of the early years of the Civil Rights movement. While he gives an account of Martin Luther King’s early years, he also illuminates the actions of many who were engaged in this effort. You will find all of the important members of the movement: the fearless Diane Nash; the eccentric James Bevel; the courageous John Lewis; the focused heroism of Bob Moses; the multitalented Bayard Rustin; the brilliant Ella Baker; the outsider Stanley Levison; Medgar Evers; and the praiseworthy work of Septima Clark. Parting the Waters also reveals the action taking place in the national political area, including King's first meeting with a President Eisenhower in 1958 and King’s attempts to get President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to use the power of the administration to bring an end to segregation, including the efforts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s machinations behind the scenes. Branch is a masterful storyteller, chronicling one of the nation's most crucial periods. It is all the more important because the fight continues.
February 18, 2021
Exhaustive, engrossing volume (the first in a trilogy) chronicles King’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement’s formative years, from his tentative role as a spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to emerging as the movement’s undisputed leader following the March on Washington. It’s the kind of sweeping, grand-scale social history that so few writers can pull off (Robert Caro is the closest analogue), with Branch attuned both to the minute, fine-grain details of specific events, their sociocultural context, and the higher-level debates and backroom dealings among movement organizers, politicians and religious leaders. So many vivid personages pass across its pages, some well-known (movement leaders Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks; presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and a swarm of lesser politicos), others less so (E.D. Nixon and Fred Shuttlesworth, King’s testy allies-turned-rivals in Montgomery and Birmingham; John Doar, the courageous Justice Department attorney who pressed for a more aggressive response to segregationist violence) that it’s difficult to call it a biography, though King is always the central figure: a smart, charismatic young man thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, refining his tactics and worldview until he became a living symbol of a movement and a people. A must-read for all students of American history.
September 11, 2020
So diligent, so enlightening. I’m hoping to put an article together when I finish the trilogy (I’ve read two so far). I knew the outline of this story, but so much surprised me—especially the very stark internal divisions among American blacks, the almost maniacal animus of J. Edgar Hoover against MLK, and the way John Kennedy’s immorality silently hampered efforts toward civil rights. I was struck by how quickly so many people shouted lies (“The Civil Rights movement is just a front for Communist agitators!”) in order to bury the truth about their own wickedness. I was struck by the simple fact that what sometimes have begun to feel like caricatures of Jim Crow Southerners in contemporary movies were absolutely spot-on. I was struck by the way the moral arc of the story, one that seems so obvious now, one that bent toward justice, was not at all obvious to the participants. I was struck by the total absence (?) of white evangelicals from the story (so far—after reading volts. 1 and 2). I don’t know what to make of this yet. I was deeply struck by the explicitly Christian appeals—and I mean appeals to Jesus’ own personal example—that informed the non-violent theories of King, even as he practiced an adultery that was open to many friends. Was King right about non-violence? I think so. Both the Bible generally (“resist not an evil person,” “don’t return reviling for reviling,” “heap coals of fire on their head”) and the example of Jesus (“as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth”) tell us that the only righteous way a minority can beat the terrible injustices of a majority is by more suffering, suffering driven by love (a constant King appeal), suffering that stirs the God-given conscience of the oppressor. If there is no Jesus, there’s no non-violent Civil Rights movement. If there’s on God, there’s no God-given conscience you can reliably appeal to. If there’s no black church tradition, there are no freedom songs, and there’s no orator like King to rise to the top. I recently listened again to his most famous speech and, toward the end of this volume, read some of the backstory. What a mercy of God that King led with love, toward non-violence. May God help us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him.
August 5, 2016
For sheer size and detail, it seems inarguable that Taylor Branch has written the definitive Civil Rights Movement history. This tome, which I hauled around with me for the better part of three weeks, is only a third of the series. In over 900-pages it covers the history of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the history of King's family in Atlanta and, most extensively, the crescendos and nadirs of the movement from Montgomery to the March on Washington and the assassination of President Kennedy.
Branch wanders quite thoroughly down paths of subject matter that seem, especially early on, to be diversionary, but ultimately create a remarkably rich context for the reader: King's theological foundations, the inner politics of the National Baptist Convention, the paranoia of a Hoover FBI, the politics of a Kennedy White House, and the foundational disagreements among the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC --the foremost African-American civil rights groups-- concerning tactics, goals, and motivations.
I taught the Civil Rights Movement twice a school-year for three years to a total of twenty different classes of high school seniors and I felt the constriction of time and attention spans each time. After reading Parting the Waters, I have to recognize again what a weak and limited portrait we're accustomed to of this crucial period in American history. We give our young people and ourselves very little of this remarkable story. What is taught is a vague and watery history punctuated by a handful of names and dates, if teachers have the calendar days to get there at all. The Civil Rights Movement, as I confess to teaching it, may have seemed to my students like exactly what it wasn't. It may have seemed like a somewhat interesting but inevitable tumble towards greater equality, not a growing roar from the conscience of the nation, provoked by those most marginalized and magnified at the price of their very literal blood and tears.
By contrast to my cursory PowerPoints and video clips, Branch adds flesh and blood to the characters of Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and of course Dr. King, retracing their walk through history. He introduces the reader to a much wider cast than our narrow textbook interpretations allow for: Septima Clark, Bob Moses, and the murdered Medgar Evers, to name only a few. He narrates the parallel drama among familiar heavyweights of American history: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover. He weaves carefully between descriptions of history and politics, cringe-inducing descriptions of violence and injustice, and soaring depictions of King's oratory and the movement's accomplishments.
Okay, enough from me. Great book. Here are some favorite quotes:
"In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state."
"Trying at once to explain whites to Negroes and Negroes to whites, King felt all the more acutely the "anxieties and sensitivities" that "make each day of life a turmoil ... another emotional battle in a never-ending war." The Negro, he said, "is shackled in his waking moments to tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and in his subconscious he wrestles with this added demon.""
"...on King's thirty-fourth birthday, the FBI officially wrote him off as unfit for mediation or negotiation. Thereafter, upon receiving intelligence that someone was trying to kill him, the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets... The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome. That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history."
Branch wanders quite thoroughly down paths of subject matter that seem, especially early on, to be diversionary, but ultimately create a remarkably rich context for the reader: King's theological foundations, the inner politics of the National Baptist Convention, the paranoia of a Hoover FBI, the politics of a Kennedy White House, and the foundational disagreements among the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC --the foremost African-American civil rights groups-- concerning tactics, goals, and motivations.
I taught the Civil Rights Movement twice a school-year for three years to a total of twenty different classes of high school seniors and I felt the constriction of time and attention spans each time. After reading Parting the Waters, I have to recognize again what a weak and limited portrait we're accustomed to of this crucial period in American history. We give our young people and ourselves very little of this remarkable story. What is taught is a vague and watery history punctuated by a handful of names and dates, if teachers have the calendar days to get there at all. The Civil Rights Movement, as I confess to teaching it, may have seemed to my students like exactly what it wasn't. It may have seemed like a somewhat interesting but inevitable tumble towards greater equality, not a growing roar from the conscience of the nation, provoked by those most marginalized and magnified at the price of their very literal blood and tears.
By contrast to my cursory PowerPoints and video clips, Branch adds flesh and blood to the characters of Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and of course Dr. King, retracing their walk through history. He introduces the reader to a much wider cast than our narrow textbook interpretations allow for: Septima Clark, Bob Moses, and the murdered Medgar Evers, to name only a few. He narrates the parallel drama among familiar heavyweights of American history: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover. He weaves carefully between descriptions of history and politics, cringe-inducing descriptions of violence and injustice, and soaring depictions of King's oratory and the movement's accomplishments.
Okay, enough from me. Great book. Here are some favorite quotes:
"In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state."
"Trying at once to explain whites to Negroes and Negroes to whites, King felt all the more acutely the "anxieties and sensitivities" that "make each day of life a turmoil ... another emotional battle in a never-ending war." The Negro, he said, "is shackled in his waking moments to tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and in his subconscious he wrestles with this added demon.""
"...on King's thirty-fourth birthday, the FBI officially wrote him off as unfit for mediation or negotiation. Thereafter, upon receiving intelligence that someone was trying to kill him, the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets... The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome. That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history."
September 23, 2007
Parting the Waters defines what a popular history should be: detailed, well-researched, and as readable as a novel. While the life of MLK is the fulcrum of the work, Branch delves deeply into into areas as diverse as the history of Dexter Avenue Baptist and power struggle between Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. All this detail means that as Branch moves chronologically through the major events of the Civil Rights struggle, you feel like you have the context to understand exactly what these events meant to the people involved at the time they were happening. What I most appreciate about this book is how it introduced me to major players in the Civil Rights movement who somehow didn't make my high school history book. People like Vernon Johns, Fred Shuttlesworth, Robert Moses, Septima Clark, John Lewis, and Diane Nash, all of whom come across as fascinating and complex personalities in their own right.
One drawback to all this detail is that Parting the Waters is long--really long. I took me a summer of nights reading until one or two o'clock in the morning to finish it. Still, when I found the sequel, Pillar of Fire, on a discount table earlier this year I snapped it up and have been reading it ever since.
One drawback to all this detail is that Parting the Waters is long--really long. I took me a summer of nights reading until one or two o'clock in the morning to finish it. Still, when I found the sequel, Pillar of Fire, on a discount table earlier this year I snapped it up and have been reading it ever since.
March 12, 2015
Part of the definitive trilogy on the Civil Rights movement. An incredible read--meticulously researched. It took him 23 years to complete it. Branch is white but a number of years ago I saw him on an MLK Day panel on BET. He was surrounded by black leaders from the movement whose names probably any informed person knows. What does that tell you about how the people who lived the events in this book think about Branch's version? The most amazing thing about this book is that you realize that MLK was only part of the story. He was a front man and speaker but there were hundreds of other young Blacks (and older too)who took action without King's instruction and did amazing and horribly dangerous things. Why didn't you know? So much of this story was strictly a local Southern story. Media beyond the South didn't bother and Branch does a wonderful job of helping us understand how so much of the story escaped us. This volume included the Kennedy years--Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and so many other events that drew our attention. Prepare to be disappointed in how the Kennedy brothers responded to the desegregation issue. Think political ramifications as the guiding star. Many histories are, admittedly, deadly dull. This one was hard to put down.
October 28, 2010
This is the most epic, engrossing history book ever. It's pretty difficult to find a 1000-page book that's densely written but you nevertheless can't put down, but this book accomplishes that feat. It's the first in a trilogy about the Civil Rights Era, and would be a superior replacement for every history book I had to read from 6th grade on through high school. For most of us who sat through Texas history, MLK was reduced to his "I have a dream" speech, and the particulars of his strategic, meticulous, agonizing, and even shrewd attempts to use non-violence are washed away in black and white clips of people singing "We Shall Overcome." It also depicts a much less sympathetic JFK, one who was dragged reluctantly into civil rights and actively appointed the most virulently segregationist judges in the South.
Read it!
Read it!
December 7, 2008
Standing in front of the smoking ruins of the bombed dwelling lately occupied by your wife and newborn daughter before a seething mob crying out to avenge you is a powerful test of a man's character. On January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King's house was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott; his wife Coretta and daughter Yolanda barely escaped the blast. After the bombing, the house was ringed by a thin line of white policemen in imminent fear of attack by a much larger African American crowd. Appearing before the crowd, King had first to show them that Coretta and Yoki were unharmed before they would let him speak. Addressing the crowd, King reminded them that his movement was founded upon nonviolence, urged them to disband, go home, and pray, and told them that he would see them at the next mass meeting to support the boycott.
For me, that is the defining moment of Taylor Branch's first thousand pages on the history of Dr. King and his movement: Parting the Waters. The entirely human response would have been to order the summary execution of any white person in sight after one's house had been bombed and one's family nearly killed. To our benefit and his everlasting credit, Dr. King was able to rise above the normal human response and live up to the true meaning of his creed.
Branch's book is by no means a hagiography, however. As it gallops through a thousand pages of burnings, bombings, knifings, shootings, hangings, and mass protests met by police attack dogs and high-powered fire hoses, Branch's book also captures the very human side of King the icon. How many people realize, after all, that the great civil rights leader was born "Mike King, Jr.," a name he retained among his closest associates, that he had a passion for soul food, or that he was an accomplished pool player? From the intrigue within the Baptist Church to the fundraising problems of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Branch effectively conveys a picture not only of the dramatic highlights but also of the tumultuous inner life of the movement.
King is by no means the only luminous figure in this first volume of Branch's trilogy, which sharply limns the generosity of Harry Belafonte, who virtually bankrolled the movement, the quixotic idealism and complicated personal life of Bayard Rustin, the quiet courage of Bob Moses, the fiery sermons of James Bevel, and the unflinching courage of John Lewis. At the same time, it also paints the vacillation and political calculation of the Kennedys and the monomania of J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, even Eugene "Bull" Connor seems to have human qualities compared to the demonic intensity and Machiavellian scheming of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose anti-Communist fantasies not only led him to persecute the Civil Rights movement but also to ignore the real dangers of organized crime.
As the book closes with the March on Washington and the assassination of JFK, one looks forward to climbing the mountaintop at an ever accelerating pace in the two subsequent volumes.
For me, that is the defining moment of Taylor Branch's first thousand pages on the history of Dr. King and his movement: Parting the Waters. The entirely human response would have been to order the summary execution of any white person in sight after one's house had been bombed and one's family nearly killed. To our benefit and his everlasting credit, Dr. King was able to rise above the normal human response and live up to the true meaning of his creed.
Branch's book is by no means a hagiography, however. As it gallops through a thousand pages of burnings, bombings, knifings, shootings, hangings, and mass protests met by police attack dogs and high-powered fire hoses, Branch's book also captures the very human side of King the icon. How many people realize, after all, that the great civil rights leader was born "Mike King, Jr.," a name he retained among his closest associates, that he had a passion for soul food, or that he was an accomplished pool player? From the intrigue within the Baptist Church to the fundraising problems of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Branch effectively conveys a picture not only of the dramatic highlights but also of the tumultuous inner life of the movement.
King is by no means the only luminous figure in this first volume of Branch's trilogy, which sharply limns the generosity of Harry Belafonte, who virtually bankrolled the movement, the quixotic idealism and complicated personal life of Bayard Rustin, the quiet courage of Bob Moses, the fiery sermons of James Bevel, and the unflinching courage of John Lewis. At the same time, it also paints the vacillation and political calculation of the Kennedys and the monomania of J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, even Eugene "Bull" Connor seems to have human qualities compared to the demonic intensity and Machiavellian scheming of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose anti-Communist fantasies not only led him to persecute the Civil Rights movement but also to ignore the real dangers of organized crime.
As the book closes with the March on Washington and the assassination of JFK, one looks forward to climbing the mountaintop at an ever accelerating pace in the two subsequent volumes.
July 3, 2011
One of the reviewers echoed my feelings...this is probably the best non-fiction I have ever read. King is the axis of this brilliant but disturbing narrative, but the history of the US is skillfully interwoven. Although there were many uplifting portions of the story, what a sad commentary on us as a nation. What were the outrageous demands of the civil rights movement-opportunity and equality?
In what can easily be characterized as a battle of good vs. evil, Taylor takes us from the deep south, where segregationists routinely violate black civil rights with impunity, to Washington, DC, where the Kennedys feed civil right improvements to King through an erratic IV drip to mollify the southern Democrats. Meanwhile, Hoover wastes untold man hours and tax dollars pursuing King as a communist, with zero evidence, contradicting his own men who reported no communist threat.
Taylor's behind the scenes narrative of the White House tightrope on civil rights shows us that there was no room for lofty ideals, courage, or "doing the right thing". It was all political calculus.
Fast forward to the present, and imagine that the people we elect to move us forward view all pressing issues- global warming, immigration, deficit reduction, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya- through the prism of politics. Nothing has changed...it is politics as usual.
SH
In what can easily be characterized as a battle of good vs. evil, Taylor takes us from the deep south, where segregationists routinely violate black civil rights with impunity, to Washington, DC, where the Kennedys feed civil right improvements to King through an erratic IV drip to mollify the southern Democrats. Meanwhile, Hoover wastes untold man hours and tax dollars pursuing King as a communist, with zero evidence, contradicting his own men who reported no communist threat.
Taylor's behind the scenes narrative of the White House tightrope on civil rights shows us that there was no room for lofty ideals, courage, or "doing the right thing". It was all political calculus.
Fast forward to the present, and imagine that the people we elect to move us forward view all pressing issues- global warming, immigration, deficit reduction, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya- through the prism of politics. Nothing has changed...it is politics as usual.
SH
February 15, 2019
Taylor Branch has written a magnificent history of the early civil rights movement, using the life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a framework. Although there is a great deal of information about King's life both public and private, other key players in this great drama also receive extensive treatment. Some, such as John & Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, are well-known. Others have received far less recognition: Vernon Johns, the powerful itinerant country preacher who was a kind of grandfather to the movement; Bayard Rustin, whose unconventional lifestyle clashed with political reality in a way that caused much pain to King; Stanley Levison, one of King's closest confidante's and advisors, from whom King was pressured to distance himself because of alleged communist ties; Bob Moses, a tireless, courageous worker who toiled for years in the Deep South to register Negroes for the vote.
Branch also narrates events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides with the you-are-there immediacy of an eyewitness reporter and the eye for detail of a novelist. This book is a very satisfying and informative read.
Branch also narrates events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides with the you-are-there immediacy of an eyewitness reporter and the eye for detail of a novelist. This book is a very satisfying and informative read.
April 14, 2017
This is history at its best: a narrative that immerses you into the people, places, and events of another era. The cast of characters alone is captivating, from black preachers like Vernon Johns, Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and King, to tireless activists like Bob Moses and John Lewis (yes, that John Lewis), to strident segregationists like George Wallace, all the way to the powerful elite like Rockefeller, Bob and John Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover. Taylor Branch has captured the grand sweep of the civil rights movement with its inner conflicts, unpredictability, and the FBI's attempt to discredit King through communist fears. He also pulls back the veil on the political machinations at the local, state, and federal level that would have been unknown even to most who lived through this tumultuous era. This is only the first volume of Branch's trilogy and I'm already looking forward to reading the second volume. In my book, Branch belongs with William Manchester and David McCullough as a master historian.
July 30, 2010
This is a beautifully written account of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King's development as a pastor, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, SNCC, SCLC and all the horrors that were endured from Birmingham to Mississippi and beyond in the early 1960s. I considered it a must-read for several reasons; the main one is that my generation has no knowledge of people being hosed down or beaten or jailed for freedom and I wanted to read more from someone who knew the subject well. Taylor Branch did not disappoint.
September 1, 2019
Truly one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. I wish there were more pictures. I recommend taking the time to pause, look things up, listen to speeches, etc. Really wonderful and revealing.
July 16, 2017
Simply one of the most important books about American history ever written. It is a massive book, 922 pages of text, but then again, its epic scope tells an epic story, one as eventful and difficult as the Book of Exodus for which it is named. Prefaced with a brief history of the Baptist Church in the South, it then shifts to MLK's emergence as a preacher there, and proceeds to detail how the Civil rights movement emerged from the churches of the South. It obviously focuses in major detail about major events: the Birmingham Bus Boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock High School, the Freedom Rides of 1961, the riots in 1962, James Meredith's admittance into Ole Miss after more bloody riots, the Children's March in Birmingham in 1963 (where the movement captured the national imagination though the televised images of rabid police dogs and overwhelming water hose power, alongside images of hundreds of children being arrested), culminating in the March on Washington. With one final chapter, Branch sets the table for future advances, with the planning of Freedom Summer and Selma voting registration, as well as the assassination of JFK.
Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for this book, which will never be bettered as the definitive account of this era. What impresses the reader the most is the peeling back of the historical veil, to see how many more defeats than victories within the movement, to see how many people disagreed with MLK, especially within the African American community, to fully understand how immensely difficult it was to have achieved what was accomplished. Very few people felt that MLK was doing the right thing, so much so that his emergence as the leader of the movement is simply through willpower and public presence alongside his application of the philosophy of Gandhi's resistance through non violence. Today, we take it as a given that MLK is a national hero. Even in 1963, this was not the case for his contemporaries, except for those closest to him. Branch exposes his personal weaknesses and doubts, as well as the complicated nature of politics in Washington at this time, with many revealing accounts of the Kennedy Administration. One can see the Kennedys slowly brought around to reckon with the political forces that pulled on them from the right and the left. This book illustrates how complicated and intensive it is to initiate, sustain, and accomplish political change from the standpoint of a political minority. Essential book of American history.
Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for this book, which will never be bettered as the definitive account of this era. What impresses the reader the most is the peeling back of the historical veil, to see how many more defeats than victories within the movement, to see how many people disagreed with MLK, especially within the African American community, to fully understand how immensely difficult it was to have achieved what was accomplished. Very few people felt that MLK was doing the right thing, so much so that his emergence as the leader of the movement is simply through willpower and public presence alongside his application of the philosophy of Gandhi's resistance through non violence. Today, we take it as a given that MLK is a national hero. Even in 1963, this was not the case for his contemporaries, except for those closest to him. Branch exposes his personal weaknesses and doubts, as well as the complicated nature of politics in Washington at this time, with many revealing accounts of the Kennedy Administration. One can see the Kennedys slowly brought around to reckon with the political forces that pulled on them from the right and the left. This book illustrates how complicated and intensive it is to initiate, sustain, and accomplish political change from the standpoint of a political minority. Essential book of American history.
December 22, 2015
This book has been sitting by my nightstand for a while, but when I heard that Taylor Branch, David Simon, and Ta-Nehisi Coates were working together on a screen adaptation of it, it jumped to the top of my list. Though I know the vague outlines of MLK's life and of the early days of the mid-20th century civil rights movement, I was like many other Americans and embarrasingly thin on the actual details.
This book was incredibly helpful at filling out the contours of that narrative, and is a fun read to boot. It turns out that trying to get equal rights for black Americans in the late 1950s and '60s was actually a dramatic and interesting story (yes, duh, of course it was). It's sure to make a terrific TV series. And this period is overall one of the most under-discussed in American history. Not to mention the incredible whitewashing of MLK himself.
The book is long, but well told. The chapter on the Montgomery Bus Boycott particularly is a thrilling tale. (And this is a good companion book for the often under-discussed role of women in that movement.) I look forward to seeing this work reimagined in new ways.
This book was incredibly helpful at filling out the contours of that narrative, and is a fun read to boot. It turns out that trying to get equal rights for black Americans in the late 1950s and '60s was actually a dramatic and interesting story (yes, duh, of course it was). It's sure to make a terrific TV series. And this period is overall one of the most under-discussed in American history. Not to mention the incredible whitewashing of MLK himself.
The book is long, but well told. The chapter on the Montgomery Bus Boycott particularly is a thrilling tale. (And this is a good companion book for the often under-discussed role of women in that movement.) I look forward to seeing this work reimagined in new ways.
November 2, 2020
First of a three volume study of the civil rights struggle in the United States during the 20th century, 'Parting the Waters' focuses primarily--and critically--on Martin Luther King, but not without extensive forays into other representative events and their participants. Beautifully written and profoundly moving throughout, this book is to be recommended to all citizens.
I was too young to be much aware of the period, 1954-63, covered. My attentions were on the Kennedy administration and the space race, but I do recall the frequent headlines and pictures in Dad's 'Chicago Daily News' and the grandparents' 'Tribune' and that my parents were definitely on the side of the demonstrators. My own involvement didn't begin until high school and then, in the late sixties, it had become, for me, an issue of class and 'black power' as represented by older, well-educated Panthers and, most particularly, demonstrations in support of open housing ordinances in the suburbs of Chicago.
I was too young to be much aware of the period, 1954-63, covered. My attentions were on the Kennedy administration and the space race, but I do recall the frequent headlines and pictures in Dad's 'Chicago Daily News' and the grandparents' 'Tribune' and that my parents were definitely on the side of the demonstrators. My own involvement didn't begin until high school and then, in the late sixties, it had become, for me, an issue of class and 'black power' as represented by older, well-educated Panthers and, most particularly, demonstrations in support of open housing ordinances in the suburbs of Chicago.
September 3, 2008
This is the most complete, best researched, most accurate book on the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement that has been written, bar none. More than that, though, Branch captures the spirit of the movement in exquisite detail. Whether he is talking about MLK Jr., Harry Belafonte, Bull Connor or JFK, he brings their actions, interactions and conversations back to life. This is not just movement history, but American history at its best and its worst.
Taylor Branch was the richly-deserving recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for this book, the first in a trilogy of works about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. It is very highly recommended.
Taylor Branch was the richly-deserving recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for this book, the first in a trilogy of works about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. It is very highly recommended.
October 3, 2016
Must-read history.
October 26, 2017
This book took me a over year to read, but was worth it. I read it off and on over a year and a half. Such hatred is hard to read, but the hope of Civil Rights for all is a powerful story.
April 28, 2009
Parting the Waters is about the civil rights movement of mid-20th century America. Branch indicates in his title that these late-1950, early 1960's years were properly "The King Years." Martin Luther King Jr. came of age and had his career path steered by the events that were taking place in America at that time, and in turn he became the single most influential figure shaping the manner in which the civil rights battles would be waged. The book is not therefore purely a biography of King, as much as it is the story of the arc of King's life as it intersected a crucial point in the nation's history. This is a monumental work which is the first of a three-part series of books.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to follow a bus driver's order to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. She was cited with violating the city's bus laws and refused to pay the fine. A planning committee of prominent black citizens used this incident as a touchstone to challenge the law by way of a bus boycott. King, the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, agreed to lead the boycott. Events caused the boycott to be prolonged for a year, during which the poorest residents of the city who were most in need of public transportation, refused to use the service. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually affirmed a lower District Court order which declared unconstitutional both the Montgomery and Alabama segregated bus laws. King, at age 26, experienced his first taste of fame in the South at this time.
Many early civil rights leaders were drawn from the ranks of southern black Baptist preachers. King and other prominent preachers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and continued the fight for civil rights by aiming at the South's restrictive voter registration laws. Initially the SCLC was interested in educational efforts to teach blacks how to navigate the laws designed to disenfranchise them, the most conspicuous example being Robert Moses' heroic efforts in McComb County, Mississippi. Soon, effort was expended to teach leadership and organizing tactics and strategies for civil rights leaders. Low-key efforts by SCLC organizers to get local blacks registered at their local courthouses throughout the deep South were joined by high profile movements involving civil disobedience and mass arrest at places such as Terrell and Albany Counties in Georgia; McComb and Greenwood in Mississippi; and Birmingham in Alabama.
There was no doubt that efforts to challenge the South's segregation laws would lead to violence against the protesters. Following the example of Ghandi, King established the rule that the hatred leveled against the protesters would be met nonviolently. Nonviolence was effective in disarming the white perception of innate black violence, and it would turn white violence into an asset. Protestors by the thousands would have to fight for their civil rights courageously for years, without returning the violence directed at them.
Branch describes the formation of the second significant civil rights organization which came into existence at this time. Young blacks, mostly college students, started being engaged in protest efforts to challenge the segregation laws barring blacks from lunch counters and other public facilities in cities across the South. The sit-in movement became organized under the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their tactics were not always endorsed by the SCLC, but they adopted the policy of nonviolence and joined SCLC in many important campaigns, starting with Albany in 1961-62.
SNCC, in conjunction with leaders of CORE, followed the sit-ins with a new movement which would place its participants in the face of violence from the segregationists. The 1961 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Boynton v Virginia outlawed segregation in waiting rooms and restrooms at bus stations of companies engaged in interstate commerce. Integrated groups of blacks and whites would ride buses throughout the South to test the states' compliance with the law. Branch pulls no punches as he describes the resistance faced by the first Freedom Ride in May, 1961 from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, including the firebombing of the first bus, and subsequent beatings of riders in bus stations. One of the most egregious examples of this type of intimidation occurred when Public Safety Director Bull Connors' officers left the Birmingham bus station to the mercy of a KKK mob immediately before the arrival of the bus bearing the first Freedom Riders.
Branch describes all of the beatings, shootings, arsons and bombings confronting King and others as matters of historical fact and allows readers to form their own opinions regarding the outrageousness of events depicted in the book. One may ask where the federal government stood at this time, when southern state governments were defiantly enforcing the segregation laws. Couldn't the U.S. government just swoop down and force the states to at least protect those engaged in peaceful protest against unjust laws? The answer was more complicated than I had imagined. Branch does a superb job of describing the Kennedy administration, where the President's brother, Robert, was head of the Justice Department. The Kennedy's certainly personally believed in the need for civil rights reform, but they were not ready to commit the government to be a leader in the fight. President Kennedy was adamant that military or police power could not be an agent for effecting a revolution in race relations. Of course there were some notable instances when the government took action at this time. John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, worked tirelessly throughout the South to investigate civil rights abuses and bring suits, on a county-by-county basis, regarding violations of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Federal Marshals were used to protect Freedom Riders in Montgomery and risked serious imminent threats to their lives in the confrontation with rioters during the integration of University of Mississippi.
However, the overall federal role, as seen by the President, was to be peacemaker and mediator. There were powerful motives forcing this passivity. President Kennedy was worried about the possibility of losing Democratic congressmen in the mid-term elections in 1962 and was looking forward to his reelection prospects in 1964. His party at that time was moderate, with a strong conservative base in the South. The southern segregationist governors had worked hard to get him votes in 1960 and he did not want to alienate them. He and Bobby were also being influenced by J. Edgar Hoover, who kept feeding the White House with poisoned intelligence connecting King with associates who had had communist ties. Jack Kennedy knew also that there were limits to how far he could influence the FBI to work harder to investigate crimes against civil rights workers, when its Director had a secret dossier of Kennedy's self-destructive extra-marital sexual escapades going back several decades.
All of this reflected on Martin Luther King, who enjoyed having his status as a rising civil rights leader confirmed by the attention paid him by the President, but was constantly thwarted by demands from the Justice Dept. to refrain from civil disobedience and from the president to get rid of alleged subversives working for him. He would powerfully convey two messages in 1963 that would firmly establish him as the most eloquent spokesperson for civil rights. The first would occur while he languished in the Birmingham jail during the grueling campaign which brought the world newsreel pictures of Bull Connors' high-powered fire hoses and police dogs set loose on demonstrators. Finally shaking free of the stigma associated with being a lawbreaker for engaging in civil disobedience, he wrote a letter, addressed to his southern white minister allies who constantly urged him to steer clear of jail. As Branch quotes, King wrote about the shortcomings of seemingly sympathetic fellow ministers who were quick to urge their worshippers to support desegregation, when it was supported by the law, instead of taking the risk of calling for integration, regardless of its legal status in the South, because it is morally right and leads to brotherhood between the races.
Also in that year King spoke several times in which he followed a developing theme to explain his vision for the moral ends to be attained by the civil rights struggle. Branch describes how King's oral presentation became more forceful as he spoke to succeeding audiences. All of the essential pieces were present when he spoke before a group of Black capitalists in Chicago in which he started by letting them know that they could provide valuable resources for "the struggle", then denounced white politicians in Congress for maneuvering to weaken civil rights legislation, finally making abstract remarks on the power of nonviolence. He concluded the speech remarking that he had a dream ... deeply rooted in the American dream... a dream that in Alabama (where violence against a friend just occurred) (people of all races) "will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters." (p. 871)
King's speech was finely honed by the time of the March on Washington on August 28th. This decades-long dream of A. Philip Randolph, who organized the March with Bayard Rustin, brought speakers from most of the major civil rights organizations to a live crowd of hundreds of thousands and a vast national television audience. King edited his text partly to placate demands from the White House to keep the rally from becoming an anti-government event (resulting in the boycott of the event by Malcom X and the Black Muslims) , and also to set aside his usually lofty oratory. The result was a speech in which the Old Testament was combined to the as yet unrealized American sense of being. As Branch notes, critics would point out the ethereal tone of the speech and the usage of content too simple for the occasion, but they would miss the point that this was a speech which presented ideals with an emotional command of oratory that gave King the credibility to define democratic justice. Branch judges that the power of his voice projected King across racial divisions and established him as a new founding father.
King's personal triumphs in 1963 would have mixed results. He was now instantly recognized by all Americans, black and white. He would no longer be constrained by those outside his movement who had always insisted on waiting until times were better to initiate protest. He was America's foremost civil rights representative. However, his national stature would make him more resented by other civil rights leaders who also worked hard in the movement. Ralph Abernathy, fellow preacher who marched alongside, and shared triumph and defeat with King since the beginning, would increasingly find himself in the shadow to King's spotlight. J. Edgar Hoover, who was finding it increasingly difficult to keep Americans alarmed about Communist influence on American institutions when CPUSA had lost almost all of its membership, looked at King after the March on Washington as a national menace worthy of directing his agency's resources to harassing and destroying.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to follow a bus driver's order to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. She was cited with violating the city's bus laws and refused to pay the fine. A planning committee of prominent black citizens used this incident as a touchstone to challenge the law by way of a bus boycott. King, the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, agreed to lead the boycott. Events caused the boycott to be prolonged for a year, during which the poorest residents of the city who were most in need of public transportation, refused to use the service. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually affirmed a lower District Court order which declared unconstitutional both the Montgomery and Alabama segregated bus laws. King, at age 26, experienced his first taste of fame in the South at this time.
Many early civil rights leaders were drawn from the ranks of southern black Baptist preachers. King and other prominent preachers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and continued the fight for civil rights by aiming at the South's restrictive voter registration laws. Initially the SCLC was interested in educational efforts to teach blacks how to navigate the laws designed to disenfranchise them, the most conspicuous example being Robert Moses' heroic efforts in McComb County, Mississippi. Soon, effort was expended to teach leadership and organizing tactics and strategies for civil rights leaders. Low-key efforts by SCLC organizers to get local blacks registered at their local courthouses throughout the deep South were joined by high profile movements involving civil disobedience and mass arrest at places such as Terrell and Albany Counties in Georgia; McComb and Greenwood in Mississippi; and Birmingham in Alabama.
There was no doubt that efforts to challenge the South's segregation laws would lead to violence against the protesters. Following the example of Ghandi, King established the rule that the hatred leveled against the protesters would be met nonviolently. Nonviolence was effective in disarming the white perception of innate black violence, and it would turn white violence into an asset. Protestors by the thousands would have to fight for their civil rights courageously for years, without returning the violence directed at them.
Branch describes the formation of the second significant civil rights organization which came into existence at this time. Young blacks, mostly college students, started being engaged in protest efforts to challenge the segregation laws barring blacks from lunch counters and other public facilities in cities across the South. The sit-in movement became organized under the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their tactics were not always endorsed by the SCLC, but they adopted the policy of nonviolence and joined SCLC in many important campaigns, starting with Albany in 1961-62.
SNCC, in conjunction with leaders of CORE, followed the sit-ins with a new movement which would place its participants in the face of violence from the segregationists. The 1961 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Boynton v Virginia outlawed segregation in waiting rooms and restrooms at bus stations of companies engaged in interstate commerce. Integrated groups of blacks and whites would ride buses throughout the South to test the states' compliance with the law. Branch pulls no punches as he describes the resistance faced by the first Freedom Ride in May, 1961 from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, including the firebombing of the first bus, and subsequent beatings of riders in bus stations. One of the most egregious examples of this type of intimidation occurred when Public Safety Director Bull Connors' officers left the Birmingham bus station to the mercy of a KKK mob immediately before the arrival of the bus bearing the first Freedom Riders.
Branch describes all of the beatings, shootings, arsons and bombings confronting King and others as matters of historical fact and allows readers to form their own opinions regarding the outrageousness of events depicted in the book. One may ask where the federal government stood at this time, when southern state governments were defiantly enforcing the segregation laws. Couldn't the U.S. government just swoop down and force the states to at least protect those engaged in peaceful protest against unjust laws? The answer was more complicated than I had imagined. Branch does a superb job of describing the Kennedy administration, where the President's brother, Robert, was head of the Justice Department. The Kennedy's certainly personally believed in the need for civil rights reform, but they were not ready to commit the government to be a leader in the fight. President Kennedy was adamant that military or police power could not be an agent for effecting a revolution in race relations. Of course there were some notable instances when the government took action at this time. John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, worked tirelessly throughout the South to investigate civil rights abuses and bring suits, on a county-by-county basis, regarding violations of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Federal Marshals were used to protect Freedom Riders in Montgomery and risked serious imminent threats to their lives in the confrontation with rioters during the integration of University of Mississippi.
However, the overall federal role, as seen by the President, was to be peacemaker and mediator. There were powerful motives forcing this passivity. President Kennedy was worried about the possibility of losing Democratic congressmen in the mid-term elections in 1962 and was looking forward to his reelection prospects in 1964. His party at that time was moderate, with a strong conservative base in the South. The southern segregationist governors had worked hard to get him votes in 1960 and he did not want to alienate them. He and Bobby were also being influenced by J. Edgar Hoover, who kept feeding the White House with poisoned intelligence connecting King with associates who had had communist ties. Jack Kennedy knew also that there were limits to how far he could influence the FBI to work harder to investigate crimes against civil rights workers, when its Director had a secret dossier of Kennedy's self-destructive extra-marital sexual escapades going back several decades.
All of this reflected on Martin Luther King, who enjoyed having his status as a rising civil rights leader confirmed by the attention paid him by the President, but was constantly thwarted by demands from the Justice Dept. to refrain from civil disobedience and from the president to get rid of alleged subversives working for him. He would powerfully convey two messages in 1963 that would firmly establish him as the most eloquent spokesperson for civil rights. The first would occur while he languished in the Birmingham jail during the grueling campaign which brought the world newsreel pictures of Bull Connors' high-powered fire hoses and police dogs set loose on demonstrators. Finally shaking free of the stigma associated with being a lawbreaker for engaging in civil disobedience, he wrote a letter, addressed to his southern white minister allies who constantly urged him to steer clear of jail. As Branch quotes, King wrote about the shortcomings of seemingly sympathetic fellow ministers who were quick to urge their worshippers to support desegregation, when it was supported by the law, instead of taking the risk of calling for integration, regardless of its legal status in the South, because it is morally right and leads to brotherhood between the races.
Also in that year King spoke several times in which he followed a developing theme to explain his vision for the moral ends to be attained by the civil rights struggle. Branch describes how King's oral presentation became more forceful as he spoke to succeeding audiences. All of the essential pieces were present when he spoke before a group of Black capitalists in Chicago in which he started by letting them know that they could provide valuable resources for "the struggle", then denounced white politicians in Congress for maneuvering to weaken civil rights legislation, finally making abstract remarks on the power of nonviolence. He concluded the speech remarking that he had a dream ... deeply rooted in the American dream... a dream that in Alabama (where violence against a friend just occurred) (people of all races) "will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters." (p. 871)
King's speech was finely honed by the time of the March on Washington on August 28th. This decades-long dream of A. Philip Randolph, who organized the March with Bayard Rustin, brought speakers from most of the major civil rights organizations to a live crowd of hundreds of thousands and a vast national television audience. King edited his text partly to placate demands from the White House to keep the rally from becoming an anti-government event (resulting in the boycott of the event by Malcom X and the Black Muslims) , and also to set aside his usually lofty oratory. The result was a speech in which the Old Testament was combined to the as yet unrealized American sense of being. As Branch notes, critics would point out the ethereal tone of the speech and the usage of content too simple for the occasion, but they would miss the point that this was a speech which presented ideals with an emotional command of oratory that gave King the credibility to define democratic justice. Branch judges that the power of his voice projected King across racial divisions and established him as a new founding father.
King's personal triumphs in 1963 would have mixed results. He was now instantly recognized by all Americans, black and white. He would no longer be constrained by those outside his movement who had always insisted on waiting until times were better to initiate protest. He was America's foremost civil rights representative. However, his national stature would make him more resented by other civil rights leaders who also worked hard in the movement. Ralph Abernathy, fellow preacher who marched alongside, and shared triumph and defeat with King since the beginning, would increasingly find himself in the shadow to King's spotlight. J. Edgar Hoover, who was finding it increasingly difficult to keep Americans alarmed about Communist influence on American institutions when CPUSA had lost almost all of its membership, looked at King after the March on Washington as a national menace worthy of directing his agency's resources to harassing and destroying.
March 2, 2021
Less a personal biography and more an in-depth socio-political analysis of King (and his colleagues') impact during the early civil rights movement in the south. While lacking the sentimental anecdotes that most biographies use to make the reader feel an intimate connection to the subject, this was an incredibly detailed, brilliantly told and tirelessly researched masterpiece, easily deserving of its Pulitzer Prize.
(might do a more detailed review later)
(might do a more detailed review later)
February 23, 2017
A very dark period in U.S. history and one that must never be forgotten. So much can be learned from these pioneers of the civil rights movement. A must read for all.
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