Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch (PDF)

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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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review The first book of a formidable three-volume social history, Parting the Waters is more than just a biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the decade preceding his emergence as a national figure. Branch’s thousand-page effort, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, profiles the key players and events that helped shape the American social landscape following World War II but before the civil-rights movement of the 1960s reached its climax. The author then goes a step further, endeavoring to explain how the struggles evolved as they did by probing the influences of the main actors while discussing the manner in which events conspired to create fertile ground for change. Timeline of a TrilogyTaylor Branch’s America in the King Years series is both a biography of Martin Luther King and a history of his age. No timeline can do justice to its wide cast of characters and its intricate web of incident, but here are some of the highlights, which might be useful as a scorecard to the trilogy’s nearly 3,000 pages.King The King Years Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 May: At age 25, King gives his first sermon as pastor-designate of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 1954 May: French surrender to Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board outlaws segregated public education. December: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott, which King is drafted to lead. 1955 October: King spends his first night in jail, following his participation in an Atlanta sit-in. 1960 February: Four students attempting to integrate a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter spark a national sit-in movement.April: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded.November: Election of President John F. Kennedy May: The Freedom Rides begin, drawing violent responses as they challenge segregation throughout the South. King supports the riders during an overnight siege in Montgomery. 1961 July: SNCC worker Bob Moses arrives for his first summer of voter registration in rural Mississippi.August: East German soldiers seal off West Berlin behind the Berlin Wall. March: J. Edgar Hoover authorizes the bugging of Stanley Levinson, King’s closest white advisor. 1962 September: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi under massive federal protection. April: King, imprisoned for demonstrating in Birmingham, writes the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”May: Images of police violence against marching children in Birmingham rivet the country.August: King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech before hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington.September: The Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church kills four young girls. 1963 June: Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers assassinated.November: President Kennedy assassinated. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 November: Lyndon Johnson, in his first speech before Congress as president, promises to push through Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill. March: King meets Malcolm X for the only time during Senate filibuster of civil rights legislation.June: King joins St. Augustine, Florida, movement after months of protests and Klan violence.October: King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and campaigns for Johnson’s reelection.November: Hoover calls King “the most notorious liar in the country” and the FBI sends King an anonymous “suicide package” containing scandalous surveillance tapes. 1964 January: Johnson announces his “War on Poverty.”March: Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam following conflict with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.June: Hundreds of volunteers arrive in the South for SNCC’s Freedom Summer, three of whom are soon murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.July: Johnson signs Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.August: Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military force in Vietnam. Democratic National Convention rebuffs the request by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated in favor of all-white state delegation.November: Johnson wins a landslide reelection. January: King’s first visit to Selma, Alabama, where mass meetings and demonstrations will build through the winter. 1965 February: Malcolm X speaks in Selma in support of movement, three weeks before his assassination in New York by Nation of Islam members. Review David Levering Lewis The Philadelphia Inquirer Endlessly instructive and fascinating, thorough, stupendous. Now the source and standard in its field.Robert C. Maynard The Washington Post Book World In remarkable, meticulous detail, Branch provides us with the most complex and unsentimental version of King and his times yet produced.Richard John Neuhaus The Wall Street Journal A compelling story, masterfully told.Jim Miller Newsweek A masterpiece … remarkably revealing…. The past, miraculously, seems to spring back to life.Garry Wills The New York Review of Books Already, in this chronicle, there is the material of Iliad after Iliad…There is no time in our history of which we can be more proud.Robert Wilson USA Today Superb history. About the Author Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book – the first in a projected series of three volumes – begins a comprehensive history of the civil rights movement, focusing on the role played by Martin Luther King. It is not a biography of King per se but Taylor Branch has a lot to say about how King, through personal effort, became a great leader. King was, of course, a great orator, and Branch is pretty adept at analyzing his methods. But almost anyone who has heard King or read him knows that he was channeling something greater than himself.What King wanted for himself was a life of scholarship. Yet, as Jesus said on the Mount of Olives, “not my will, but yours be done.” In a brilliant anecdote, Branch relates how King was elected, almost accidentally, to head the Montgomery Bus Boycott. At a mass meeting that evening, King gave an inspired speech. At the end of the speech, the audience sat, stunned. People reached out to touch him as he left the building. “[King] would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. . . . He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.” The obstacles in Montgomery in 1955 were many, and only a few weeks passed before King sat in despair, his face buried in his hands. He prayed, saying “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” As he spoke these words, he experienced a transcendent religious experience that gave him the strength to continue his struggle. No man is perfect, but King knew his duty, and did it.Beyond its insights into King’s character, this book offers readers a survey of our country at a critical juncture. When the civil rights movement began, the balance of interests in the United States had left the South in the grip of the great evil of segregation. King himself shifted the balance. At the same time, thousands of ordinary Americans, devoted to nonviolent struggle, suffered tremendous privation, loss of livelihood, beatings, and sometimes death, making it impossible for the federal government to ignore the plight of Southern blacks.Finally, through Branch’s history, we meet a large number of what could almost be called interesting minor figures except that they were not minor at all. One of these is Vernon Johns, a brilliant farmer-preacher who preached the social gospel. In a memorable scene, Johns is asked to address a group of white and black preachers who are meeting to discuss the role of the church during a time of racial tension. He says, “The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross. . . . If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was drop him down on Friday, let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That’s all you hear. You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’s own established religion as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there. . . . I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross.” At this point, no one’s too happy that they invited Johns to speak. Lest we think that Johns was just an eccentric, though, Branch also refers us to Johns’ “Transfigured Moments,” which can be found on the web and shows Johns to be a serious man of considerable understanding and imagination.In addition to its merit as history, Parting the Waters is a great read, and deserves to be read slowly. If you can do this, the time you spend with this 900-plus-page book will be extremely rewarding.

⭐I have known Taylor Branch since 1968, when I was a writer for The Great Speckled Bird, already the South’s Standard Underground or Alternative newspaper, now digitized via the Georgia State University labor and cultural archives, one of the leading such sites of archival innovation in the region, perhaps the U.S. At the time I’m not sure what Taylor was doing, for work, but I recall he was living in Atlanta, perhaps working a day job, but organizing for McCarthy, in opposing Lyndon Johnson’s renomination, as part of the broad based opposition to the Vietnam/Indochina war. As a graduate of one of the finer Presbyterian prep schools in the city, he continued on his career up east, after the McCarthy/Julian Bond led challenge delegation upset the labor activists supporting Humphrey, in Chicagoas well as the old south folk appointed by then Gov. Lester Maddox, in one of the great and least remember successes of the African-American pioneered Challenge strategy which changed the Democratic Party, andra America, leading to the nominations and victories of progressives, like Bill Clinton, and ultimately, Barack Obama. Between the time of the successful seating of the Georgia Challenge Delegation in Chicago, in 1968, and 1971, black Americans had already decided on a strategy of nominating and ultimately electing a Black President, the title of a front page article for THE NATION, which I wrote in 1971, while still writing and ‘reporting’ for THE BIRD, and as an associate at the new INSTITUTE FOR SOUTHERN STUDIES, of which Julian Bond was President, chosen for his opposition to the war, the Supreme Court case which bears his name, his own literary acumen, and his father’s scholarly writing as best known, in a book published around that time, ’68, Negro Education in Alabama, A study in cotton and steel. This profound work out of the 30s continued to inspire the work of the Institute as it moved to North Carolina, and I would be surprised if its publication SOUTHERN EXPOSURE did not include a favorable review of this book, now a Classic, in the same league as C.Vann Woodward’s books, or those of Dr. Bond, but with the twist of exciting narrative writing with NARRATIVE carrying the argument, (see preceding reviews, including some of 60’s Republicans, (self described) instead of the more typical ‘academic argumentative style’ which is characteristic of the post PhD, tenure seeking, too often eyelid closing SERIOUS RESEARCH. Branch managed to combine the intensity of research or a well writing and researched PhD, with access to many key people, because of his location of ‘home town Atlanta,’ as well as a dynamic writing style and an appropriate Perspective which puts the life of Dr. King, and the many, many other players in the non-violent MOVEMENT which Branch so tellingly describes, quotes, etc at the center of the world non-violent MOVEMENT, the most philosophically interesting movement, to quote a friend, Dr. Hortense Spillers of Vanderbilt, in the post Hiroshima world. And this book, so far, (FBI records have not been completely released and organized on many of the ‘lesser’ groups of the era, such as CORE, SNCC, and even SCLC, or even NAACP, all key groups resisting in different ways the varying forms of totalitarianism in such familiar venues as Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, all of which continue to contribute their neo-fascists innovations to the national dialogue.

⭐This is one of the most powerful and moving books I’ve ever read, and I wanted to give it six stars. How here to do it justice?First, it’s a cracking read. (Other history books can be heavy, you keep checking to see how many pages to the end, or left in the chapter). “Parting the Waters” is a real page-turner. It is long — it kept me going through a long haul flight, lots of airport waiting and a couple of long bus/train rides — but it made the time pass effortlessly.It’s a great story, structured like a novel: strong central character, you meet him in experienced youth; the hero encounters challenges, and overcomes them and embarks on a long and dangerous journey with many battles and dangers, the hero takes on these battles and grows stronger. This classic plot structure with a real heroic quality makes it a gripping read.”Parting the Waters” chronicles the grand canvass of the civil rights movement: the major battles (Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, the voter registration drivers, the Birmingham campaign…), the politcal backdrop (Kennedy’s election, Kennedy’s Presidency, the dilemmas over the Civil Rights bill), all the characters, internal conflicts and under-currents among civil rights organisations and campaigners. But as well it zooms in with tender and intimate portraits on the people at the centre or caught up in the turmoil: how did it affect one of the protestors… or the story of a mother… or of one of the tragic victims.It’s so important: the end of apartheid in the world’s biggest democracy. Tenant farmers who tried to register to vote were evicted from their farms. Men and women riding a bus were stoned and fire-bombed. Police officers beat up citizens for fun. Those who tried to testify were shot in the head. And, terribly, so much more.Parting the Waters makes you live the emotion. I felt dumbfounded at what southern USA was like in the fifties and sixties, inspired by the civil rights campaigners, numbed by the viciousness and brutal violence they faced, in tears at what they had to go through, angry, so angry they had go through it; on the edge of my seat, alert and rivetted, to see what happened next, bewildered by and in despair of the whites’ attitudes, in tears again at the protestors’ courage, such inspiring and daunting courage.And Martin Luther King: we see him with all his weaknesses and flaws, but what a giant of a man! What a giant of human history!This book is being read in 1000 years time and I run out of superlatives.

⭐I found this book and the others in the series to be full of fantastic detail as to what life was like in the 50’s and 60’s for black people.The details of the civil rights movement, the individuals, their supporters and other participants were particularly interesting.I am a big fan of Lyndon Johnson, a multi faceted personality, and am amazed at what he achieved and how he managed it. Much has been said about president Kennedy’s efforts, but these pale to insignificance against Jonson’s achievements

⭐Fascinating reading, unfortunately when it arrived it was not in “New” condition as described. There were several marks and the binding was separated from the cover as shown.

⭐As described, well packaged and an excellent read.

⭐good

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