Parting The Waters: Martin Luther King And The Civil Rights Movement 1954-63 (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
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: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 first volume in Taylor Branch’s magnificent three-volume biography of Martin Luther King, was first published in 1988, and read by me shortly thereafter. Then as they were released I read the second (Pillar of Fire, 1998) and third (At Canaan’s Edge, 2006) volumes. Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize and the others have also deservedly won various honors because of the skill Branch brings as a writer, researcher and storyteller (in the finest sense of that word). He weaves a compelling linked tale of King and America, making it clear that the modern Civil Rights movement was many, many people and manages throughout the three volumes to give major space to a rich index of characters—sharecroppers to Presidents, school children to ministers, citizens unjustly charged with crimes to local and federal judges, the unschooled poor to the educated elite.If you are well-versed in the general history of the period and King’s life all that you would expect is here but many surprises as well. Some small and familial: both Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father were born and baptized Michael Luther King, the father changing his and his son’s name to underscore his identification with the founder of Protestantism. And, as any father would, Daddy King, as he was known, frequently labored to restrain his son from actions that risked jail or violence and the comfortable path he had designed for his son. There is even one of those classic parental moments during the Birmingham campaign in 1963 when the father tries to persuade the son not to march, not just because there was danger and sure arrest but because there was a federal injunction that King would be violating. (More on this shortly.) “I have to go,” says the son. “Well,” replies Daddy King, “you didn’t get this nonviolence from me. You must have got it from your Mama.”It is also a surprise that the Kennedys (President John and Attorney General Robert) had to protect their political left flank from Republicans. Liberal Republicans, not yet an oxymoron and still dynamically connected to their origin as the Party of Lincoln, pushed legislation and made speeches that pressured the Kennedy Administration to do more. The South was yet solidly Democratic; many of the federal judges appointed by Kennedy were segregationist recommendations of segregationist Democratic senators from Dixie. The federal injunction that prohibited peaceful marches in Birmingham, for example, was issued by a Kennedy appointee. When Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department had to find a sympathetic judge in the South for one of their own injunctions or appeals they were forced to seek out Eisenhower appointees.There were two streams of reform pressure, one was the courts, which the NAACP and the White House preferred. The other was direct action—sit ins, marches, kneel-ins—any public action that either violated local and state segregation law or was an attempt by African Americans to exercise their constitutional rights, say to register to vote. This approach was the one individuals, locals groups, and new civil rights organizations like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee preferred. In the event, both won battles, sometimes separately but often in combination.And if we are truly to be frank about American history and politics, big government has never been as big a threat to individual freedom and the rights of citizens as local and state government has been. It was local and state police, not federal officers, who arrested, beat, lynched (or looked the other way when local citizens did) African Americans and, as the civil rights movement grew, activist whites. It was local judges and juries who refused to bring charges or when compelled, brought in acquittal verdicts in less time than it would take to consider a fast food menu. The state of Alabama banned the NAACP.Local authorities violated the rights of its black citizens to assembly, to meet and to peacefully protest. They arrested orderly protestors for “disturbing the peace” when either police violence or mob violence passively observed by police went without consequence. A sheriff beats and kicks a preacher’s pregnant wife; she’s arrested. A man coming to register to vote is caned by the registrant for his temerity, and arrested. A man pistol-whipped and shot by police is arrested by the officer who assaulted him. The Kennedy Administration claims a victory when they get the charges dropped against the victim, even though they failed to get any charges against the police officer whose only provocation was the victim’s willingness to attempt to register to vote.With an engaged Federal government, if an often half-heartedly engaged one under Ike and Jack, the resistance and violence was strong and persistent. Without it the struggle would have been longer, more violent and deadly than it was. Nor was the reactionary violence against African Americans new--terrorism by any objective definition. From the end of Reconstruction to modern times there was a coordinated policy of brutality that maintained segregation and was executed across a significant portion of our land by private citizens and local and state authorities against the freedom and rights of American citizens. Over the long decades from the last quarter of the 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th, it left untold numbers injured or maimed, dead, or jailed, and generations of dreams deferred or crushed.The miracle of the King years so ably captured by Branch is the courage and determination of Southern African Americans and their sympathizers. It is beyond inspiring. Despite the violence against body, home and church and livelihood, despite the arrests, despite the threats and hate, people kept putting their lives on the line to make America a more just society, a less false reflection of its ideals. King emerges from Branch’s accounting a great man, an American hero on par with Washington and Lincoln, but one who was a leader of a movement he didn’t start and that had many branches that didn’t regard him as their leader because it was a decentralized national movement that had scores of leaders—not to mention uncounted foot-soldiers. There were strategic, tactical, and personal differences among civil rights leaders, a common goal, mostly, but a myriad of paths and means.In the part of the movement led by King the resistance to oppression was non-violent (tip of the hat to Gandhi, Tolstoy and Thoreau), a further testimony to King’s greatness. Many others were unwilling, some defiantly so, to rule out violence in self-defense or retaliation. Given the bloody history of the oppression you will at times share that impulse. King was a radical reformer and the most radical of his ideas was non-violent direct action.Those who don’t always come out so well are moderates, taxing King and others with unreasonable patience, a constant drumbeat of “don’t go so fast.” (Read King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for the rebuttal to that absurd notion.) And then there are the Wallaces, the Faubuses, the Bull Connors and Pritchetts, and the public and private white citizens who bombed, burned, shot and beat with no fear of consequence except possibly higher regard from white neighbors. They will infuriate you until your focus shifts to the dignity and heroism of those who opposed them armed with faith in their cause and, for many but not all, the power of Christian love.It is an incredibly compelling story, one that will have you flying through these pages as through a great novel. Branch, by the way, doesn’t flinch or pass over the human weaknesses of those engaged in the struggle—King’s infidelities, the pomposity and privilege of the Negro preacher elite, the ridiculous turf wars between civil rights groups, etc.—but in insisting on the fact of their basic flawed humanity, the extraordinary courage, discipline, determination, and dedication to principles demonstrated by King and others under extreme circumstances puts them in the same pantheon as American heroes of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War. Branch does right by them in this beautifully written, dramatically told, first-rate work of American biography and history.
What do You think about Parting The Waters: Martin Luther King And The Civil Rights Movement 1954-63 (1990)?
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.
—Bill
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.
—Richard
This is one of the best nonfiction books that I have ever read. Easily deserving of a Pulitzer, Branch documents the early history of the Civil Rights movement in a thorough but incredibly engrossing style. His approach is nuanced and he does not create black and white characters. King is a flawed individual who nevertheless succeeds in rising to greatest, to a large extent, as a product of his times. But after reading this book, one is thoroughly astounded and appalled at what life was like in the 1950s in the South and how passive (resistant) the federal government was in providing aid to the civil rights movement. One finds both Kennedys just short of obstructionist while the FBI and all Southern forces worked actively against King and the Civil Rights Movement.The style is easy and the story riveting.
—Pedsplace
