Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954

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Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63

Taylor Branch

Biography & Memoir

Aug 13, 2018

As a biography of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch’s nearly 3,000-page trilogy, America in the King Years, stands alone in its understanding of King’s place at the center of a pulsing network of moral convictions, political pressures, practical demands, historical committed people—from the powerless to the prominent—arrayed on both sides of his cause. As a history of that cause, it is both meticulous and majestic in its attention to the strategy and tactics—as well as the suffering and bravery—of a generation of civil rights advocates as it battled brutal proponents of bigotry and the entrenched cowardice and cruelty of local and national institutions. As a portrait of the United States in the tumultuous era from 1954 through 1968, it has few if any rivals in its scope, significance, and emotional force. The first in the trilogy, Parting the Waters details, among myriad other events, the arrest of Rosa Parks and the launch of the Montgomery bus boycott, which King was drafted to lead; the lunch counter sit-ins and the bloody Freedom Rides; King’s unswerving commitment to nonviolence and his imprisonment during a demonstration in Birmingham; his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington; and the KKK’s bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls.

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Don MacKinnon

Aug 28, 2018

No matter what you think you know about the civil rights movement, and the people who made it happen... this book immerses you so deeply in the personalities and events you almost forget how it ends.

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