Parting the Waters
Read Parting the Waters Online
Authors: Taylor Branch
Parting the Waters
“In remarkable, meticulous detail, Branch provides us with the most complex and unsentimental version of King and his times yet produced.”
âRobert C. Maynard,
The Washington Post Book World
“Endlessly instructive and fascinating, thorough, stupendous. Now the source and standard in its field.”
âDavid Levering Lewis,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A compelling story, masterfully told.”
âRichard John Neuhaus,
The Wall Street Journal
“A masterpieceâ¦remarkably revealingâ¦. The past, miraculously, seems to spring back to life.”
âJim Miller,
Newsweek
“Already, in this chronicle, there is the material of
Iliad
after
Iliad
â¦. There is no time in our history of which we can be more proud.”
âGarry Wills,
The New York Review of Books
“Superb history.”
âRobert Wilson,
USA Today
“A wide-ranging, monumental tapestry. Branch recounts the turbulent era with feeling and insight.”
âDavid Anderson,
United Press International
“A brilliantly written saga that breathes life into the people and passions of the King years.”
âHarold C. Fleming,
The News and Observer Book World
“A book that excites as the best history ought toâ¦a notable achievement.”
âRoger Harris,
Newark Star-Ledger
“A dense, elegant narrative that ranges from the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Oval Office. Branch has reconstructed an era that changed America forever.”
âKim Hubbard and Linda Kramer,
People
“Branch gives us a canvas as broad, varied and richly peopled as a medieval religious painting. Should be required reading for every black and white citizen of the state.”
âGarland Reeves,
The Birmingham News
“A thrilling portrait.”
âRuth Gilbert,
New York
magazine
“Branch has fit together all the piecesâthe people, places, eventsâto show relationships, the larger picture we may have missed or forgotten. With this ordered, sweeping look at the movement and King, we are able to put things into perspective.”
âPatsy Sims,
Chicago Sun-Times
“Importantâ¦a marvelous book about a man and a movement.”
âLeslie W. Dunbar,
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
“Simply superior in every aspect.”
âRay Jenkins,
The Baltimore Sun
Pillar of Fire
Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest
(with Charles Peters)
Second Wind
(with Bill Russell)
The Empire Blues
Labyrinth
(with Eugene M. Propper)
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Copyright © 1998 by Taylor Branch
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IMON
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Branch, Taylor.
Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954-63/Taylor Branch.
p. cm.
Bibliography Includes index.
1. Afro-AmericansâCivil rights. Â Â 2. Civil rights movementsâ
United StatesâHistoryâ20th century. Â Â 3. King, Martin Luther, Jr.,
1929-1968. Â Â 4. United StatesâHistoryâ1961-1969. Â Â I. Title.
E185.61.B7915 1998
88-24033
CIP
973'0496073âdc19
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5868-2
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5868-3
We are grateful for permission to quote from "Listen, LordâA Prayer” in
God's Trombones by James Weldon Johnson.
Copyright 1927 by The Viking Press, Inc. Copyright renewed 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson.
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For the Choir of
All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.
And in memory of
Septima Poinsette Clark
Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eyeâwhat we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response. This subliminal force recommends care in choosing a point of view for a history grounded in race. Strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., though he is at its heart. To recreate the perceptions within his inherited world would isolate most readers, including myself, far outside familiar boundaries. But to focus upon the historical King, as generally established by his impact on white society, would exclude much of the texture of his life, which I believe makes for unstable history and collapsible myth.
To overcome these pitfalls of race, I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch. Like King himself, this book attempts to rise from an isolated culture into a larger history by speaking more than one language.
The text moves from King to people far removed, at the highest and lowest stations. By seeking at least a degree of intimacy with all of themâold Mother Pollard and also President Eisenhower, Bob Moses of SNCC and also J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, with the Kennedys and also King's rivals within the black churchâI hope to let the characters define each other.
My purpose is to write a history of the civil rights movement out of the conviction from which it was made, namely that truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies. I hope to sustain my thesis that King's life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years.
The chosen structureânarrative biographical historyâhas influenced several elements of style. For example, the word “Negro” is employed here in narrative covering the years when that term prevailed in common usage. Far from intending a political statement, I merely hope to recreate the feeling of the times, the better to capture the sweep of many changes including the extraordinary one in which the entire society shifted from “Negro” to “black” almost overnight. Because of the length of this work, for which I beg the reader's indulgence, that shift falls within the span of a second volume.
On another matter of housekeeping, I regret having to leave the record on Stanley Levison slightly ajar. Since 1984, I have sought the original FBI documents pertaining to the Bureau's steadfast contention that King's closest white friend was a top-level Communist agent. On this charge rested the FBI's King wiretaps and many collateral harassments against the civil rights movement. In opposing my request, the U.S. Department of Justice has argued in federal court that the release of thirty- to thirty-five-year-old informant reports on Levison would damage the national security even now. Almost certainly there is bureaucratic defensiveness at work hereâand also, I suspect, some petty spy rivalry with the CIAâbut so far the logic of secrecy has been allowed to reach levels of royalist absurdity.
Other evidence, including David Garrow's pioneering work on the FBI investigation of King, has convinced me that Levison's character and historical contributions are established beyond significant doubt. Nevertheless, the material being withheld denies the American public a common ground for historical discussion. This stubborn wisp of mystery allowed President Reagan, even while honoring King with a national holiday, to state publicly that a charge of fundamental disloyalty hangs over him. I deeply regret that a democratic government still labors to keep such allegations alive through state secrecy. It is all the more sad this year, when Soviet authorities canceled history examinations throughout their country on the admission that their national heritage has become lost among the lies and official secrets of the past.
Baltimore, Maryland
August 1988