Good quality books on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America are surprisingly hard to come by, especially considering how pivotal this political movement truly was. Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1953-64 is as good as it gets.
Branch’s first volume in this massive three book series has the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the central figure of the narrative. It all begins with King as a mediocre high school student from a middle-class African-American background who wishes to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the clergy. Extensive details are given about his college education, time spent at divinity school, and the growth of his personal philosophy. While you can see King’s intellectualism start to soar above and beyond that of his peers, these early chapters really do dwell on the subject more than they should have. If you think theological seminaries are not too exciting to read about, this part of the narrative might drag quite a bit.
But the pace revs up and takes off when Martin Luther King begins preaching in Birmingham, Alabama, becomes more acquainted with Gandhi’s practice on nonviolent protest, and embraces racial integration as the purpose of his life. We can see how the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, picket lines, voluntary jail sentences, and public criticism of the Deep South’s Jim Crow laws propelled him to become the premier leader of this most important socio-political uprising. We also get to see how ugly and evil the southern segregationists really were as they beat, bomb, lynch, and murder any African-American they can find who tries to improve the lives of Black Americans. Taylor Branch does an excellent job of showing just how rotten the people in the South were at that time and just how tyrannical the state governments and police were as they colluded with the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan to commit acts of terrorism against the citizens of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi who merely wanted little more than a fair chance at life. Some passages of this book are infuriating to read but honest American citizens need to know all the details of this shameful part of our past so we can prevent our nation from ever sinking this low again.
Along with the activism of Dr. King, we also learn about other organizations like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, CORE , and the more radical SNCC who later went on to work more closely with the New Left political movements of the later 1960s. These organizations contributed a lot to the Civil Rights Movement by organizing voter registration drives and the Freedom Rides throughout the Deep South after the government banned segregation at the federal level. Branch shows, however, that not all African-American advocacy groups were sympathetic to King and his cause. Surprisingly, the NAACP saw him as a dangerous rival and gave minimal support to his ideas. The African-American Southern Baptist Conference also put up strong resistance to King and his own organization, the SCLC.
Branch’s account of these times are so successful because he provides a street-level picture of how nonviolent demonstrations worked and why it was such a game-changer in the history of American politics. On one hand, the demonstrators were well-dressed African-American groups, sometimes mixed with courageous white supporters, who often made their point by sitting, laying down, praying, and singing church hymns. On the other hand were violent rednecks and police, attacking them with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses, sometimes resorting to using guns and bombs to murder people or blow up their homes and churches. Ultimately, the optics of this all did more violence to the barbaric segregationists than it did to the peaceful demonstrators who looked, more and more, like innocent victims. Rather idiotically, the Southern white people kept claiming that African-Americans were a threat to society and racial integration was inherently dangerous but it was these same white troglodytes who were committing all the acts of terrorism and violent repression. When the media broadcast images of segregationist brutality across the nation, public opinion quickly pivoted to the side of the Civil Rights activists. Branch does a sufficient job of showing the reader what this all looked like. He really puts you in the center of all the action.
At another level of society, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, took notice of what was happening in the South which was a Democratic stronghold in their day. Both of the Kennedy brothers felt personal sympathy for the Civil Rights cause but politically it was a dilemma. They didn’t want to turn their backs on their Deep South constituencies but they also wanted to maintain law and order. Martin Luther King had direct contact with Robert Kennedy, but the acting AG dithered while trying to encourage Southern politicians to reach solutions on their own. There were times when the Kennedy brothers were preparing to send federal troops into the South to prevent the police from killing Black people. They had to do this several times in order to enforce the desegregation of public schools. Branch’s portrayal of the Kennedys may leave the reader with mixed feelings about them. They checked their personal feelings to uphold the law even though the law disgusted them. This had the effect of trivializing the Civil Rights cause in the eyes of its adherents. It was all a tricky situation for John F. Kennedy because he won the presidential election with support from both the segregationists and the desegregationists. It is easy for us to criticize the decisions a president makes but considering that most of us never have been, and never will be, in that position of power we might not be the best ones to make those kinds of judgments.
Another political layer to this history is that of J. Edgar Hoover the sinister activities of the FBI. Hoover was an outright racist who hated African-American people. He especially had a personal hatred for both Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy so he set the FBI on a task to destroy them and the organizations involved with the Civil Rights Movement. He was convinced that Dr. King’s SCLC was infiltrated by communist agents with direct ties to the KGB. The FBI did extensive wiretapping and espionage operations on King and his associates. When they failed to turn up evidence, Hoover fabricated it, claiming that Dr. King’s lawyer and closest white friend Stanley Levison was being paid by the Soviet Union to destabilize America. Branch shows us how sick-minded J. Edgar Hoover really was. In light of the spying they did, and probably still do, on American citizens, you might question whether America is really all that different from any other totalitarian nation or not. Just remember that the US government was against racial integration until it became a viable issue for strategically winning elections.
Other fascinating topics covered in this book are the Ole Miss Riots that happened when James Meredith tried to register as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, the assassination of the NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Dr. King’s writing of the landmark essay “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in which he castigated the hypocrisy of white segregationist clergymen, and the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The biggest problem with this book is its size. At over 900 pages, there are a few parts that could have been edited out. While the majority of Dr. King’s work was not direct political action, it was actually organizing, planning, and fundraising, the details of every meeting he ever attended are not necessarily important. The same can be said for White House cabinet meetings. Some of the information also gets redundant, especially Branch’s mentioning of John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs. For example, the tryst that Kennedy had with a possible East German spy may be relevant to the discussion about his contentious relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and why he insisted that King throw Stanley Levison under the bus to placate the FBI director, but Branch goes over the details too much so that it just seems like a waste of paper after a couple paragraphs. Then there are other important parts that do not get sufficient detail. Little is said about the Constitutional Amendment and federal legislation passed under the Eisenhower administration and the emergence of the Nation of Islam along with Malcolm X are mentioned only briefly.
Taylor Branch’s Parting Of the Waters, despite its length, is an easy book to get engaged with. The subject matter is important and it can really change the way you look at American society and race relations. Even when the author preachers to those of us who already members of the choir, it is still an eye-opening narrative. The next time somebody asks about the ten books you need to read before you die, this should certainly be one of them.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America In the King Years 1954-63. Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster Inc., New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/Tokyo: 1989.
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