I’m about a third of the way through Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, by Taylor Branch. Parting the Waters is the first book of Branch’s massive trilogy interweaving the history of the black civil rights movement with the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The first book alone is 922 pages; together the three books are about 2,300 pages. (I’m not counting acknowledgements, endnotes, index, etc.)
Parting the Waters is absorbing. It really brings the chaos of the era to life: bus boycotts, marches, bombings, jailings, political machinations, internal dissension within the civil rights movement. It seems like half the movement involved creating plans and the other half involved scrambling to respond to unforeseen events.
I’m not really setting out to finish the book — it’s just that I keep reading it and it keeps being interesting. I started the book because I wanted to read something meaty, and for a long time it had been on my mental list of things I eventually wanted to read in my life. (It’s long been acclaimed and it won the Pulitzer for History in 1989.)
Partly because February is Black History Month and partly because Barack Obama has broken so many racial barriers lately, the book seems particularly appropriate right now. Unfortunately, since it’s a biography of Martin Luther King, we know how the story ends.
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 79 last month. He wouldn’t even be 80 years old today. That brings home with great clarity how young he was when he was assassinated, and how much life that assassination deprived him. It’s jarring to take him out of the myths of history and imagine him living on into the present — which, under normal circumstances, he would have.
I wonder what he would think of Barack Obama?
My dad’s in that book! (I think it’s volume two. Like, in one sentence. But still.)
Hey, this post is recent.
The book has an amazingly broad reach into:
1. King’s background: I learned about the Niebuhr influence in a 60s class (I might have heard the book from there), but to read his argument in Moral Man and Immoral Society is especially interesting given it’s seemingly permanent insight into society, an insight that is particularly powerful at explaining modern US political culture.
2. The rest of the movement: The amount of detail about the movement strips away the meaningless summary I picked up from high school. The end of the book goes far in demonstrating a broad context for Anne Moody’s (grew up in Mississippi, and became student activist there) disappointment in her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi.
3. America at the time: I really understand I read and started reading some Vietnam War books, but I don’t know where else I would have learned about the “heroine of Dienbienphu” story.
There’s hundreds of interesting facts, people, and stories to think about. Anyway, maybe you’re done reading it by now, and I hope tell other people this book and what you read in it.
I just finished David Halberstam’s The Children, which I strongly recommend. It’s over 700 pages, but with a narrower and more personal focus, it’s much more of a page-turner. It follows Diane Nash, Jim Lawson, John Lewis, Jim Bevel, and Marion Barry, along with four other lesser-known students who probably aren’t mentioned in Parting the Waters. They make up the Nashville contingent of SNCC.