Books |
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
Taylor Branch
By
Published: Jan 14, 2024
Category:
Biography
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LAST WEEK IN BUTLER: Weekend Butler. James M. Cain: “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Guy de Maupassant: “Bel-Ami.”
SHORTER M.L. KING: “Parting the Waters” is 900 pages. All three volumes of Taylor Branch’s biography run 2,700. There’s a greatest hits version: 190 pages. Right here.
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To read the news, non-violence is a discredited approach to change — this is the time of bombast and strong leaders and merciless applications of violence. But if you look at your personal life, kindness and respect for differences and close listening have never been more important. On this national holiday — which, this year, occurs on King’s birthday — this is the news you might like to think about. And read about.
Thick books. They’d better be great, because they sure are heavy. “The Power Broker,” for example, the Robert Caro biography of New York City potentate Robert Moses. A brick of a book, but when I sat down to read it, I raced through it as if it were a thriller. And, ever after, I remember the book as if it were an experience.
Could you have this kind of experience reading about Martin Luther King? After all, everyone knows the King story in outline. Who hasn’t heard the “I have a dream” speech? Or seen King in Alabama, marching proudly to jail?
Old story, to be sure, but when you hear it told day by day, as Taylor Branch does, it seems new — an epic life unfolding in front of your eyes. Branch traces King’s education, showing how teachers and writers shaped his thought. He introduces us to the men and women who became King’s colleagues and takes the time to make them as real as King. And then, of course, he moves into the set pieces: the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, jail. [For a rare, historic video, click here. ]
Branch, as a writer, is under King’s spell; his prose has a cadence you don’t often see in biographies, even in Pulitzer Prize winners. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle version, click here.]
Here’s Branch on King’s first great speech, delivered just before the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott:
The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few minutes passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him….In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.
And here’s Branch on King in Birmingham:
Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.
And here’s Branch on King’s “I have a dream” speech:
It went beyond the limitations of language and culture to express something that was neither pure rage nor pure joy, but a universal transport of the kind that makes the blues sweet...
Warning: If you have a kind thought for J. Edgar Hoover, it will be tested here. So will the reputation of John F. Kennedy. But then, everyone seems dwarfed by the central character of this first-of-three volumes — as Branch tells us, Martin Luther King is our Moses. A bold claim. And yet, as you move through these pages, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree.
EXCERPT
Here’s the conclusion of the assassination chapter…
King walked ahead of [Reverend Billy] Kyles to look over the handrail outside, down on a bustling scene in the parking lot [of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee]. Police undercover agent Marrell McCullough (a mole in the entourage) parked almost directly below, returning with SCLC staff members James Orange and James Bevel from a shopping trip to buy overalls. Orange unfolded his massive frame from McCullough’s little blue Volkswagen, tussling with Bevel, and Andrew Young stepped up to rescue Bevel by shadow-boxing at a distance. King called down benignly from the floor above for Orange to be careful with preachers half his size.
McCullough and Orange walked back to talk with two female college students who pulled in just behind them. Jesse Jackson emerged from the rehearsal room, which reminded King to extend his rapprochement.
“Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me,” he said. Kyles, overhearing on his way down the balcony stairs, told King not to worry because Jackson already had secured his own invitation.
Abernathy shouted from Room 306 for King to make sure Jackson did not try to bring his whole Breadbasket band, while Chauncey Eskridge was telling Jackson he should upgrade from turtleneck to necktie for dinner.
Jackson called up to King: “Doc, you remember Ben Branch?” He said Breadbasket’s lead saxophonist and song leader was a native of Memphis.
“Oh, yes, he’s my man,” said King. “How are you, Ben?”
Branch waved. King recalled his signature number from Chicago. “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’in the meeting tonight,” he called down. “Play it real pretty.”
“O.K., Doc, I will.”
Solomon Jones, the volunteer chauffeur, called up to bring coats for a chilly night.
There was no reply. Time on the balcony had turned lethal, which left hanging the last words fixed on a gospel song of refuge. King stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank.
