Books: A Time for Heroes, Not Saints

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PARTING THE WATERS: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS 1954-1963

by Taylor Branch; Simon & Schuster; 1,064 pages; $24.95

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech to a crowd of 250,000 that had massed in Washington to support passage of civil rights legislation. It was a high moment. The Georgia preacher's cadences rolled over the Reflecting Pool like God's own truth; the Washington Monument loomed like Mount Sinai. As Mahalia Jackson chimed in, King concluded with the resounding hope that blacks and whites would join hands to sing, in the words of an old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last!"

Weeks later, this hope was fouled by smoke and flames. In Birmingham, the focus of a school-desegregation campaign, a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Four young girls, readying themselves for the Sunday service, were killed.

Others had died in the struggle for civil rights. But after Birmingham, it became harder to sell a strategy of nonviolence. Blacks began to listen more seriously to Malcolm X and other eye-for-an-eye militants. By 1968, when King was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers, the language and images of black power dominated the discourse of race relations.

Volume I of Taylor Branch's major accomplishment in biography as social history places King convincingly at the center of an American revolution. The son of M.L. King Sr., the formidable pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, was no simple country preacher. His faith and oratory were rooted in the rural traditions of the black church, but his social conscience and tactics were molded by formal education and experience.

The nonviolent protest advocated by King proved highly effective in the newly expanded age of jet travel and television news coverage. Clips of black schoolchildren walking through barrages of jeers and spit brought home the snarling face of racism. The sight of orderly demonstrators enduring high- pressure hosings and the fangs of police dogs elicited sympathy and donations.

Branch, a journalist formerly on the staffs of Harper's and Esquire, retrieves this receding past with all its drama and much of its detail. What may have once seemed a patchwork of events is given structure and coherence. The Montgomery bus boycott, the violence at the University of Mississippi, the murder of Medgar Evers and dozens of lesser-known incidents contributed to a gathering storm.

The personalities of the men and women who organized and led the Freedom Riders and lunch-counter sit-ins are drawn with clarity and perception. The battle cry "We shall overcome" often takes on subtle meanings that illustrate the complexities of courageous acts. For example, Rosa Parks, the woman who sparked the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott when she refused to give her seat to a white man, had to master her conflicts about respectability. * "Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers," writes Branch, "she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites."