Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

“I got your letter, Dean Fiske,” Johns replied. “But I want to know whether you want students with credits or students with brains.”

He accused them of persisting in the white man’s view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression, not labor, that demeaned them.

The report brought the phrase “civil rights” into common political parlance, replacing “the Negro question.”

He knew that he needed big ideas to go with his big words if he wanted to elevate his ministry above fundamentalism without sinking into permanent skepticism.

Among the theologians and philosophers King studied during his first year at Crozer was Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Lutheran-turned-Baptist whose experiences as a minister in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York at the close of the nineteenth century led him to write Christianity and the Social Crisis, the publication of which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Social Gospel movement in American churches. (The book was among the few King would ever cite specifically as an influence on his own religious beliefs.)

Critics denounced him as a utopian or a Communist. But to generations of followers, Rauschenbusch rescued religion from sterile otherworldliness by defining social justice as the closest possible human approximation of God’s love.

Both creeds hoped to see the meek inherit the earth, said Niebuhr, but the spiritual forces were too shy or too pure to fight the harsh world of evil, and the materialistic forces were too mechanical or too conspiratorial to allow the humanity which justice needs to breathe.

Most of the advanced schools of theology, feeling less adequate in a time of science’s empirical miracles and permanent, mathematical truths, protected themselves with scaled-down promises and vague imitations of the scientific method. Karl Barth called God the “wholly Other.” Tillich was defining God with his own intricately technical language of symbolism. Henry Nelson Wieman, whom King would compare with Tillich in his Ph.D. dissertation, called God “that something upon which human life is most dependent…that something of supreme value which constitutes the most important condition.” Even Niebuhr told an audience at Yale that Jesus was “a revelation of the mystery of self and of the ultimate mystery of existence.” Theology, which had once ruled all science as well as all being, was resorting to more and more elaborate shrugs.

“Evil is not driven out, but crowded out,” he concluded. “Sensuality is not mastered by saying: ‘I will not sin,’ but through the expulsive power of something good.”

King implied, virtue and sensuality were of the same nature. By setting good and evil in a kind of competition, rather than in opposition, King changed the nature of the contest from a tug-of-war into a race.

Clifford Durr, for his part, was a grim harbinger to white Southern liberals on the race issue.

Idealists would say afterward that King’s gifts made him the obvious choice. Realists would scoff at this, saying that King was not very well known, and that his chief asset was his lack of debts or enemies. Cynics would say that the established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more blame and danger ahead than glory.

“And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love,” he said. “Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.”

the grand jury was preparing criminal indictments against MIA leaders under a 1921 statute prohibiting boycotts “without just cause or legal excuse.”

He was still in Nashville when Bayard Rustin made his appearance in Montgomery. Of those outsiders who would be drawn prominently into King’s life, Rustin was the first to show up in person.

The jailhouse door, which for centuries had conjured up visions of fetid cells and unspeakable cruelties, was turning into a glorious passage, and the arriving criminals were being celebrated like stars at a Hollywood premiere.

Each meeting’s agenda would be organized around five prayers, including one for the strength of spirit to be nonviolent, one for the strength of body to keep walking, and a “prayer for all those who oppose us.”

King’s major reservation about the Vice President was that his relish and conviction seemed so evenly applied to all subjects as to mask his interior substance. Nixon was “magnetic,” King wrote a year later, in a public letter that darted between flattery and suspicion. “I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity…. And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

he contracted the evangelist’s curse. No matter how many cheers he received or how many tear-streaked faces assured him that lives were transformed, tomorrow’s newspaper still read pretty much like today’s. Segregation remained in place. People listened wholeheartedly but did nothing, and King himself was surer of what they should think than what they should do. Under these conditions, oratory grew upon him like a narcotic. He needed more and more of it because he enjoyed the experience, yet was progressively dissatisfied with the results.

Lawson stated that most violent segregationists were only made more angry by the sight of passive demonstrators curled in the fetal position. This was a way to get livers kicked in and backs broken, he said, recommending that resisters try to maintain eye contact with those beating them.

He turned the meeting over to a minister who began preaching so fervently from Ezekiel about the dry bones of the faithless that more than a dozen people had to be carried out in fits of uncontrollable excitement, and the deacons finally covered the preacher himself with an overcoat and several scarves, to calm him. This was an old ritual of religious ecstasy that was just being introduced to white teenagers through the performances of rock stars, most notably James Brown.

he presented his agenda as an “opportunity” for the Administration. Still, for fresh Kennedy officials, the article could be perceived only as a warning shot across the Administration’s bow, or, more accurately, across its stern.

One of the men grabbed Zwerg’s suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg’s head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage. A small girl asked what the men were doing, and her father replied, “Well, they’re really carrying on.” The Freedom Riders in the nearby taxi turned away in sickened hysteria.

By the peculiar logic of racial politics, King raised a cry about restaurant courtesies while accepting death threats quietly as a hazard of his work.

He spoke at a prayer service at the ruins of Mount Olive Baptist Church, having led a nighttime car caravan out into Terrell County from Albany. The caravan itself was a daring act, inconceivable before the transformations of the Albany Movement.

This time, four of the arsonists were so brazen that the first FBI agents on the scene found them still there watching the blaze, drinking beer. Arrested, the four suspects confessed to the FBI. Justice Department lawyers, scrutinizing their statements as to motive, found them difficult to translate in the idiom of the Supreme Court’s opaque ruling in the 1944 Screws case, but in general they had more to do with hating Negroes than with voting rights.

Ironically, the four defendants in the arson would be convicted by a state jury—the only conviction in the many such cases in Georgia.

As he was leaving, he turned to Louis Pitzitz, owner of Birmingham’s largest department store. “Mr. Pitzitz,” he said, “the last time, they arrested two students in your store. This time it’s gonna be different. Martin Luther King and I are gonna sit on your stool, and we aren’t gonna walk out. They’re gonna have to drag us out. And the press will be there. And you’ll be out of business all over Alabama. That’s just the way it is.”

from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.

singing “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” and the somber slave spiritual “Steal Away to Jesus.”

Adding music to my Spotify playlist, Parting the Waters

It was a joyful occasion, he declared, as he started them off in a rendition of “I’m on My Way to Freedom Land,” which gathered volume until the auditorium shook.

Spotify playlist, Parting the Waters

The First Family on the very day Kennedy announced the quarantine of Cuba. The album quickly sold a million copies, pushing past the debut album of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary to the top of the pop charts, alongside “He’s a Rebel” by the Crystals and “You Are My Sunshine” by Ray Charles.

Although King agreed with O’Dell that a free society betrayed itself by policing beliefs, he could not bring himself to leave the article unanswered.

“Once more we have been shocked by the bombing of Bethel Baptist Church,” King wired President Kennedy. He appealed for help in Birmingham, which he described as “by far the worst big city in race relations in the United States. Much of what has gone on has had the tacit consent of high public officials.”

That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history.

and the most popular song that April was the Chiffons’ bubbly “He’s So Fine.”

Spotify: Parting the Waters

Dylan appeared only before a small Negro crowd in Greenwood, singing his “Blowin’ in the Wind.” This song, as recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, had just displaced puppy love atop the pop charts.

Singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the eight SNCC workers walked outside the jail to a triumphant press conference.

When the Civil Rights Commission submitted an advance draft of its special report, Burke Marshall rebutted selected phrases from the report in a memorandum to President Kennedy. Of the finding that Negroes in registration lines had been “set upon by vicious dogs,” Marshall reported that a single dog had bitten a single preacher in Greenwood. “The use of police dogs is not a prohibited activity,” he added.

About ten of the original sixty stood their ground. Already soaked beyond any worry of lost dignity, they sang one word, “freedom,” to the tune of “Amen.”

In caustic remarks, he and his fellow preachers noted that this tender solicitude for Negro children had never produced much concern over their consignment to miserable schools or other injuries of segregation.

At St. Luke’s, the movement choir’s rendition of “Rock Me, Lord” drove one woman into screeches so unworldly that the preachers on the platform whispered among themselves about whether something should be done.

I don’t know how many of you would be able to write a history book. But you are certainly making history, and you are experiencing history. And you will make it possible for the historians of the future to write a marvelous chapter. Never in the history of this nation have so many people been arrested for the cause of freedom and human dignity!” When the cheers died down, he said, almost in disbelief, “You know, there are approximately twenty-five hundred people in jail right now.”

Begging their indulgence, he recited again the distinctions among the three Greek words for “love.” This time he added a small new twist by stating that there was something mundane, even debased, about eros and filia. “Romantic love is inevitably a little selfish,” he declared. “You move your lover because there is something about your lover that moves you.” Titters punctuated his coy description until he moved on to agape. “And when you rise to love on this level,” he declared, “you love those who don’t move you. You love those that you don’t like. You love those whose ways are distasteful to you. You love every man because God loves him!”

as King left hurriedly for the last mass meeting, the choir sprinted into a runaway version of “Ninety-nine and a Half Won’t Do.”

“The hour has come for the Federal Government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States,” he said. “I am not criticizing the President, but we are going to have to help him.” Almost plaintively, King recalled his long, futile campaign to persuade President Kennedy to issue a Lincolnesque proclamation.