American History

Taylor Branchs book, Parting the Waters is the first of the three-volume books that covers both the life and times of Dr. Martin King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  The titles of the the three books are derived from events from the Bible as told in the book of Exodus when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.  These books also tell of this journey the blacks took to the promised freedom and equality guaranteed by the laws of the United States to all its citizens.

The chapter Pawn of History sees how Martin Luther King had taken his first steps into protesting the existing policy of segregation by allowing himself to be put in jail. This act served two purposes   the first was to protest segregation and the second had a deeper political purpose as it helped ensure the win of John F. Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960.  In the following chapter, Kennedy Transition saw Kennedy taking steps in seeing to what can be done to address the plight of the black people but had little support from some people in his administration. He was also preoccupied by the growing tensions with Cubas new Marxist regime. Baptism on Wheels covers the Freedom Ride where blacks and white sypmathizers protested the segregation on buses and bus stations by riding buses together seated side by side and would run all summer, defying segregation laws employing Gandhis passive resistance, bravely enduring attacks from segregtionists and walkouts by bus drivers to expose the evil in them.

In conclusion, Parting the Waters proved to be an excellent start in the 3-volume history of the civil rights movement by Branch who would follow it up with  Pillar of Fire  and  At Canaans Edge  and as mentioned earlier, Branch was able to draw a parallelism between the situauation blacks faced and the Hebrews in their quest for freedom and quality in America.  Parting the Waters is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.