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Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement
Simon & Schuster
January 2013
On Sale: January 8, 2013
224 pages
ISBN: 1451678975
EAN: 9781451678970
Kindle: B007EE52I0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Taylor Branch, author of the acclaimed America in the
King Years, introduces selections from the trilogy in
clear context and gripping detail. The King Years delivers riveting tales of everyday
heroes who achieved miracles in constructive purpose and yet
poignantly fell short. Here is the full sweep of an era that
still reverberates in national politics. Its legacy remains
unsettled; there are further lessons to be discovered before
free citizens can once again move officials to address the
most intractable, fearful dilemmas. This vital primer amply
fulfills its author’s dedication: “For students of freedom
and teachers of history.” This compact volume brings to life eighteen pivotal dramas,
beginning with the impromptu speech that turned an untested,
twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King forever into a public
figure on the first night of the 1955 Montgomery Bus
Boycott. Five years later, minority students filled the
jails in a 1960 sit-in movement, and, in 1961, the Freedom
Riders seized national attention. Branch interprets King’s famous speech at the 1963 March on
Washington, then relives the Birmingham church bombing that
challenged his dream of equal souls and equal votes. We see
student leader Bob Moses mobilize college volunteers for
Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer, and a decade-long
movement at last secures the first of several landmark laws
for equal rights. At the same time, the presidential
nominating conventions were drawn into sharp and
unprecedented party realignment. In “King, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Nobel Peace Prize,”
Branch details the covert use of state power for a personal
vendetta. “Crossroads in Selma” describes King’s ordeal to
steer the battered citizen’s movement through hopes and
threats from every level of government. “Crossroads in
Vietnam” glimpses the ominous wartime split between King and
President Lyndon Johnson. As backlash shadowed a Chicago
campaign to expose northern prejudice, and the Black Power
slogan of Stokely Carmichael captivated a world grown weary
of nonviolent protest, King grew ever more isolated. As
Branch writes, King “pushed downward into lonelier causes
until he wound up among the sanitation workers of Memphis.”
A requiem chapter leads to his fateful assassination.
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