The King Years
Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“Right out of the pages of our lives…Compelling portraits placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently.” —The New York Times Book Review
The essential moments of the Civil Rights Movement are set in historical context by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the magisterial America in the King Years trilogy.
A masterpiece of storytelling on race and democracy, violence and nonviolence, The King Years delivers riveting tales of everyday heroes whose stories inspire us still. Here is the full sweep of an era that transformed America and continues to offer crucial lessons for today’s world told in “remarkable, meticulous detail” (The Wall Street Journal).
With this vital primer, Branch relates the dramatic story of how the Movement evolved from a bus strike to a political revolution, and brings this historic achievement to a wider audience, sufficiently fulfilling Branch’s dedication: “For students of freedom and teachers of history.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Branch (The Clinton Tapes) selects crucial scenes from his Pulitzer Prize winning three-volume history, America in the King Years, to capture the turning points of the civil rights era. Covering the period from 1954 to 1968, Branch begins with Martin Luther King Jr.'s first major speech, given during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat and ends with King's assassination on a hotel balcony in Memphis. In between are vivid vignettes that convey the movement's growth: Freedom Rides, sit-ins, the murders of the voter registration workers in Mississippi, the bombing of a church in Birmingham, and the marches to Selma, Birmingham, and Washington, where King's "Dream" speech addressed a quarter of a million people. Branch highlights King's relationships with major figures, including activist Bob Moses; Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement; J. Edgar Hoover; and King's collaboration with President Lyndon Johnson on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and their lack of agreement on the escalating war in Vietnam. He also illuminates how the passage of the Civil Rights Act realigned the political parties during the stormy political conventions in 1964. Though King is the central figure, this is not a biography, but rather a compressed narrative history that, despite its brevity, captures the evolution of a decisive period that changed America.
