Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

He wore silk pajamas and hung out with weirdos. He was often frighentend and uncertain, and even Thurgood Marshall called him a "rabble-rouser."

On the eighth day of his siege against segregated Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jn had reached an impasse on both sides of the color line. King began the campaign in the spring of 1963 vowing to put more than a thousand people in Bull Connor's jail. But despite his exhortations, fewer than 150 had come forth. Many blacks were ignoring his call to boycott segregated stores. The local black newspaper called King's demonstrations "wasteful and worthless '" White Alabama, meanwhile, had begun to bear down upon him. Knowing that the movement's bail money was running low, the state legislature sent the maximum bail fee rocketing, from $300 to $2,500. A week later, King's bondsman was broke. Without bail money, jailgoers would face six months in prison rather than six days. The trickle of volunteers would run dry.

Nonplused, King convened the cabal of preachers behind the campaign. Offly he had the stature to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed. Should he suspend the assault for a fundraising tour? Or step forward to prison as promised? One direction threatened the look of hypocrisy and retreat; the other the uncertain harvest of martyrdom. Polling his lieutenants, King found the demoralized clique as befuddled as he was, and he withdrew into the silence of his bedroom.

When he reemerged a few minutes later, King had swapped his business suit for a denim workshirt and jeans, more fitting for his decision of jail. It was the first time that several of his stunned associates had seen him without a ne"I don't know what will happen," he told the hushed room. Daddy King made a final attempt to change his son's Well you didn't get this nonviolence from me," he huffed. "You must have got it from your Mama."

In the tumult of subsequent days, Harry Belafonte raised the bail money, King scrawled his Letter from Birmingham City Jail, a thousand schoolchildren filled the police wagons and streets, and segregationists came kneeling to the negotiating table. The photos left behind, of children staring down police dogs, are perhaps the most powerful and instructive images of the era, and when they hit the papers, they signaled segregation's doom. Had King kept his tie on, the image left instead at best would have bespoken a man and movement in decline, a wellintentioned leader in over his head.

But King was in over his head, at nearly every phase of his extraordinary leadership. He faced not only the twin bulwarks of burning white hate and cool white indifference but black opposition of every color and hue-colleagues whose egos he bruised, rivals who thought he was moving too fast or too slow, and the apathies of rich and poor, mired in their own privileges and miseries. In hindsight, King's achievements seem shrouded in a romantic mist of inevitability. The titles of the leading biographies-Let the Trumpet Sound, Bearing the Cross, and now Parting the Waters*-add to the impression of mighty, foreordained triumph. But what's striking about Taylor Branch's terrific book is how mightily uninevitable King's victories seemed at the time.

Parting the Waters is both a biography and a wideangled history of the civil rights movement. As the first volume of a planned two-pan work, its 886 pages cover King to 1963, and Branch's meticulous research laces the saga with nuance and irony. There is news in his additions to the story of the FBI's dishonor, but much of the book's joy is simply in the reading. This is a work powered by narrative, and Branch's prose shines: King's aide 'Jerked and crackled across Shiloh's floor like a downed power line"; against blacks, 'Justice was a fast waterslide to jail."

Branch doesn't speculate on what the civil rights movement might have looked like without King, but the reader begins to wonder. To be sure, there would have been a movement without him. But it's doubtful that it would have earned its revered place in American mythology. When people take to the streets, even for a righteous cause, there's no guarantee of a happy ending. Certainly the antiwar crusade left no comparable moral glow. In delivering his cause to its mythological resting ground, King was the survivor of a thousand scrapes with doubt and disaster.

'Let me think about it'

There wasn't much in King's childhood that indicated the gestation of great religious or racial leadership. King did have a traumatic encounter with segregation's harsh heart when a six-year-old white friend obeyed his father's command to stop playing with "the nigger kid" King. In a calm voice at the evening dinner table, King told his parents he hated white folks, and Branch argues...