Civil Rights Potpourri

Taylor Branch’s massive Parting the Waters aspires to be “a history of the civil rights movement” formed out of “knitting together a number of personal stories,” first and foremost that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch emphasizes that the book is “not a biography” for he goes out of his way to consider other activists, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Bob Moses-but he nonetheless builds the book around King, dec...