Books, Arts & Manners

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster, 1,064 pp., $24.95)

Martin Luther King Jr. would have been sixty this year. It’s startling to reflect that he was not yet forty when he was murdered; he had always seemed older than he was, especially when a new generation of Black Power militants had stolen the spotlight from him in the mid Sixties. The garbage workers’ strike he was leading in Memphis at the time he was shot seemed, until that moment, like a minor sideshow in the turbulent life of the times. Even his assassination was soon upstaged by Bobby Kennedy’s.

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Joseph Sobran

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Martin Luther King Jr

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster, 1,064 pp., $24.95)

Martin Luther King Jr. would have been sixty this year. It’s startling to reflect that he was not yet forty when he was murdered; he had always seemed older than he was, especially when a new generation of Black Power militants had stolen the spotlight from him in the mid Sixties. The garbage workers’ strike he was leading in Memphis at the time he was shot seemed, until that moment, like a minor sideshow in the turbulent life of the times. Even his assassination was soon upstaged by Bobby Kennedy’s.