Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1989.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1988.
Winner of the Ambassador Book Award for Biography in 1989.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest in 1989.

In volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement. Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War. Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder. Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

This book is part of the "America in the King Years" series.
Here are some other books from this series: