Taylor Branch > Quotes

“It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“Rauschenbusch rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of brotherhood made manifest in social ethics.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“The principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation,” he declared. “Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so.”
― Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65

“Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials.”
(Page 919)”
― Taylor Branch

“He scolded his listeners for being eager to sell off their few productive assets in exchange for articles of prestige. “You say you want a definition of perpetual motion?” he asked. “Give the average Negro a Cadillac and tell him to park it on some land he owns.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“Concentrate not on the eradication of evil, but on the cultivation of virtue.” (Page 99)”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63

“On September 29, the day after the James attack in Birmingham, the screen showed the arrival in Oxford of former Major General Edwin Walker, who, disciplined for insubordination, had resigned from the U.S. Army in flaming public protest against what he called the Kennedy Administration’s “collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy.” Walker already had gone on the radio to rally volunteers, confessing that he had been “on the wrong side” when he carried out Eisenhower’s orders to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School five years earlier. “Barnett yes, Castro no!” he declared. “Bring your flags, your tents and your skillets! It is time! Now or never!” Other cameras showed trucks and cars already cruising the streets of Oxford. Intelligence reports picked up Klan Klaverns mobilizing from as far away as Florida. Barnett’s desk was stacked with telegrams offering services to the defense of Mississippi.”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

“Among civilian whites in general, reactions wound more softly in the same coil: a stab of sympathy and generalized remorse, followed quickly by resentment of exaggerated accusations and then a growing sense of innocence.”
― Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement