America's Prophet (35 page)

Civil Rights Movement

Anyone who writes about Martin Luther King, Jr., is indebted to Taylor Branch’s magisterial series,
Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire,
and
At Canaan’s Edge
. The extended quotation describing the final moments of King’s mountaintop speech comes from page 758 of
At Canaan’s Edge
. I found three other books extremely helpful:
Voice of Deliverance
by Keith D. Miller, which contains the similar passages in King’s and Phillips Brooks’s sermons on Egyptians and evil;
To the Mountaintop
by Stewart Burns; and
Prophetic Politics
by David S. Gutterman. I also drew from
An Easy Burden
by Andrew Young and
Singing in a Strange Land
by Nick Salvatore.

The quotation from Zora Neale Hurston is taken from the introduction to her novel
Moses, Man on the Mountain
. My portrait of the relationship between King and Abraham Joshua Heschel was informed by Susannah Heschel’s essay “Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.” in
Black Zion,
edited by Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch. Charlton Heston’s quotation about why he was chosen to speak at the March on Washington appears in Emilie Raymond’s
From My Cold Dead Hands
.

Passover

Two books explore the fascinating history of Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism—Freud and the Legacy of Moses
by Richard J. Bernstein and
Freud’s Moses
by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. My discussion of the political influence of Moses benefited from
Moses as Political Leader
by Aaron Wildavsky. David Geffen’s delightful compilation of American Passover
stories is
American Heritage Haggadah
. The Jewish Publication Society has recently republished an edition of
A Survivors’ Haggadah,
written, designed, and illustrated by Yosef Dov Sheinson.

My conclusion also draws from
The Jewish Century
by Yuri Slezkine and
The Prophetic Imagination
by Walter Brueggemann. The Henry David Thoreau quote comes from
Walden;
the W. E. B. Du Bois quote from
The Crisis,
November 1918; the Langston Hughes quote from “Let America Be America Again.” The evocative phrase that America is a “synonym for human possibility” is from Bercovitch,
The Rites of Assent
.

Final Word

I am grateful to the many people who provided the images that appear in this book. Reproductions of some of those images, as well as additional material I’ve collected during my research that does not appear in the final book, can be viewed at www.brucefeiler.com. The site also contains discussion materials, a homemade film about Moses and my family, a film of Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his Mountaintop speech in Memphis, video clips of Moses in film (including DeMille’s speech at the opening of
The Ten Commandments,
as well as Moses splitting the Red Sea), and a way to e-mail me directly. I welcome comments, queries, and reports from discussion groups, as well as stories about how Moses continues to inspire fresh generations to renew the story of freedom.

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