Ubiquitous civil rights historian Taylor Branch is speaking at Town Hall tonight.

Branch, of course, won the Pulitzer for Parting the Waters, the first installment in his sweeping civil rights trilogy. He just published the third and final installment, At Canaan’s Edge, earlier this year.

Despite the Pulitzer, Branch is an odd and frustrating writer to read. He tends to back into important stories with a barrage of unrelated anecdotes , and he compounds that problem by talking about characters before they’ve actually been introduced. (I have long wanted to do a comical reading of the opening chapter from Pillar of Fire, the second book in the trilogy, in which Branch awkwardly lays out the specifics of a shootout at a Nation of Islam mosque. It’s a totally confusing “Who’s on First” write up that, frankly, is inexcusable.)

Obviously, though, Branch is a fantastic researcher, and his detailed knowledge of the civil rights movement is astounding. Ultimately, what Branch adds to civil rights history (history that’s better detailed in David Garrow’s 1-volume Bearing the Cross or John Lewis’s autobiography), is the sense that the leaders of the sit-in movement and freedom rides and voting rights organizing drives—predominantly young people like Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael, and some slightly older guys, Bob Moses and Jim Lawson—were utter weirdos. Freaks. Iconoclasts. Kooks.

Branch debunks the condescending myth that these people were “strait-laced Negroes” who just organically got fed up with their station in society. When you begin to comprehend how bold and calculated their acts of civil disobedience were—how completely out of step with the mores of the time these actions were—and you combine that with Branch’s details of their personal lives and philosophies and late night debates, you begin to understand that these kids were total freaks.

It’s a pleasant revelation.