Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · 638 pages

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Robin D.G. Kelley · 392 pages

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: d

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr. · 561 pages

This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby S

Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare?

James H. Cone · 368 pages

March: Book One

John Lewis · 125 pages

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Lut

Why We Can't Wait

Martin Luther King Jr. · 159 pages

In 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched the Civil Rights movement and demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action with this letter from Birmingham Jail. Why We Can't Wait recounts not only the Birmingham campaign, but also examines the history of the civil rights struggle and the tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equali

Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement

Rick Bowers · 120 pages

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

Paul Ortiz · 296 pages

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68

Taylor Branch · 1,056 pages

This book concludes a 3-volume history of American race, violence, and democracy. As the book begins, King and his movement are one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. The quest to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 engages the conscience of the world, strains the civil rights coalition, and embroils King with the U.S. government. After Selma, freedom worke

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

Eric Foner · 690 pages

Chronicles how Americans responded to the changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

C. Vann Woodward, William S. McFeely · 205 pages

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights moveme

Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Russell Freedman · 114 pages

The Children

David Halberstam · 783 pages

The Children is David Halberstam's moving evocation of the early days of the civil rights movement, as seen through the story of the young people - the Children - who met in the 1960s and went on to lead the revolution. The Children is a story one of America's preeminent journalists has waited years to write, a powerful book about one of the most dramatic moments in recent American history. They

Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case

Chris Crowe · 144 pages

Presents a true account of the murder of fourteen-year-old, Emmett Till, in Mississippi, in 1955.

Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary

Elizabeth Partridge

An inspiring look at the fight for the vote, by an award-winning authorOnly 44 years ago in the U.S., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a fight to win blacks the right to vote. Ground zero for the movement became Selma, Alabama.Award-winning author Elizabeth Partridge leads you straight into the chaotic, passionate, and deadly three months of protests that culminated in the landmark march fro

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn · 702 pages

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Gilbert King · 545 pages

In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgo

I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

Charles M. Payne · 525 pages

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore · 384 pages

Glenda Gilmore explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered socie

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans

Kadir Nelson · 112 pages

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

Danielle L. McGuire · 324 pages

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

Diane McWhorter · 720 pages

I Am Not Your Negro

James Baldwin · 144 pages

Transcript of the documentary film, I am not your negro, by Raoul Peck composed of unpublished and published writings, interviews, and letters by James Baldwin on the subject of racism in America.

We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March

Cynthia Levinson · 176 pages