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

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Phillip M. Hoose · 146 pages

Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Martin Luther King Jr. · 230 pages

Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service.

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

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

David Margolick · 315 pages

"The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation --

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

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

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

Diane McWhorter · 720 pages

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.

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

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

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Philip Dray · 528 pages

It is easy to shrink from our country's brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation's closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however--misremembering it as

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans

Kadir Nelson · 112 pages

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

John Lewis, Michael D'Orso · 526 pages

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis was present at all the major battlefields of the movement. Arrested more than forty times and severely beat

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson · 635 pages

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a t

Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington · 192 pages

Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period. "Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he transi

Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin · 190 pages

Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Patrick Phillips · 302 pages

"A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia and ... testament to the deep roots of racial violence in America ... Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century"--

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down

Andrea Davis Pinkney

It was February 1, 1960.They didn't need menus. Their order was simple.A doughnut and coffee, with cream on the side.This picture book is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the momentous Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in, when four college students staged a peaceful protest that became a defining moment in the struggle for racial equality and the growing civil rights movement. Andrea Davis Pi

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

Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Russell Freedman · 114 pages

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan

Laurence Leamer · 378 pages

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history--the Ku Klux Klan. On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The yo

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

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

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon · 474 pages

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--an "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for