Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

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 --

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

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

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

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

Cynthia Levinson · 176 pages

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power

Timothy B. Tyson · 416 pages

Robert F. Williams was suspended and made a pariah by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the organization that had been at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, because he dared speak clear pixel of the day-to-day, street-level struggle faced by Southern blacks, and encourage that violence upon African American homes and families be met in kind. Afraid of offe

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.

Rosa

Nikki Giovanni · 34 pages

The story of Rosa Parks and her courageous act of defiance. Provides the story of the young black woman who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger in Alabama, setting in motion all the events of the Civil Rights Movements that resulted in the end of the segregated south, gave equality to blacks throughout the nation, and forever changed the country in which we all live today. She had not

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.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Margot Lee Shetterly · 312 pages

"Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of the

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

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

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

The Story of Ruby Bridges

Robert Coles · 32 pages

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America

Wil Haygood · 410 pages

"The author of The Butler presents a revelatory biography of the first African-American Supreme Court justice--one of the giants of the civil rights movement, and one of the most transforming Supreme Court justices of the 20th century,"--Novelist.

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

James H. Cone · 368 pages

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Manning Marable · 601 pages

Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better

The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd · 311 pages

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racis

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

David Levering Lewis · 752 pages

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans

Kadir Nelson · 112 pages

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline · 306 pages

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