Martin Luther King, Jr.

On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement. Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks's politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought--for more than a half a century--to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Discover the inside story of the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of one of its most iconic figures, Congressman John Lewis. This graphic novel trilogy is a first-hand account of Congressman 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.

Staff Pick by Susan Jacobs

Abraham Heschel is an influential name in religious studies and the author of Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. When The Prophets was first published in 1962, it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of biblical scholarship. The Prophets provides a unique opportunity for readers of the Old Testament, both Christian and Jewish, to gain fresh and deep knowledge of Israel's prophetic movement. The author's profound understanding of the prophets also opens the door to new insight into the philosophy of religion.

Staff Pick by Andrew Battista

Bernard LaFayette Jr. (b. 1940) was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a leader in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, a Freedom Rider, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the national coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign. At the young age of twenty-two, he assumed the directorship of the Alabama Voter Registration Project in Selma -- a city that had previously been removed from the organization's list due to the dangers of operating there. In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, LaFayette shares the inspiring story of his years in Selma.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Shortly before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a radical redistribution of economic and political power to transform the whole of society. In 1967, he envisioned and designed the Poor People's Campaign, an interracial effort that was carried out after his death. This campaign brought together impoverished Americans of all races to demand better wages, better jobs, better homes, and better education. King and the Other America explores this overlooked and obscured episode of the late civil rights movement, deepening our understanding of King's commitment to social justice and also of the long-term trajectory of the civil rights movement.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world's most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including the economic injustice that "takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

The first comprehensive history of the role of women in the civil rights movement, Freedom's Daughters fills a startling gap in both the literature of civil rights and of women's history. Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and other well-known leaders of the civil rights movement have admitted that women often had the ideas for which men took credit. In this groundbreaking book, credit finally goes where credit is due -- to the bold women who were crucial to the movement's success and who refused to give up the fight.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long? How Long? presents a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have neglected the most important leaders of the Civil Rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women. Belinda Robnett argues that the diversity of experiences of the African-American women organizers has been underemphasized in favor of monolithic treatments of their femaleness and blackness. Drawing heavily on interviews with participants in the Civil Rights movement, this work retells the movement as seen through the eyes and spoken through the voices of African-American women.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Historians have long agreed that women--black and white--were instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. Until recently, though, such claims have not been supported by easily accessed texts of speeches and addresses. With this first-of-its-kind anthology, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon present thirty-nine full-text addresses by women who spoke out while the struggle was at its most intense. Houck and Dixon introduce each speaker and occasion with a headnote highlighting key biographical and background details. The editors also provide a general introduction that places these public addresses in context.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their individual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality. In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of "Citizenship Schools" to teach poor Black people to read, write, and register to vote.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels. Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women's all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

This collection of nine essays analyzes the people, the protests, and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics, and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

In this first biography of Coretta Scott King, written by her friend Octavia Vivian, the reader meets a determined young girl who grew up in Alabama and worked her way through Antioch College only to discover that she was not allowed to teach in the white schools in Ohio. She pursued a musical career in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King, Jr. The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 brought Dr. King and his wife into national prominence. Since then the nation has seen the beauty and composure of Coretta Scott King as she has continued to speak and act on behalf of civil rights.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Coretta Scott was committed to social justice long before she met and married Martin Luther King, Jr. She shared in all the dangers that King's prominence in the civil rights movement brought, and she saw herself as full partner in the movement. Yet she generally remained in the background, supporting King's work and caring for their children, until his assassination transformed her into a movement leader in her own right: founder of the King Center, leader of a mass demonstration for a renewed national commitment to nonviolent social change, force behind the establishment of the national holiday bearing her husband's name. This book follows the trajectory of Coretta Scott King's tumultuous life at the heart of the most important American social movement of the 20th century.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Staff Pick by Gaby Garcia

The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking and scholarly work on post-1945 U.S. history. Yet the dominant narrative of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move outside the South after 1965. This book brings together new scholarship on black social movements outside the South to rethink the civil rights narrative and the place of race in recent history.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Describes the decades-long covert counterintelligence program code-named Cointelpro directed against socialists and activists in the Black and anti-Vietnam War movements. The operations revealed in the documents cited in this book many of them photographically reproduced provide an unprecedented look at the methods used by the FBI, CIA, military intelligence, and other U.S. police agencies. Despite their authors intentions, these documents also record pieces of the history of efforts to build the communist movement in the United States.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

The civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements were the two greatest protests of twentieth-century America. The dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1965 took precedence over civil rights legislation, which had dominated White House and congressional attention during the first half of the decade. The two issues became intertwined on January 6, 1966, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became the first civil rights organization to formally oppose the war, protesting the injustice of drafting African Americans to fight for the freedom of the South Vietnamese people when they were still denied basic freedoms at home.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Since his death on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King's legacy has influenced generations of activism. Edited and with a lead essay by Brandon Terry, this volume explores what this legacy can and cannot do for activism in the present. King spent the months leading up to his death organizing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and planning the Poor People's Campaign, a "multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington in pursuit of economic justice. Thus the spring of 1968 represented a hopeful, albeit chaotic set of possibilities; King, along with countless other activists, offered both ethical and strategic solutions to the multifaceted problems of war, racism, and economic inequality.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

This 21st-century activist's guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender carves out a path to collective liberation. Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development.

Staff Pick by April Hathcock

Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control - relegating millions to a permanent second-class status - even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

Staff Pick by Andrew Battista

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Staff Pick by Gaby Garcia

On August 28, 1963, something quite amazing occurred. On the day, one of the largest political rallies ever took place in support of civil and economic rights of African-Americans and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most stirring speeches in history, when standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. This book is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of this address and includes narrative and more than 100 captioned photos of the American Civil Rights movement.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

As raw and unforgettable as the moment they were taken, these iconic images—never before published as a collection—document the historic Selma-to-Montgomery marches that turned the tide for African American voting rights.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia

Volume 2 of the Double Exposure series features iconic, as well as moving but less well-known, photographs of pivotal Civil Rights events with work by Spider Martin, Charles Moore, and Ernest Withers among other noteworthy and newly discovered photographers.

Staff Pick by Maria Mejia