Civil Rights History

In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a White mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District - a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed 35 square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass?

Looting - a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods - is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement. But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class - not to mention the brazen messages these methods send to the police and the state.

What is a royal family?

Featuring biographies of Thomas Jennings, Elizabeth Jennings & Elizabeth Jennings (who sat down centuries before Rosa Parks did), Alice Ball, Patricia Bath, George Robert Carruthers, George Grant, Lonnie Johnson (nuclear physicist and inventor of the Super Soaker & Nerf Gun), Charles Turner, Anton Wilhelm Amo, the Russian Noble Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Ivan Abramovich Gannibal, Judith Gideon the Queen of Gonder, Kandake (Candace) the Queens of Meroe, and Princess Adoniah of Kush - Black History is so much more than Rosa Parks! A sequel to Black History is More than Martin Luther King and ...

Asian Americans have been woven into the fabric of the United States for centuries, yet they’re too often dismissed as “perpetual outsiders.” This misperception is fueled by enduring stereotypes, resulting in policies with real, negative consequences for the community. In her powerful book, Not Outsiders, Helen Raleigh dismantles these myths with a vivid retelling of their political activism. She reveals a community deeply rooted in America’s core values—freedom and equality—values they’ve championed for over 150 years. From battling for civil rights in the 19th century to ...

A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel.

A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.

Chosen by the Guardian as one of the one hundred best nonfiction books of all time, Olaudah Equiano’s searing first-person account helped awaken contemporary readers to the nightmare of slavery.

Of the great figure in 20th-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 39. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man.

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy - author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law - “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

Patricia Shupe and Emily Abrams fell in love in a time when homophobia was not only accepted it was expected in some areas. They fought together, laughed together, and loved together fiercely. They overcame all odds to be together through arrests, hate crimes, illness, and hiding their true selves for the comfort of society. But in a time before the Stonewall Riots, before gay acceptance, and before same sex couples could live freely, their love carried them through it all. Dancing on the Stone Wall is the journey of one humble couple who peacefully and quietly conquered the world together ...

This biography of a seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and more.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

This is not your ordinary memoir. The author looks at his life through the lens of stories he's told his children and grandchildren for years. Over seven decades of life, not in a recitation of things he did or people he met but of incidents that left a lasting impact on him in the form of stories that hopefully transport the reader back in time. These are not stories of the authors life, but stories from that life. Tales that tell of a journey from a place of deprivation and outhouses to privilege and state houses. One man's journey to realize the American dream.

A unique and timeless guide to American government and its electoral process - as relevant today as when it was first published in 1972 - from the voice of Black consciousness, cultural icon Dick Gregory, the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and author of the NAACP Image Award-winning Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies.

The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present, and in American Dialogue, Joseph J. Ellis focuses the conversation on the often-asked question "What would the Founding Fathers think?" He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics, using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today's political conflicts.

America's Black intellectuals have made many important contributions to American intellectual life as writers, historians, educators, and social activists. Various lines of thought, which form the black intellectual traditions, emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and continue to influence the present.