American Civil Rights

In Lighting the Fires of Freedom 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, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that remain important and relevant today.

The arduous task of overthrowing Jim Crow codes and legislation marked one of the first strides toward the modern struggle for ethnic equality in American society and required nearly a century of struggle. That effort spawned a multitude of heroic African American activists, but it is remembered in large part for the work of two iconic African American men of stature. Much like their later counterparts, the debate between gradual integration through temporary accommodation and overtly insistent activism was led by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression.

A moving true story for children ages 6 to 9 about growing up in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II—from the iconic Star Trek actor, activist, and author of the New York Times bestselling graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy. February 19, 1942. George Takei is four years...

A vibrant, revealing portrait of the "King of Calypso," whose extraordinary performing career and activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond Even two years after his death, Harry Belafonte is everywhere. You can’t go to a wedding, or to Yankee stadium, without...

Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram fled Nazi Germany only to find racism as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. As a white woman and a Holocaust refugee, Marione was the most unlikely of heroes in the fight for civil rights for African Americans. This is her empowering story - a tale of courage, strength, and determination.

An astonishing civil rights story from Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin. On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks, critically injuring off-duty men...

An expat in Rome makes his way as a writer in this gripping and genre-defying novel, first published in 1965 by a rediscovered great of Black American literature. In this masterpiece of metafiction set in the Rome of the tumultuous 1960s, Black American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his...

A radical reclamation of the Black Madonna as a liberatory figure that offers a richly spiritual and politically charged vision of Black divinity and resistance. Social psychologist and author of God Is a Black Woman Christena Cleveland brings forth Black Madonna as a Divine icon and spiritual...

A renowned judge wonders: What would criminal justice look like if we put respect at the center? The Black and Latina daughter of a working-class family, Victoria Pratt learned to treat everyone with dignity, no matter their background. When she became Newark Municipal Court’s chief judge, she...

Good Trouble is the helpful antidote to all the pessimism and name-calling that is permeating today’s political and social dialogues. Revisiting episodes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, it highlights the essential lessons that modern-day activists and the civically minded can extract and embrace in order to move forward and create change. Journalist Christopher Noxon dives into the real stories behind the front lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and notable figures such as Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin.

During the civil rights movement, the state of Mississippi created an elaborate spy network. Its mission was to preserve segregation by any means necessary—including voter interference, sponsorship of white supremacy groups, and even murder.

Bayard Rustin (1912 to1987), the famed openly gay African American organizer, taught Martin Luther King Jr. strategies of nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thereby launching the birth of the civil rights movement in 1955. Widely acclaimed as a founding father of modern black protest, in 1963 Rustin reached his pinnacle of notoriety as organizer of the March on Washington.

A celebration of the revolutionary change Amy and David Goodman have witnessed during the two decades of their acclaimed television and radio news program Democracy Now!—and how small individual acts from progressive heroes have produced lasting results. In 1996 Amy Goodman began hosting a...

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...

This program includes an introduction read by the author. A radical case for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment as the only way to control gun violence in America. There's an average of one mass shooting per day in the United States. Given the ineffectiveness of the gun control lobby, it's time for...

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of the social injustice. Yet, her simple act of courage started a chain of events that forever shaped the landscape of American race...

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. This seemingly small act triggered civil rights protests across America and earned Rosa Parks the title "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice For decades, affirmative action reshaped not just American higher education but the broader society, opening doors that had been closed for centuries and transforming who entered the pathways to power. But the Supreme Court in 2023 killed...

Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, shares the true story about a girl, a dress, and the historic fight to attend an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Carlotta can’t wait to wear her new dress on her first day of school. But when the moment finally arrives...