American Civil Rights

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

It’s the dirty little secret of our American civil justice system: Getting real justice in everyday lawsuits costs too much. Legal fees and hidden costs dwarf financial stakes, forcing a choice between frustrating settlement or a long slog through litigation’s due process—either path feeling like legalized extortion. This huge and growing gap in our civil justice system occupies a no-man’s land of prevailing injustice between small claims and high-stakes disputes, defying all efforts to control it for decades. Until now.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only - or even always the dominant - civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift and community empowerment.

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations—even to Cow Tom himself.

First published in 1961, John Hope Franklin’s revelatory study of the Reconstruction Era is a landmark work of history, exploring the role of former slaves and dispelling longstanding popular myths about corruption and Radical rule. Looking past dubious scholarship that had previously dominated the narrative, Franklin combines astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era.

"I have a dream." When those words were spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the crowd stood, electrified, as Martin Luther King, Jr. brought the plight of African Americans to the public consciousness and firmly established himself as one of the greatest orators of all time. Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nationis a thrilling, behind-the-scenes account of the weeks leading up to the great event, as told by Clarence Jones, co-writer of the speech and close confidant to King.

In Separate and Unequal, historian Steven M. Gillon offers a revelatory new history of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - popularly known as the Kerner Commission. Convened by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Newark and Detroit left dozens dead and thousands injured, the commission issued a report in 1968 that attributed the unrest to "white racism" and called for aggressive new programs to end discrimination and poverty.

Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

One of the nation's preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, the second part of his epic trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement. In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage.

Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms. Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community.

Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement.

Crafted by some of the greatest minds in history, in this audiobook, you’ll find work by arguably the most famous Founding Fathers and Presidents of the United States, including Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.

In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.

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.

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of 18th-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.

This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.