Civil Rights History

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, The New Queer Conscience, Voices4 Founder and LGBTQIA+ activist Adam Eli offers a candid and compassionate introduction to queer responsibility. Eli calls on his Jewish faith to underline how kindness and support within the queer community can lead to a stronger global consciousness. More importantly, he reassures us that we're not alone. In fact, we never were. Because if you mess with one queer, you mess with us all.

Through oral histories and original interviews with surviving family members, Dan Goldberg brings 13 forgotten heroes away from the margins of history and into the spotlight. He reveals the opposition these men faced: the racist pseudoscience, the regular condescension, the repeated epithets, the verbal abuse, and even violence. Despite these immense challenges, the Golden Thirteen persisted—understanding the power of integration, the opportunities for black Americans if they succeeded, and the consequences if they failed.

After a 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia, bus segregation was made illegal on new grounds. With this victory in hand, the Freedom Rides of 1961 began. Organized primarily by the Congress on Racial Equality, the Freedom Rides followed the same guidance that inspired the Montgomery Boycott—nonviolent direct action. The momentum generated by the Freedom Rides and the following activism would lead to the famous March on Washington and eventually the passage of a historic civil rights bill in 1964.

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Growing up poor in a St. Louis African American community, Dick Gregory (b. 1932) gained his improvisational skills trading insults on neighborhood streets. He honed his ironic barbs in Chicago's black nightclubs before crossing over to mainstream venues. His success at the Playboy Club led to bookings at nightspots around the country, network television exposure, and a recording contract. His first book, From the Back of the Bus, offered satiric observations on race in America in the midst of the civil rights era.

From acclaimed author Patricia Hruby Powell comes the story of a landmark civil rights case, told in spare and gorgeous verse. In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, amidst segregation and prejudice, injustice and cruelty, two teenagers fell in love. Their life together broke the law, but their determination would change it. Richard and Mildred Loving were at the heart of a Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races, and a story of the devoted couple who faced discrimination, fought it, and won.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Fighter for Justice shows young listeners how the former First Lady evolved from a poor little rich girl to a protector and advocate for those without a voice. Although now seen as a cultural icon, she was a woman deeply insecure about her looks and her role in the world. But by recognizing her fears and constantly striving to overcome her prejudices, she used her proximity to presidents and her own power to aid in the fight for Civil Rights and other important causes. This biography gives listeners a fresh perspective on her extraordinary life.

In the months and weeks before the fateful November 22nd, 1963, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey, who raucously confronted JFK and whose family name adorns the plaza where the president was murdered.

Voting is our most important right as Americans—“the right that protects all the others,” as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act—but it’s also the one most violently contested throughout US history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump’s effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy.

Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.

Written in 1791 as a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is a seminal work on human freedom and equality. Using the French Revolution and its ideals as an example, he demonstrates his belief that any government must put the inherent rights of its citizens above all else, especially politics. After its publication, Paine left England for France and was tried in his absence for libel against the crown.

Hubert Humphrey was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office, he has been largely overlooked by biographers. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey's life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president's fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey's career.

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep.

It’s no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality–and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America’s richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the hidden and insidious ways that white male elites inherit, increase, and preserve their status—and, in this book, we get clear on how to uproot their monopoly on power.

One of the most notorious crimes during the Civil Rights Movement was the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi in June 1964. Occurring less than two weeks before the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the young volunteers were killed because they had come south to help register blacks to vote, a right they had been unfairly denied for over half a century thanks to Jim Crow. The shocking nature of the crimes galvanized people and helped bring about the kinds of changes the murderers sought to prevent.

Prejudential is a concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and Black Americans through the lens of the presidents who have been elected to represent all of its people.

For the past eight decades, we have lived in "the American Century"-a period during which the US has enjoyed unrivaled power-be it political, economic, or military-on the global stage. Born on the cusp of this new era, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has spent a lifetime illuminating our understanding of the changing contours of America power and world affairs. His many books on the nature of power and political leadership have rightly earned him his reputation as one of the most influential international relations scholars in the world today.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age, then pay attention....

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this “indispensable” book (Ellen Chesler, Ms. magazine) explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojurner Truth as she “meticulously and vibrantly chronicles” (Booklist) the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery.