A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law
by by Bryan Stevenson, Loretta Lynch, and Sherrilyn Ifill
This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time.
An Unseen Light:Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis
by Edited by Aram Goudsouzian & Charles W McKinney, Jr
In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, eminent and rising scholars present a multidisciplinary examination of African American activism in Memphis from the dawn of emancipation to the twenty-first century. Together, they investigate episodes such as the 1940 "Reign of Terror" when black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city's culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis's place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom and human dignity.
Coming of Age in Mississipppi
by Anne Moody
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.
An all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs and deadly force that were used to destroy it.
A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation's destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.
Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
by Devery S. Anderson
Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first, and as of 2018, only comprehensive account of the 1955 murder, the trial, and the 2004-2007 FBI investigation into the case and Mississippi grand jury decision. By all accounts, it is the definitive account of the case. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955.
Till's 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. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book is also the basis for a Hollywood mini-series produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck, Aaron Kaplan, James Lassiter, Jay Brown, Ty Ty Smith, John P. Middleton, Rosanna Grace, David B. Clark, and Alex Foster.
Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De LA Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South
by Maryanne Vollers
Chronicles the 30-year quest for justice in Medgar Evers's 1963 murder by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, culminating in his conviction. National Book Award finalist.
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Blacks in the New World
by John Dittmer
Local People is about the history of the movement in Mississippi.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Mississippi Historical Society McLemore Prize, the Herbert G. Gutman Prize and the Gustavus Myers Center for Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Prize.
Publication of this book was supported by a grant from DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana.
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
by Equal Justice Initiative
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents EJI's multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 - at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.
Mine Eyes Have Seen: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Journey
by D'Army Bailey
Currently a Circuit Court Judge in Tennessee's 30th Judicial District, D'Army Bailey has enjoyed a long and diverse career as an activist, a politician, an attorney, a writer and columnist, a public servant, and now, a jurist. A graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (1964) and the Yale Law School (1967), Judge Bailey became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s and served briefly as a member of the Berkeley California City Council before returning, in 1974, to his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee to practice law.
In 1983, Judge Bailey organized the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation, Inc. in hopes of raising enough money to preserve the Lorraine Motel-where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated-as a museum. After a long and tedious process of raising the requisite funding, the Lorraine building, which had been left to decay by the city, was transformed into a museum that traces the entire United States Civil Rights Movement. The museum was officially dedicated in July 1991.
Today, Judge Bailey resides in Memphis with his wife, Adrienne, and two sons, Justin and Merrit
Southern Labor & Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers
by Michael K. Honey
Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.
Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
by John Lewis and Michael D'Orso
The award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind, is one of our most important records of the American civil rights movement. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a “national treasure,” this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation.
In 1957, a teenaged boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America. Lewis’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders. Lewis’s leadership in the Nashville Movement—a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi—set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change.
The late Edward M. Kennedy said of Lewis, “John tells it like it was…Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history.”
We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired
by M.J. O'Brien, Forward by Julian Bond
Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Once in a great while, a certain photograph captures the essence of an era: Three people - one black and two white - demonstrate for equality at a lunch counter while a horde of cigarette-smoking hotshots pour catsup, sugar, and other condiments on the protesters' heads and down their backs. This iconic image strikes a chord for all who lived through those turbulent times of a changing America.
The photograph, which plays a central role in the audiobook's perspectives from frontline participants, caught a moment when the raw virulence of racism crashed against the defiance of visionaries. Sadly, this same sit-in and the protest events it inspired led to the assassination of Medgar Evers, who was leading the charge in Jackson for the NAACP.
We Shall Not Be Moved puts the Jackson Woolworth's sit-in into historical context. Part multifaceted biography, part well-researched history, this gripping narrative explores the hearts and minds of those participating in this harrowing sit-in experience. It was a demonstration without precedent in Mississippi - one that set the stage for much that would follow in the changing dynamics of the state's racial politics, particularly in its capital city.
