American Civil Rights

For fans of Bridgerton and The Davenports comes a sweeping historical novel from bestselling author Veronica Chambers about courageous (and flirtatious) Ida B. Wells as she navigates society parties and society prejudices to become a civil rights crusader. Before she became a warrior, Ida B...

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself, resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in Civil Rights history. Also caught up in the intense courtroom drama were legal giant Clarence Darrow and the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In this Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where Whites had and Blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

Are you curious to learn what happened after the US Civil War? Then dive into the captivating history of the Reconstruction Era! The US Civil War brought about a lot of change. The nation not only had to figure out how to become united once again, but it also had to figure out how to integrate the newly freed slaves into society. In addition, the country had to figure out how to recover from the war, which devastated the South and took many lives on both sides.

An incisive, intersectional essay anthology that celebrates and examines romance and romantic media through the lens of Black readers, writers, and cultural commentators, edited by Book Riot columnist and librarian Jessica Pryde. Romantic love has been one of the most essential elements of...

From Donald Bogle, the award-winning author of Hollywood Black and leading authority on Black cinema history, this is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive and lavish biography of Hollywood’s first African American movie goddess. Lena Horne’s life and career are truly remarkable in American film...

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.

A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s...

LaFayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this audiobook as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s from one of its greatest leaders.

Within a few years of its first issue in 1951, Jet, a pocket-sized magazine, became the "bible" for news of the civil rights movement. It was said, only half-jokingly, "If it wasn't in Jet, it didn't happen." Writing for the magazine and its glossy, big sister Ebony, for 53 years, longer than any other journalist, Washington bureau chief Simeon Booker was on the front lines of virtually every major event of the revolution that transformed America.

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn.

Trayvon Martin’s parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement. “A reminder—not only of Trayvon’s life and death but of the vulnerability of black lives in a country...

"A superb oral history." —The Washington Post Book World "So touching, so exhilarating...no book for a long time has left me so moved or so happy." —The New York Times Book Review The almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the Civil Rights Movement are brilliantly...

“Narrator Dion Graham is a masterful and much-loved narrator whose voice will pull listeners into the story of one of the 20th century's most important people.” —Booklist "This gripping biography of a revolutionary leader flies by. Listeners interested in a new perspective of Martin Luther...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A hauntingly beautiful account of a family fractured by war . . . filled with vivid and heartbreaking details.”—The New York Times Book Review NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE “Full of wonderful treasures offered by a unique and spirited father . . . written...

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

*The book that inspired the 2021 PBS American Experience documentary, The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.* This program includes an introduction read by the author. How the blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard changed the course of America’s civil rights history. Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage...

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 A revealing...