Civil Rights History

With “arresting prose and keen insights” (Donna Brazile, New York Times bestselling author of Hacks), bestselling author Juan Williams turns his attention to the rise of a new 21st-century civil rights movement in this highly anticipated follow-up to Eyes on the Prize. More than a century of...

In 1950, before Montgomery, Alabama, knew Martin Luther King Jr., before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a White passenger, before the city's famous bus boycott, a Negro man named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by a White police officer in a confrontation after he tried to board a city bus. Thomas Gray, who had played football with Hilliard when they were kids, was outraged by the unjustifiable shooting. Gray protested, eventually staging a major downtown march to register voters and standing up to police brutality.

The world's eyes were on Mississippi during the summer of 1964, when civil rights activists launched an ambitious African American voter registration project and were met with violent resistance from white supremacists. Sue Sojourner and her husband arrived in Holmes County, Mississippi, in the wake of this historic time, known as "Freedom Summer". Thunder of Freedom unites Sojourner's personal experiences with her insights regarding the dynamics of race relations in the 1960s South, providing listeners with a unique look at the struggle for rights and equality in Mississippi.

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.

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley - daughter of actress Lena Horne - delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to civil rights. Beginning with her great-great-grandfather, Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in postwar Atlanta, Buckley follows her family's two branches: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn.

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

First time on audio! The timeless Pulitzer Prize winner, the first in an epic two-volume biography that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era, narrated by Emmy and Tony Award winner Courtney B. Vance. This monumental biography by David Levering Lewis—eight years in the...

The first book to cover the entirety of disability history, from pre-1492 to the present Disability is not only the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A...

*A New York Times Notable Book* *A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year* From the bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of The Big House comes “a well-blended narrative packed with top-notch reporting and relevance for our own time” (The Boston Globe) about the young athletes...

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.

In the dramatic and tension-filled months of 1965 that led up to the Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, King and other national leaders, including Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis, held strategy sessions at the Jackson house and met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar to negotiate plans for the march.

Historically, they have borne the labels "freaks" and "oddities"; they have been collected as pets, displayed as spectacles, and treated as comic relief. Now, for the first time, in this comprehensive volume, the lives of dwarfs are explored in all their fullness and humanity. Spanning the centuries from ancient Egypt to the present, this unique social history chronicles the various ways this population has been exploited, describes their strategies for coping, and notes the persistent influence of mythology upon perceptions of them by others.

Civil rights icon Claudette Colvin teams up with Phillip Hoose—author of the Newbery Honor and National Book Award–winning blockbuster biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice—to tell her groundbreaking story. This audiobook features music and special effects. Listen along and...

The bestselling author, political analyst, and civil rights expert delivers a forceful critique of the Trump administration's ignorant and unprecedented rollback of the civil rights movement. In this powerful and timely book, civil rights historian and political analyst Juan Williams denounces...

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On...

Mark Whitaker “writes with the eye of a journalist and ear of a poet” (The Boston Globe) to tell the story of the momentous year that redefined the civil rights movement as a new sense of Black identity, expressed in the slogan “Black Power,” challenged the nonviolent philosophy of...

This is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper, who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn’t commit, and of the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense.

When a class-action lawsuit against the US government results in a billion-dollar settlement for the aggrieved parties, you’d expect the story to be headline news...to be posted on social media everywhere...to be adapted to film or even to a popular legal procedural series on TV....