Civil Rights History

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: The first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university's new colleges.

An "admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book” (New York Times Book Review) in which “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race" (The Washington Post) takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. "This book should be a standard for all...

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “One of the truly great biographies of our time.”—Sean Wilentz, New York Times bestselling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy “A landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth century in the Robert Caro...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States—the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium "Full of intimate details, battling personalities, heated court cases, public persuasion...

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a...

Does free speech have limits? Can torture be justified? Who is really in charge of your rights? Every day we are confronted with news of foreign governments who refuse to acknowledge liberties that we in the Western world take for granted. But civil liberties are nearly always under threat, no matter where you live. Tom Head traverses the globe in order to provide a clear introduction to what civil liberties are and why they're worth defending.

Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it.

Top political strategist Maya Rupert reveals how, for people of color, being real comes at a cost and authenticity is a privilege the marginalized cannot afford—that is, unless we change the system that keeps sending us the bill. . . One of Maya Rupert’s earliest memories was learning how to...

"Both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for every reader"--Hillary Rodham Clinton Soon to Be a Major Television Event The nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote...

When famous political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville toured the new United States of America, he was impressed by the representative government set up by the Founders. At the same time, he ominously predicted, "If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto."

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.

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America. “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….” Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the...

This biography of a seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and more.

In Frontline Bodies, Nicolas Martin-Breteau argues that sports are not—and have never been—purely about entertainment for Black Americans. Instead, beginning in the 1890s during Reconstruction, Black Americans proactively used athletics as a tactic to fight racial oppression. Martin-Breteau considers the work of Edwin B. Henderson, a prominent Black physical educator, civil rights activist, and historian of Black sports.

How psychedelics can heal historical, intergenerational, and racialized trauma—an Afrofuturistic take on Black psychedelia toward joy and liberation The mainstream has long viewed psychedelic medicine as the purview of people with privilege: money to burn, time to trip, and the social safety...

From the son of legendary civil rights organizer Robert P. Moses: a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming Black in America that interweaves voices from 3 generations of the Moses family "Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice...

A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness. Creating a world worthy of our children requires recalling the dignity and distinction of the African way of life. This book is not written for...

4 stories of resilience, mutual aid, and radical rebellion that will transform how we understand the Great Depression Drawing on little-known stories of working people, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? amplifies voices that have been long omitted from standard histories of the...

A mother and race scholar seeks to answer her daughter’s many questions about race and racism with an earnest exploration into race relations and affirmative action from the perspectives of Asian Americans Before being struck down by the US Supreme Court in June 2023, affirmative action...

“Moving, thoughtful, redemptive. The Strangers is an important book. It will become a Black classic.”— Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road “Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book. Compelling and imaginatively expansive, this is...