Civil Rights History

August 18, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. This book reveals how the 70-year-long fight for women's suffrage was hard-won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others.

After 72 arduous years, the fate of the suffrage movement and its masterwork, the 19th amendment, rested not only on one state, Tennessee, but on the shoulders of a single man: 24-year-old legislator Harry Burn. Burn had previously voted with the anti-suffrage forces. If he did so again, the vote would be tied and the amendment would fall one state short of the 36 necessary for ratification. At the last minute, though, Harry Burn’s mother convinced him to vote in favor of the suffragist, and American history was forever changed.

Times of great change did not occur by man's desire for change, but through protest and persistence. Across the globe, it seems we are in an era of protest and drive. Not since the '60s have we seen political divides and awareness of this magnitude, and it is shaping all aspects of our day to day life. While some feel lost in despair and fear, we can look to the past and rise up ourselves. Protest changes the world like nothing else has to date. What change do you want to fight for?

You need to work to live. That’s the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries. Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees. But workers have always found a way to fight back.

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.

Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure of the First Amendment as well as of the entire Bill of Rights was more intentional than most people realize, beginning with the internal freedom of conscience and working outward to freedom of expression and finally freedom of public association. This design, Neuborne argues, was not to protect discrete individual rights - such as the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.

Acclaimed journalist Daniel J. Sharfstein cuts through centuries of myth to deliver this groundbreaking work. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, three American families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved—how the definitions of black and white changed over time.

Bill Bradley believes that America is at a crossroads, a "teachable moment" in which we are compelled to reevaluate our political system and leadership. With clarity and urgency, Bradley outlines the story we are being told now about who we are and what is possible for our nation. He then offers a new story, including what changes need to be made, and suggests that the party that chooses to embrace this new story will be in power for a generation.

At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and best-selling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.

Onyx lives with his mother, who is showing signs of early-onset dementia. He doesn't want to bring attention to his home—if Child Protective Services finds out, they'll put him into foster care. As he's trying to keep his life together, the Civil Rights Movement is accelerating. Is there anywhere that's safe for a young Black boy? Maybe, if only Onyx can fulfill his dream of becoming an astronaut and exploring space, where none of these challenges will follow him. In the meantime, Onyx can dream. And try to get his mom the help she needs.

In 1970, C. T. Vivian, a close colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a member of his executive staff, sat down to take stock of the civil rights movement and the progress it had made. His assessment was that it failed, and that the blame lay in the existence of myths about America. As prophetic today as it was fifty years ago, Vivian's voice rings out as a critique and a call to action for a society in deep need of justice and peace. The Black struggle for independence is more of an uphill climb than ever.

In 1937, the Depression is in full force, Joe Louis is the new heavyweight champion of the world, and Champion Always Luther arrives in Snow Hill, Alabama, changing Brother Sayre's life forever. Brother lives with his mother and sister in their well-run if run-down boardinghouse. Champion has been sent to live with his aunt, who works for Brother's family. With Champion, Brother learns all sorts of things―that he enjoys fishing, that he needs glasses, and that there are subtle and powerful rules of race and power that he's never noticed.

On a New Orleans morning in 1900, a young Black man named Robert Charles dared to fight back after an unprovoked assault by three white officers. The officers had first approached Charles on the grounds that he looked “suspicious” in a predominantly white neighborhood, and began to attack him after he stood up. After shots were fired, Charles fled on foot, and legal sanction was granted to anyone who sought to kill the “desperado” (as the white newspapers of the time quickly labeled him). In the days that followed, riotous mobs overtook New Orleans.

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.

Resilient Black Girl is a must-listen in young-adult nonfiction books for Black girls. As a social justice book for teens and a book about racism, it provides Black teen girls a better understanding of the effects of racism and equips them with skills for navigating spaces in their daily lives.

America was founded on the concept of the innate and inalienable rights of humankind. Many Christians see an echo of the imago Dei—that every human being carries the image of God—within those ideals. Yet these rights were systemically withheld from the Black and enslaved residents of this country for centuries. Through it all, Black people have proclaimed the truth of their dignity and personhood in powerful and profound ways. Crowned with Glory collects many of the writings of these men and women, both familiar and lesser-known, to shine a light on what has always been there.

A community of rock quarry miners in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, gave their tiny cluster of thatched roofed houses the name Azad Nagar. Freedomville. But it hasn't always been identified by that auspicious moniker. The miners renamed their village in 2000, after they staged a revolt that overthrew the profit-driven landowners who held their families in debt bondage for generations. But the complex story of Freedomville, the murder that these revolutionaries nearly got away with, and the short-lived freedom its inhabitants created has never before been told until now.

In the summer of 1962, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began to express interest in targeting one of the South's most brutally segregated cities. Nicknamed “Bombingham”, the city had witnessed the bombing of over a dozen Black homes and churches in the previous five years. A victory in Birmingham was a goal that would embolden the Civil Rights Movement like never before. Together with Ralph Abernathy and other SCLC leaders, King recruited and organized volunteers for sit-ins, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests throughout the city.

Mahalia Jackson was known as the queen of gospel music. A close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s, she was also a civil rights activist who sang at the March on Washington. And she traveled the world, too! Experience all the inspiring moments in Mahalia's big life in this thrilling biography, packed with fun facts, like who invented rock and roll! Short and engaging chapters are interspersed with special lists and other information made to order to engage kids, whether they're already biography fans or "have to" write a report for school.

While the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land, it is also a source of great controversy. It establishes the fundamental framework of our system of government, while differences in how to understand and interpret it often divide people. The United States Constitution: A History takes a fresh look at the Constitution, its origins, and controversies, from the founding of the country and its creation at the Constitutional Convention to the present. It examines the various controversies that divided the convention.