Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Summary:

A Day I Ain't Never Seen Before is both an oral history of Marks, Mississippi and a memoir of Joe Bateman's--a white civil rights worker from Oklahoma--experiences there at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We hear the voices of his neighbors, collaborators, and opponents as they describe their lives before and during the Movement, along with his own narration of the events. This book illuminates the thousands of ordinary people--Black and white, male and female, southern and northern, old and young--who provided the backbone, the spirit, and the power that brought about both the Civil Rights Act and the Brown decision and challenged the nation to do more. These people were the ground troops for Dr. King's dream and the embodiment of Malcolm X's warnings. And behind the more famous locales of the Movement--think Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Greensboro--are hundreds of ordinary towns like Marks. It was in those places where the impacts of the Movement were most closely felt and where the day-to-day struggles were especially real. This book is about one such ordinary town full of regular people struggling to make their lives better. Yet while much of the story is local, it intersects the broader movement in many places both through specific events like the Poor People's Campaign, Freedom Summer, James Meredith's March against Fear, and Washington, D.C.'s Resurrection City, and through broader civil rights themes ranging from school desegregation to voting rights, from sit-ins to white violence. Indeed, A Day has been edited, annotated, and contextualized by Cheryl Greenberg, a scholar of African American history, with an eye towards connecting Marks to the larger Civil Rights Movement--

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After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the attempted coup following the 2020 election. Providing context for the entire volume, the Introduction explains how COVID-19 and America's long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation's history. Discussing the rise of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, eventually exceeding the 1918 flu, the AIDS epidemic, and the Civil War, it ties public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections history, and epidemics together, and provides a short history of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction.

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States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts — and integration is carried out.

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From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America's backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington's cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln's log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an almost true story. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights--after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America's first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF--

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Since 2014, Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye have been working with a team of over a dozen historians to travel the state of Texas collecting oral histories of the Civil Rights era, from both African American and Mexican American activists. With financial support from the NEH and Krochmal's and Moye's institutions, the team conducted over 500 interviews, and then wrote essays on the state's small towns, big cities, and places in between. This book features over a dozen such essays that serve, in the editors' words, to reconstruct the history of the overlapping African American and Chicano/a freedom movements across the Lone Star State. Not one but two insurgencies challenged the state's twin caste systems, and they did so in intimate conversation. They flourished in unlikely places, urban and rural, and spanned decades before and after 1965, continuing into the 21st century. Despite the slow pace of change, activists of all ages forged powerful movements for self-determination. Some filed lawsuits for school integration and canvassed door-to-door to win political power. Others picketed to demand criminal justice reform and sought to improve public services in their cities. Still more activists joined unions and built neighborhood associations to challenge ongoing economic injustice. Organizers pointed out the ways in which integration often failed to produce equity, opting instead to build their own community-controlled healthcare, educational, and cultural institutions. Women played leading roles throughout these various campaigns, challenging the sexism of their comrades as well as that of the larger society. The polyglot activists also developed a variety of relationships with one another, from protracted collaboration to stiff competition--and everything in between. In addition to the oral history essays, the project features overview essays by the editors on each of the three regions treated (East Texas, South and West Texas, and Metropolitan Texas). A fourth section of the manuscript takes readers inside the project, explaining how this major collaboration among scholars came together and was executed. It also shares interview excerpts with nearly thirty subjects. (The full text of interviews, along with other supplementary materials, will be available on a dedicated website.)--

Summary:

A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long?, How Long? presents both a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have egregiously neglected the most important leaders of the civil-rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women.

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Jelks's meditations are written in the form of letter to Martin Luther King Jr. He speaks to the many public issues we presently confront in the United States: economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. The result is a contemporary revival of the literary tradition of meditative social analysis. These meditations on democracy provide spiritual oxygen to help readers endure the struggles of rebranding, rebuilding, and reforming our democratic institutions so that we can all breathe. -- adapted from jacket.

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Go inside the lives of people working to create an antiracist American future. They film themselves doing the work, confronting the obstacles and achieving the victories that could add up to real change in the movement for racial justice.

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For many, the story of the weeks of protests in the summer of 2020 began with the horrific nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds when Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on camera, and it ended with the sweeping federal, state, and intrapersonal changes that followed. It is a simple story, wherein white America finally witnessed enough brutality to move their collective consciousness. The only problem is that it isn't true. George Floyd was not the first Black man to be killed by police-he wasn't even the first to inspire nation-wide protests-yet his death came at a time when America was already at a tipping point. In say their names, five seasoned journalists probe this critical shift. With a piercing examination of how inequality has been propagated throughout history, from Black imprisonment and the Convict Leasing program to long-standing predatory medical practices to over-policing, the authors highlight the disparities that have long characterized the dangers of being Black in America. They examine the many moderate attempts to counteract these inequalities, from the modern Civil Rights movement to Ferguson, and how the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others pushed compliance with an unjust system to its breaking point. Finally, they outline the momentous changes that have resulted from this movement, while at the same time proposing necessary next steps to move forward. With a combination of penetrating, focused journalism and affecting personal insight, the authors bring together their collective years of reporting, creating a cohesive and comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in America--

Summary:

A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the New York Times bestselling author of the worthy and necessary (The New York Times) Nobody, Marc Lamont Hill, and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster. With his signature clear and courageous (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave some of the most pivotal recent moments in the country's racial divide--the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the harassment of Christian Cooper--into their historical context. In doing so, they reveal the common thread between these harrowing incidents: video recordings and the immediacy of technology has irrevocably changed our conversations about race and in many instances tipped the levers of power in favor of the historically disadvantaged. Drawing on the powerful role of technology as a driver of history, identity, and racial consciousness, Seen and Unseen asks why, after so much video confirmation of police violence on people of color, it took the footage of George Floyd to trigger an overwhelming response of sympathy and outrage? In the vein of The New Jim Crow and Caste, Seen and Unseen incisively explores what connects our moment to the history of race in America but also what makes today different from the civil rights movements of the past and what it will ultimately take to push social justice forward--

Summary:

Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their individual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality. In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes of the civil rights movements such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of Citizenship Schools to teach poor Black men and women to read and write and help them to register to vote. We learn of Black women's activism in the Black Panther Party where they fought the police, as well as the entrenched male leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the behind-the-scenes work of women kept the organization afloat when it was under siege. It also includes first-person testimonials from the women who made headlines with their courageous resistance to segregation-Rosa Parks, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Dorothy Height. This collection represents the coming of age of African-American women's history and presents new stories that point the way to future study. Contributors: Bettye Collier-Thomas, Vicki Crawford, Cynthia Griggs Fleming, V. P. Franklin, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Duchess Harris, Sharon Harley, Dorothy I. Height, Chana Kai Lee, Tracye Matthews, Genna Rae McNeil, Rosa Parks, Barbara Ransby, Jacqueline A. Rouse, Elaine Moore Smith, and Linda Faye Williams.

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Told through his perspective as an activist, Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. He explains how each act of violence was incited by specific instances of structural racism, and details concrete and actionable strategies to address crimes committed by our “justice” system.

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The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, re-centering the narrative around the mobilization of ordinary people.

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A first-person account of the two month stand-off in 2020 between protesters and state troopers, Metro police, and the National Guard at Ida B. Wells Plaza in Nashville--

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Peniel Joseph offers a powerful new interpretation of recent American history. The summer of 2020, he argues, marked the climax of nothing less than a Third Reconstruction: a new period of intense struggle to secure citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that sought to transform America after the US Civil War and during the civil rights era. America's first and second Reconstructions failed to achieve their largest aims. But our Third Reconstruction, Joseph writes, offers an opportunity we must seize--Provided by publisher.

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Award-winning author, scholar, and social visionary George Yancy brings together the greatest minds of our time to speak truth to power and welcome everyone into a conversation about the pursuit of justice, equality, and peace--

Summary:

Reviews the background of the 1963 civil rights demands, and describes the strategy of the Birmingham campaign and outlines what can be expected of future action.