Civil Rights
Path to Grace
The civil rights movement is often defined narrowly, relegated to the 1950s and 1960s and populated by such colossal figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Many forget that the movement was ...
The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education
As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated ...
A Slow, Calculated Lynching
In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard ...
The Struggle of Struggles
From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924–2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County’s ...
Emma's Postcard Album
BCALA 2023 Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation Award winner
The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob ...
Our Portion of Hell
Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee: An Oral History of the Struggle for Civil Rights offers an unrivalled account of how a rural Black community drew together to combat the immense forces ...
Women Who Invented the Sixties
While there were many protests in the 1950s—against racial segregation, economic inequality, urban renewal, McCarthyism, and the nuclear buildup—the movements that took off in the early 1960s were ...
Black Bodies in the River
Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events—especially the lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner—stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights movement. The ...
The South Strikes Back
In The South Strikes Back, Hodding Carter III describes the birth of the white Citizens’ Council in the Mississippi Delta and its spread throughout the South. Originally published in 1959, this book ...
The Real Ambassadors
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 ...