Tuesday, February 25, 2014

10 Great Books On Civil Rights

(from usatoday.com)



In the past 50 years, thousands of books have been written about the civil rights movement. USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer recommends 10 works by historians, journalists, novelists and activists:

• Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964): King was best known for his speeches and sermons, but his writing also could be inspirational, including his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, part of this collection.

• Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow (1986): A Pulitzer Prize-winning account of King's religious faith and education, civil rights accomplishments and personal demons.

• Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (1988): Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the first volume in a trilogy that traces King's rise to greatness, his courage and personal conflicts.

• Malcolm & Martin & America: A Dream or a Nightmare by James Cone (1990): A theologian questions if Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were as much polar opposites as is popularly thought.

• Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (1990): The creator and a writer of the acclaimed public TV series Eyes on the Prize draws upon 1,000 interviews with those who took part in the marches, sit-ins and Freedom Rides.

• Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter (2001): Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an investigation of the author's hometown and own segregationist family during 1963 when the civil rights movement came into its own.

• Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism (2003): The Library of America's two-volume collection of the best reporting from 1941 through 1973, history in its first draft.

• Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas (2005): A vivid novel about a 19-year-old college student from Michigan who goes to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help register blacks to vote.

• Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders by Eric Etheridge (2008): Using police mug shots from 1961 and contemporary photos, the stories of protesters, black and white, who came from across the USA to challenge segregation laws.

• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (2010). By focusing on three individuals, the author chronicles the mass migration of the nearly 6 million African Americans who left the south between 1915 and 1970, remaking America.

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