Civil Rights History

"An award-winning investigative reporter shares the real-life detective story of how Klansmen came to justice in notorious unsolved civil rights cold cases--decades after they had gotten away with murder"-- Mitchell takes readers on the twisting, pulse-racing road that led to the reopening of four of the most infamous killings from the days of the civil rights movement. His work played a central role in bringing killers to justice for the assassination...

"In Mighty Justice, trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree recounts her inspiring life story that speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times. From the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, to the segregated courtrooms of the nation's capital; from the male stronghold of the army where she broke gender and color barriers to the pulpits of churches where women had waited for years for the right to...

Sheila Pree Bright's moving photographs of Civil Rights activists and Black Lives Matter protests--

Victorine Quille Adams was a Baltimore native and the first African American woman elected to the city council. Born in 1912, she lived through stringent segregation, racial violence and economic turbulence. Educated at Morgan State and Coppin State Universities, she took to the classroom and enriched the lives of her students. In 1946, she founded the Colored Women's Democratic Campaign Committee to educate African American women about the vote and...

"On June 5, 1966, the civil rights hero James Meredith left Memphis, Tennessee, on foot. Setting off toward Jackson, Mississippi, he hoped his march would promote Black voter registration and defy racism. The next day, he was shot by a mysterious white man and transferred to a hospital. What followed was one of the key dramas of the civil rights era ... Tracking rural demonstrators' courage and impassioned debates among movement leaders, [the author]...

It was the final speech of a long day, August 28, 1963, when hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In a resounding cadence, Martin Luther King Jr. lifted the crowd when he told of his dream that all Americans would join together to realize the founding ideal of equality. The power of the speech created an enduring symbol of the march and the larger civil rights movement. King's speech still inspires...

Offers a detailed account of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and discusses why those events signaled a turning point in the movement.

"In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful...

"Ernest C. Withers was one of the most prominent African-American photographers during the civil rights years. During the course of his work, he took thousands photographs that document the Movement--from the Emmett Till trial in 1955 to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. What set his work apart was that he goes beyond the political struggles to show the human face of Movement. Withers worked primarily a local photographer, as a freelancer...