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Top 10 Books about the Civil Rights Movement |
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Lighting the Fires of Freedom by Janet Dewart BellA groundbreaking collection based on oral histories celebrates the lesser-known leadership of African-American women in the 20th-century fight for civil rights, drawing on first-person interviews to offer deeply personal and intimate insights into what inspired and fueled the work of nine surviving Civil Rights-era activists.
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Civil Rights Queen
by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
This biography of the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court examines how she played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South.
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Walking with the Wind
by John Lewis
The highest black elected official in America, the congressman looks back on his life from his childhood on a Alabama cotton farm to his fight for civil rights, to his enduring commitment to the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Until Justice Be Done
by Kate Masur
A groundbreaking history of the antebellum movement for equal rights that reshaped the institutions of freedom after the Civil War. The half century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over freedom as well as slavery: what were the arrangements of free society, especially for African Americans? Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted black codes that discouraged the settlement and restricted the basic rights of free black people. But claiming the equal-rights promises of the Declaration and the Constitution, a biracial movement arose to fight these racist state laws. Kate Masur's magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Its advocates battled in state legislatures, Congress, and the courts, and through petitioning, party politics and elections. They visited slave states to challenge local laws that imprisoned free blacks and sold them into slavery. Despite immovable white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, their vision became increasingly mainstream. After the Civil War, their arguments shaped the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, the pillars of our second founding.
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Carry Me Home
by Diane McWhorter
A journalist chronicles the peak of the civil rights movement, focusing on the African-American freedom fighters who stood firm on issues of civil rights and segregation during the movement's eventful climax in Birmingham and the white establishment that opposed them.
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Before the Movement
by Dylan C. Penningroth
A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.
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Medgar & Myrlie
by Joy-Ann Reid
Tracing the extraordinary lives and legacy of two civil rights icons, this gripping account of Medgar and Myrlie Evers is told through their relationship and the work that went into winning basic rights for black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
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Waging a Good War
by Thomas E. Ricks
A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter offers a fresh perspective on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its legacy today, narrating its triumphs and defeats and highlighting lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool.
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Saying It Loud
by Mark Whitaker
Deeply researched and widely reported, this exploration of the Black Power phenomenon that began to challenge the traditional civil rights movement in 1966 offers brilliant portraits of the major characters in the yearlong drama and the fierce battles over voting rights, identity politics and the teaching of Black history. Illustrations.
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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