Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963 
 
On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter...

"Even though slavery had ended in the 1860s, African Americans were still suffering under the weight of segregation a hundred years later. They couldn't go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, or even use the same bathrooms as white people. But by the 1950s, black people refused to remain second-class citizens and were willing to risk their lives to make a change"--

At an early age, Martin Luther King Jr. was unhappy about the unfair laws and customs that made it difficult for African Americans to live freely. Before he reached his teen years, he vowed to do something about them. As an adult, he became a preacher and civil rights leader. He told the world about his dream for racial harmony and peace in the United States. He marched, led boycotts and sit-ins, and made speeches to try to obtain civil rights for...

A groundbreaking collection based on oral histories that brilliantly plumb the leadership of African American women in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights-many nearly lost to history-from the latest winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women were generally not in the headlines; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels...

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America - the right to cast a ballot...

“A bracing corrective to national mythology” about the American civil rights movement—from the author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (New York Times)
The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,...

Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was. Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King's revolutionary...

In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she "had become a woman haunted by the dead." Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family's history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into...

Discusses the march on Washington D.C. to demand equal rights for everyone.