A moving portrait of how black Americans have spoken out against injustice—with speeches by Thurgood Marshall, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, and more.In "full-throated public oratory, the kind that can stir the soul", this unique anthology collects the transcribed speeches of the twentieth century's leading African American cultural, literary, and political figures, many never before available in printed form ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune...

A National Book Award winnerThe New York Times bestselling history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.**“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” -**Washington PostSome Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—...

Martin Luther King, Jr. described Stride Toward Freedom as "the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of non-violence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rallied by the young preacher and activist Martin Luther King, ...

A provocative and lively examination of the meaning of America's first black presidency, by the New York Times-bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop.Michael Eric Dyson explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama's identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Wal...

It’s become fashionable among the liberal elite to downplay, deride, even deny America’s greatness. The political correctness police insist that America is hated” around the world for being too big, too powerful, too rich, too successful, too loud, too intrusive. And besides, it’s not nice to brag.They are completely missing the point.America’s greatness, America’s exceptional greatness, is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and ...

The Struggle for Black Equality is a dramatic, memorable history of the civil rights movement. Harvard Sitkoff offers both a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of civil rights organizations and a compelling analysis of the continuing problems plaguing many African Americans. With a new foreword and afterword, and an up-to-date bibliography, this anniversary edition highlights the continuing significance of the movement for black equality and justice.

A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide.Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests—the largest state government–focused civil disobedience campaign in American history—came to be known as...

The bestselling author of Lincoln on Leadership brings us an absorbing chronicle of Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership during the most tumultuous period in America's recent past—featuring a foreword by his daugher, Dr. Bernice King.Martin Luther King Jr. is known for his famous speeches and his ability to inspire the people of the United States to demand equality, regardless of the color of their skin. His ability to lead has cemented himself as one of America's g...

From the end of postwar Reconstruction in the South to an analysis of the rise and fall of Black Power, acclaimed historian Adam Fairclough presents a straightforward synthesis of the century-long struggle of black Americans to achieve civil rights and equality in the United States. Beginning with Ida B. Wells and the campaign against lynching in the 1890s, Fairclough chronicles the tradition of protest that led to the formation of the NAACP, Booker T. Washington and the strategy of accomm...

“In The American Bible, Prothero has turned his considerable talents to assembling a version of the American canon. The author's prose is, as usual, spritely, informed and incisive.” – Washington PostThe New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One presents a provocative crash course in the great “American scriptures”—those texts that have both divided and defined our understanding of what it is to b...

There are those who say the South has disappeared. But in her groundbreaking, thought-provoking exploration of the region, Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native and Pulitzer Prize finalist, asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform itself.Thompson spent years traveling through the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. African Americans who left en masse for much of...

Howard Zinn on Race is Zinn’s choice of the shorter writings and speeches that best reflect his views on America’s most taboo topic. As chairman of the history department at all black women’s Spelman College, Zinn was an outspoken supporter of student activists in the nascent civil rights movement. In "The Southern Mystique," he tells of how he was asked to leave Spelman in 1963 after teaching there for seven years. "Behind every one of the national government’s moves toward racial equalit...