Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change National Book Award Collection

In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the US was idyllic. But chasing good school districts with affordable housing left Tiffanie and her family constantly uprooted--moving from Texas to Florida then back to New Jersey. As Tiffanie came of age in the suburbs, she began to ask questions about the binary Black and white American world. Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all? Why was it so hard for Black families to achieve stability? Why were Black girls treated as something other than worthy? Ultimately, exhausted by the pursuit of a "better life" in America, twenty-year old Tiffanie returns to Tobago. She is suddenly able to enjoy the simple freedom of being Black without fear, and imagines a different future for her own children. But then COVID-19 and widely publicized instances of police brutality bring America front and center again. This time, as an outsider supported by a new community, Tiffanie grieves and rages for Black Americans in a way she couldn't when she was one.

An expansion of her New York Times piece of the same name, Black American Refugee examines in depth the intersection of her personal experiences and the broader culture and historical ramifications of American racism and global white supremacy. Through thoughtful introspection and candidness, Tiffanie unravels the complex workings of the people in her life, including herself, centering Black womanhood, and illuminating the toll a lifetime of racism can take. Must Black people search beyond the shores of the "land of the free" to realize emancipation? Or will the voices that propel America's new reckoning welcome all dreamers and dreams to this land?

This biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term “race woman” to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte’s first Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the founding director of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture. Maxwell-Roddey founded the National Council for Black Studies, helping institutionalize the field with what is still its premier professional organization, and served as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women’s organizations in the United States. Using oral histories and primary sources that include private records from numerous Black women’s home archives, Ramsey illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of a powerful leader’s life story.

Provides compelling and manageable solutions for how to reform the criminal justice system from the inside out A racial reckoning in the US criminal justice system was long overdue well before the highly publicized murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others in 2020. Progressive Prosecution argues that prosecutors, having helped build our failed system of mass incarceration, must now lead the charge to dismantle it. With contributions from practicing district attorneys as well as leading scholars in the fields of law and criminal justice, Taylor-Thompson and Thompson's volume offers an unapologetically ambitious vision for reform. The contributors draw from empirical evidence and years of combined research experience to argue that change must happen at the local level, with prosecutors choosing to adopt race-conscious approaches. These prosecutors must do the hard work themselves, actively focusing on the ways that race misshapes perceptions of criminality, influences discretionary calls, affects how we select juries, and induces a reliance on punitive responses. Progressive Prosecution acts as both a call to action and a practical guide, instructing prosecutors on what they need to do to bring about lasting and meaningful change. Progressive Prosecution is an urgent work of scholarship, a must-read for anyone committed to racial equity and meaningful criminal justice reform.

In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

America's first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last--an opportunity to choose hope over fear.

In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America's greatest moral revolution--the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization--the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.

An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the Movement's triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance--involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement's adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool--the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement's later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America's civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change--and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.

America, Goddam explores the combined forces of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam, renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence. Across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led many to envisioning and building toward Black liberation through organizing and radical politics. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song which inspired the title, America, Goddam is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working-class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, it is these punishment campaigns, Murch says, that generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such difficult conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and incarceration has proved difficult. This book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged since the killing of Trayvon Martin that challenges the bi-partisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it.

Making a case for beauty in a time of crisis and loss echoes bell hooks's wisdom about love, "It's not about going soft at all; it's about knowing what can save our planet. Which is people connecting, communicating, showing loving-kindness." Beauty inspires such a spirit of community. And while it is imperative to work to understand the histories of this nation and its multitiered systemic oppressions, collaboratively co-constructing alternative courses of action for the future is just as vital. With work by leading poets from the U.S. territories, commonwealths, states, and the District of Columbia, THE BEAUTIFUL engages both of these tasks.

Bodies out of Place asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies out of Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events--the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, sleeping while Black occurrences, and others--Combs demonstrates how the underlying belief that undergirds each encounter is a false presumption that Black bodies in certain contexts are out of place. Within these examples she illustrates how, even amid professions to color-blindness, fixed attitudes about where Black bodies belong, in what positions, at what time, and with whom still predominate. Combs describes a long historical pattern of white pushback against Black advancement and illuminates how each of the various forms of pushback is aimed at social control and regulation of Black bodies. She describes overt and covert attempts to push Black bodies back into their presumed place in U.S. society. While the pushback takes many forms, each works to paint a narrative to justify, rationalize, and excuse continuing violence against Black bodies. Equally important, Combs celebrates the resilient Black agency that has resisted this subjugation.

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law? In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.

In contemporary South Africa, power no longer maps neatly onto race. While white South Africans continue to enjoy considerable power at the top levels of industry, they have become a demographic minority, politically subordinate to the black South African population. To be white today means having to adjust to a new racial paradigm. In this book, Jacob Boersema argues that this adaptation requires nothing less than unlearning racism: confronting the shame of a racist past, acknowledging privilege, and, to varying degrees, rethinking notions of nationalism. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with a cross-section of white South Africans--representationally diverse in age, class, and gender--Boersema details how they understand their whiteness and depicts the limits and possibilities of individual, and collective, transformation. He reveals that the process of unlearning racism entails dismantling psychological and institutional structures alike, all of which are inflected by emotion and shaped by ideas of culture and power. Can We Unlearn Racism? pursues a question that should be at the forefront of every society's collective consciousness. Theoretically rich and ethnographically empathetic, this book offers valuable insights into the broader sociological process of unlearning, relevant today to communities all around the world.

In Black Reconstruction W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away. As history testifies, revolution nearly always triggers its antithesis: counterrevolution. In this book Steinberg provides an analysis of this backlash, tracing the reverse flow of history that has led to the current national reckoning on race. Steinberg puts counterrevolution into historical and theoretical perspective, exploring the "victim-blaming" and "colorblind" discourses that emerged in the post-segregation era and undermined progress toward racial equality, and led to the gutting of affirmative action. This book reflects Steinberg's long career as a critical race scholar, culminating with his assessment of our current moment and the possibilities for political transformation.

The definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice and champion of twentieth-century American liberal democracy. Scholars have portrayed Felix Frankfurter-Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice-as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and Warren Court villain. Yet as Brad Snyder reveals, Frankfurter was a pro-government, pro-civil rights liberal. He helped found the ACLU, rejected shifting political labels, and practiced judicial restraint. A disciple of Oliver Wendell Holmes and a protégé of Louis Brandeis, he thrived as a power broker for FDR and as a talent scout for the liberal establishment. (Former students and clerks included Dean Acheson, Elliot Richardson, and Richard Goodwin.) This sweeping narrative illuminates how an Austrian immigrant befriended presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, led calls for a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, and helped achieve a unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. The result is a full and fascinating portrait of a lawyer and Supreme Court justice who championed democracy.

In their darkest hours over the course of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds across the United States and beyond to build vast, now forgotten, networks of mutual aid: farms, shops, schools, banks, daycares, homes, health clinics, and burial grounds. They called these spaces "cooperatives," local challenges to global capital, where people pooled all they had to meet all their needs. By reading their activism as an artistic practice, Irvin J. Hunt argues that their overarching need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. Steeped in the wonders of this movement's material afterlife, Hunt extrapolates three non-progressive forms of movement time: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a kind of all-at-once simultaneity. These temporalities describe how these leaders, along with their circles, maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, expressed the pleasures of resistance, challenged the value of longevity, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be.

"Identity politics" is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Táíwò argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture--deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of "class" vs. "race." By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

In this unforgetable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father's cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploitative media, and her difficult yet determined journey as an activist against police violence. She begins with the morning of July 17, 2014--a rare day off from work, one she had hoped to enjoy with rest and family, that quickly turned her world inside out. What follows is a personal account of the suffering Emerald and her family endured: unsympathetic camera lenses, the stares and whispers of strangers, and the inability to mourn in private. In addition to these vulnerable, personal essays, Finding My Voice includes conversations in which Emerald found inspiration, empathy, and community: politicians, athletes, and activists like Brian Benjamin and Etan Thomas; others who had survived similarly unfathomable grief like Lora Dene King, Angelique Kearse, and Pamela Brooks; and Emerald's own family, Mrs. Esaw Garner and Eric Garner Jr. The book ends with a powerful call-to-action by author and daughter of Malcolm X, Ilyasah Shabazz. With growing calls for radical transformation and accountability, Emerald Garner's memoir is a story of family and community, and the strength it takes to survive, to stand, to speak."

A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster-a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement, and one woman's relentless battle for environmental justice. By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. After a white crabber was killed by a young Vietnamese refugee in self-defense, the situation became a tinderbox primed to explode, and the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan saw an opportunity to stoke the fishermen's rage and prejudices. A shocking campaign of violence ensued, marked by burning crosses, conspiracy theories, death threats, torched boats, and heavily armed Klansmen patrolling Galveston Bay. The Vietnamese were on the brink of fleeing, until a charismatic leader in their community, a highly decorated colonel, convinced them to stand their ground by entrusting their fate with the Constitution. Drawing upon a trove of never-before-published material, including FBI and ATF records, unprecedented access to case files, and scores of firsthand interviews with Klansmen, shrimpers, law enforcement, environmental activists, lawyers, perpetrators and victims, Johnson uncovers secrets and secures confessions to crimes that went unsolved for more than forty years.

"From the American Revolution to Black Lives Matter, Americans have come to associate freedom with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. Few ideas are as central to the national mythos. But whenever the federal government has taken a stand for racial minorities, however halfhearted, white Americans have been quick to weaponize the concept of freedom, framing the state itself as a tyrannical obstacle to their own liberties. In Freedom's Dominion, prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie lays bare the tales of violence and power that lie beneath America's cherished ideal of freedom, through the history of one seemingly charming place in Alabama-Barbour County and its largest town, Eufaula. Ever since the Founding, white Americans crying freedom have responded to even the most limited federal interventions to help non-white people with massive, and often violent, resistance. Tracing one town's story and a long struggle between local racism and federal power that continues to this day, Freedom's Dominion reveals how many white Americans came view the federal government as an obstacle to their freedom-their freedom, that is, to oppress.

Early on a summer morning in 1974, local officials found the jailer Clarence Alligood stabbed to death in a cell in the women's section of a rural North Carolina jail. Fleeing the scene was Joan Little, twenty years old, poor, Black, and in trouble. After turning herself in, Little faced a possible death sentence in the state's gas chamber. At her trial, which was followed around the world, Little claimed that she had killed Alligood in self-defense against sexual assault. Local and national figures took up Little's cause, protesting her innocence. After a five-week trial, Little was acquitted. But the case stirred debate about a woman's right to use deadly force to resist sexual violence. Through the prism of Little's rape-murder trial and the Free Joan Little campaign, Christina Greene explores the intersecting histories of African American women, mass incarceration, sexual violence, and social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Greene argues that Little's circumstances prior to her arrest, assault, and trial were shaped by unprecedented increases in federal financing of local law enforcement and a decades-long criminalization of Blackness. She also reveals tensions among Little's defenders and recovers Black women's intersectional politics of the period, which linked women's prison protest and antirape activism with broader struggles for economic and political justice.

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the "Good War" fought by the "Greatest Generation." Half American is American history as you've likely never read it before.

A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy--from his family's roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing--telling the story of how one man's tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.

Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint. Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 (passed amid pervasive fears of slave rebellions) authorizes the president to deploy federal troops to quell domestic uprisings. Invoked during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, the Act was deployed to enforce the promise of equal citizenship for Black Americans. But the Act has also authorized federal military intervention to suppress so-called race riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and during the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion; more recently, President Trump threatened to use the Act in response to the George Floyd racial justice protests. Hawa Allan argues that the invocation of the Act to either enforce civil rights or suppress riots reflects the enduring struggle to incorporate Black Americans as full citizens of the United States. She demonstrates how the Insurrection Act exposes America's most enduring conflicts: over racial injustice, human rights, equal citizenship, and federal power.

Victoria W. Wolcott argues that utopianism is the little-appreciated base of the visionary worldview that informed the prime movers of the Civil Rights Movement. Idealism and pragmatism, not utopianism, are what tend to come to mind when we think about the motivating philosophies of the movement. It's well-known that many of its iconic moments were carefully executed products of planning, not passion alone. But Wolcott holds that pragmatism and idealism alike were grounded in nothing less than intensely utopian thought. Key figures from Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott to Marjorie Penney and Howard Thurman shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was, Wolcott shows, both specifically utopian and precisely engaged in changing the existing world. Casting mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in the light of utopianism ultimately allows us to see the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

We remember the 1966 birth of the New Orleans Saints as a shady quid pro quo between the NFL commissioner and a Louisiana congressman. Moving the Chains is the untold story of the athlete protest that necessitated this backroom deal, as New Orleans scrambled to respond to a very public repudiation of the racist policies that governed the city. In the decade that preceded the 1965 athlete walkout, a reactionary backlash had swept through Louisiana, bringing with it a host of new segregation laws and enough social strong-arming to quash any complaints, even from suffering sports promoters. Nationwide protests assailed the Tulane Green Wave, the Sugar Bowl, and the NFL's preseason stop-offs, and only legal loopholes and a lot of luck kept football alive in the city. Still, live it did, and in January 1965, locals believed they were just a week away from landing their own pro franchise. All they had to do was pack Tulane Stadium for the city's biggest audition yet, the AFL All-Star game. Ultimately, all fifty-eight Black and white teammates walked out of the game to protest the town's lingering segregation practices and public abuse of Black players. Following that, love of the gridiron prompted and excused something out of sync with the city's branding: change. In less than two years, the Big Easy made enough progress to pass a blitz inspection by Black and white NFL officials and receive the long-desired expansion team. The story of the athletes whose bravery led to change quickly fell by the wayside. Locals framed desegregation efforts as proof that the town had been progressive and tolerant all along. Furthermore, when a handshake between Pete Rozelle and Hale Boggs gave America its first Super Bowl and New Orleans its own club, the city proudly clung to that version of events, never admitting the cleanup even took place. As a result, Moving the Chains is the first book to reveal the ramifications of the All-Stars' civil resistance and to detail the Saints' true first win.

No Choice begins by discussing the ways in which life before Roe will be mirrored in life after: the wealthy and privileged will still have access, low-income people will suffer disproportionately, and pregnancy will be heavily policed. Then, Andrews looks at the states and communities that have been affected by the erosion of abortion rights in the U.S., and tells the stories of those who are most at risk from this reversal of settled law. As the battle moves to state legislatures around the country, the book profiles the people who are working to ensure safe, legal access to this fundamental part of health care.

The stories of Black lawyers and judges are rarely told. By sharing Crockett's life of principled courage, "No Equal Justice" breaks this silence. The book begins by tracing the Crockett family history from slavery to George's admission into the University of Michigan Law School. He became one of the most senior Black lawyers in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Later, he played a central role fighting discrimination in the United Auto Workers union. In 1949, he became the only Black lawyer, in a team of five attorneys, defending the constitutional rights of the leaders of the U.S. Communist Party in United States v. Dennis, the longest and most dramatic political trial in American history. At the close of the case, Crockett and his defense colleagues were summarily sentenced to prison for zealously representing their clients. He headed the National Lawyers Guild office in Jackson, Mississippi, during 1964's Freedom Summer. In 1966, he was elected to Detroit's Recorder's Court-the court hearing all criminal cases in the city. For the first time, Detroit had a courtroom where Black litigants knew they would be treated fairly. In 1969, the New Bethel Church Incident was Crockett's most famous case. He held court proceeding in the police station itself, freeing members of a Black nationalist group who had been illegally arrested. Crockett spent his life fighting racism and defending the constitutional rights of the oppressed. This book introduces him to a new generation of readers, historians, and social justice activists.

Photographer O.N. Pruitt (1891-1967) was for some forty years the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus--known to locals as 'Possum Town.' His body of work recalls many FSA photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider with an agenda; he was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town and its residents. He photographed his fellow White citizens and Black ones as well, in circumstances ranging from the mundane to the horrific: family picnics, parades, river baptisms, carnivals, fires, funerals, two of Mississippi's last public and legal executions by hanging, and most grimly, a lynching. From formal portraits to candid images of events in the moment, Pruitt's documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers today an invitation to meditate on the vexing interrelations of photography, community, race, and historical memory. This stunning book presents Pruitt's photography as never before, combining more than 150 images with a biographical introduction and Hudson's short essays and reflective captions on subjects such as religion and racial violence, small-town work-life and entertainment, and the idea of visual legacy as linked to historical memory.

Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett's work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers. This critical biography--the first in-depth study of Bennett's life--travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett's previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle.

Pauli Murray's Revolutionary Life is the story of a feisty African-American woman born in 1910 who blazed through the barriers of race and gender years before the Civil Rights and Women's Movements. The granddaughter of a Union Army soldier and a woman whose enslaved mother was raped by her master, Pauli fearlessly rode freight trains dressed as a boy during the Depression, became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, obtained law degrees from Howard and Yale universities before becoming one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal priest.

In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit, historian Natalia Molina traces the life's work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored, housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism. Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and support. The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with the tastes of their patria chica, one another, and the city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen and the front of the house across borders and decades. Their stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience, from the pressures of racism and segregation, to the complex networks of family and community, the cross-currents of gender and sexuality, and the small but essential pleasures of daily life. A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how racialized minorities create a sense of belonging, and will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider, but had a special place where they felt like an insider.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a roadmap for how to achieve this lofty goal--it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path toward the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the NAACP Legal Defense organization and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967). Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a case to desegregate a single school district in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state-imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit that would lead to the Lee decision was filed. As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabama's official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South.

Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work. Riding Jane Crow examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies' cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.

A narrative account of Jim Crow as people experienced it The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. -- New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation" -- takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South. Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people. The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it.

The Struggle in Our Veins is the poetic echoes of an over 400 year old struggle of a people to achieve equality in America. Although sometimes elegiac and other times ebullient, the poems within are nonetheless branches of the same tree. The pains and accomplishments of this struggle go hand in hand, and the abstract verses written on these pages highlight and define an experience that is unfortunately still ongoing. The Struggle in Our Veins is a poetic rendering of the songs and the cries of a people simply trying to get American to recognize the face that all men are indeed created equal, and endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The biography "A Civil Rights Activist from Montgomery to Zambia: The Career of Reverend Robert E. Hughes" by Randall C Jimerson examines the inter-racial nature of civil rights and liberation movements in Alabama, Southern Rhodesia, and Zambia and connects them on a global scale through the life and career of Revered Robert E. Hughes.

To Live Peaceably Together is a lively examination of the methods and accomplishments of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a primarily Quaker group that took a unique and influential approach to cultivating cultural acceptance of residential integration in America after World War II. K'Meyer offers a close study of how a social movement develops and wields influence, and how social activists do their work and why. Driven by detailed stories of activists and the obstacles they encountered, the book studies how a mostly white faith-based activist group worked to ally itself to a cause that demanded constant learning and reassessment. K'Meyer details the AFSC members' spiritual and humanist motivations, their understandings of segregation, their visions of integrated neighborhoods, as well as how their strategies changed as they came to better understand structural inequality, and how they were eventually adopted by other groups.

In this book, an award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change. Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as this book uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, a legal scholar and sociologist reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a "family policing system" that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment. The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, this book argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.

The US civil rights movement was one of the most important and patriotic eras in US history. Travel to experience and understand this consequential period is both rewarding and challenging. Planning this journey isn’t easy. The distances to and between the places where this history happened are long. Travelers also must know when relevant museums, historic homes and churches, and other places of interest are open and when making appointments to visit are a must. Traveling Freedom’s Road: A Guide to Our Civil Rights History makes this important journey easier and more meaningful. Not only are readers provided with comprehensive planning information on destination cities where this history occurred but they also benefit from narratives related to the people who made the civil rights movement one of the highest expressions of faith in our founding principles.

A corrupt old Democrat. A surging Republican populist. The Democrat, hounded by corruption allegations; the Republican, dogged by business failures and ties to white supremacists. The Republican turned out thousands of screaming supporters for speeches blaming illegal immigrants and crime on the Democrats, and the Democrat plummeted in the polls.Sound familiar? The '91 Louisiana Governor's race was supposed to be forgettable. But when former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke shocked the nation by ousting incumbent Republican Governor Buddy Roemer in the primary, the world took notice. Democrat Edwin Edwards, a former three-term governor and two-time corruption defendant, was left alone to face Duke in the general election--and he was going to lose. Then a little-known state committeewoman stepped in with evidence of Duke's nefarious past. Could her evidence be enough to sway the minds of fired-up voters, or would Louisiana welcome a far-right radical into the highest office in the state?

During the Second World War, as Black Americans fought to save democracy abroad, Madeline Morgan brought debates over Black recognition and inclusion into the classroom. She created and championed the first Black history curriculum adopted by the Chicago schools. Her curriculum, Supplemental Units for the Course of Instruction in Social Studies, met with natural attention and became a model for teachers, schools, and cities across the country. Hines examines how in the postwar years Morgan's work was met with white backlash and Cold War conservatism, and provides an urgent reminder of the power of educators to push for change despite the obstacles that often erode their efforts.