The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s witnessed great changes in American society. From Brown v. Board of Education to the Montgomery bus boycott, the march on Washington, the freedom rides, the Black Power movement, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the era guaranteed basic civil rights for all Americans, regardless of race. The following scholars recommend both fiction and nonfiction on the personalities and key events of a period defined by race, violence, and democracy.
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Carole Weatherford
CHILDREN'S AUTHOR
Carole Boston Weatherford has written 20 children's books, including Champions on the Bench: The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars; Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins; and The African-American Struggle for Legal Equality. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom was a Caldecott Honor Book. She teaches at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.
MARTIN'S BIG WORDS
The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Doreen Rappaport, illustrated by Bryan Collier (2001)
* CALDECOTT HONOR BOOK
* CORETTA SCOTT KING HONOR BOOK
In this picture-book biography, Doreen Rappaport, who lived through the civil rights movement, shows young readers how the power of words can move the masses and effect change. Well-chosen quotations in big, bold type punctuate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life story as Bryan Collier's watercolor and collage illustrations document King's deeds--from the Montgomery bus boycott and the march on Washington to the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. A time line and a bibliography enhance this splendid introduction to a great leader. Ages 5 and up.
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THE OTHER SIDE
By Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis (2001)
* ALA NOTABLE BOOK
* BOOKLIST EDITOR'S CHOICE
Poignant and poetic, The Other Side uses a fence as a metaphor for racial separation in a southern town. Clover, an African American girl, and Annie, a white girl, are both forbidden to play on the other side of the fence. For weeks, the girls watch each other from afar--until they dare to sit on the fence together. The two new friends hope that the fence will one day be torn down. E. B. Lewis's shimmering watercolors capture the pre-civil rights era and the young characters' innocence. Ages 5 and up.
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GOIN' SOMEPLACE SPECIAL
By Patricia McKissack, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (2001)
Based in part on Patricia McKissack's Nashville childhood, Goin' Someplace Special follows an African American girl on a trip downtown alone in the 1950s. Around town, Tricia Ann navigates the color line and is barred from many places. When she encounters discrimination, caring adults uplift her. Finally, she reaches her destination, the public library--where all are welcome. Like Tricia Ann, Jerry Pinkney's sunny palette exudes optimism. Ages 3 and up.
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Doug McAdam
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGIST
Doug McAdam, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, is a political sociologist who specializes in the study of social movements and revolutions. He has written two books on the civil rights movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (1982) and Freedom Summer (1988), profiled below.
PARTING THE WATERS
America in the King Years 1954-63
By Taylor Branch (1988)
* PULITZER PRIZE FOR HISTORY
* NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
* NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
No one has captured the breadth, majesty, and overall narrative arc of the civil rights movement better than Taylor Branch. His massive three-volume history of the movement took some 25 years to write and contains more than 3,000 pages. Arguably, the first volume is still the Best--covering the movement's beginnings in Montgomery, the 1960 sit-ins, and such key campaigns as Albany, Birmingham, and the freedom rides. [Bookmarks reviewed the last of the series, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, EXCELLENT Mar/Apr 2006.]
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BEARING THE CROSS
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
By David Garrow (1986)
* PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
* ROBERT F. KENNEDY BOOK AWARD
David Garrow's book remains the definitive account of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The civil rights movement was not synonymous with King, but one should not deny his dominant role in the struggle and his continuing importance in American life.
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I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM
The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
By Charles M. Payne (1995)
The great virtue of the Branch and Garrow books is the breadth of their narrative vision. Both focus on the movement, writ large. However, what is largely missed in these books is the lived experience of the movement at the local level. Charles Payne's rich account of the movement in Greenwood, Mississippi, is a wonderful corrective to the typical top-down view of the struggle. The book is a bit more academic than either Branch's or Garrow's; still, it is well written and accessible.
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FREEDOM SUMMER
By Doug McAdam (1988)
* C. WRIGHT MILLS AWARD
In 1964, three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi. The movie Mississippi Burning supposedly told the story of the murder and the subsequent murder investigation. For the real story, read Freedom Summer. More important, the book recounts how the Freedom Summer Project served to radicalize the nearly 1,000 white college students who were in the state that summer. Many of those volunteers went on to play pioneering roles in the other major movements of the period, helping to set in motion the broader political turbulence we associate with the 1960s.
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Stephen J. Whitfield
HISTORIAN
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University and has specialized in the politics, ideas, and culture of 20th-century America. He is the author of A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988, paperback 1991) and the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004, paperback 2006).
FREEDOM RIDERS
1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
By Raymond Arsenault (2006)
By testing a federal regulation that desegregated interstate transportation, 436 men and women--black and white, young and old--risked their very lives and thus dramatically exposed the racial injustice of a region. Raymond Arsenault recounts the story by intertwining the passivity of Washington, D.C., the bravery of the bus riders, and the savagery of southern whites. His narrative is understated, yet it is powerful in the fury it evokes.
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CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE IDEA OF FREEDOM
By Richard H. King (1992; 1996)
The civil rights era was so punctuated by acts which continue to stir the imagination that the impact of ideas tends to be understudied. Richard King's impressive book is an indispensable corrective to narrative and anecdotal historiography. He argues that the quest for racial equality triumphed because its champions could tap into (and constructively revise) the most ambitious ideals of the republic. King approaches his topic as a historical critic rather than merely a celebrant. But the effect of his analysis is to raise the stature of activists by taking them seriously as thinkers.
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FIGHT AGAINST FEAR
Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights
By Clive Webb (2001; 2003)
In the 1950s and 1960s, the psychologically insecure and demographically weak Jewish communities of the South were hurled into the crisis of racial conflict. Small-town Jewry was torn between the impulse to reject the ugliness of bigotry and the economic and social vulnerability that made merchants wary of their white Gentile neighbors. Webb refuses to hold his protagonists to a standard of moral absolutism. But he recounts their travail, as well as their occasional gallantry, with subtlety and judiciousness.
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