Suggested Civil Rights Sources

Major Events and Legacies

These suggestions relate to specific events and people discussed in Professor Patterson’s essay - most of which reappear in other essays.

NAACP and National Urban League:

Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909-1969. New York: Routledge, 2005. This is the most up-to-date history of the Association and carries it through the 1960s.

Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Boston, Little, Brown, 1971.

Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The 90 Year Journey of the NAACP. Videorecording. Co-executive producer/director, Gene A. Davis: co-produced by Gene Davis Group, Inc. & D.R. Lynes, Inc. Morris Plains, NJ: Lucerne Media, 2000.

Weiss, Nancy J. The National Urban League, 1910-1940. New York, Oxford University Press, 1974.

Roosevelt and Truman administrations:

McMahon, Kevin J. Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

For a close analysis of the civil rights policies of the Truman administration see my notes for Dr. Pritchett's essay.

Brown vs. Board of Education and the Eisenhower era:

Ball, Howard. A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998.

Burk, Robert Fredrick. The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Thurgood Marshall: Portrait of an American Hero. Videorecording. Columbia Video Productions. Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1985.

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.

For teaching Brown vs. Board of Education, you can't do better than the website mounted by "LandmarkCases.org", a project of the Supreme Court Historical Society. You'll find a fine, fine group of materials (all of which you can download as PDF files). Materials at this website don’t begin and end with the case’s hearing and the Court’s decision – you can trace earlier cases as well as the repercussions of Brown in political cartoons, the Little Rock desegregation crisis, and the success and failures of school desegregation in the fifty years since Brown.

http://www.landmarkcases.org/brown/home.html

The Eisenhower Presidential Library provides interesting materials for classroom use on Brown V. Board of Education at this website:

http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/Civil_Rights_BrownvsBoE/ BrownvsBOEfiles.html

The "PBS Kids" website has good suggestions for classroom use of the experiences of children who broke the color barrier in desegregating their Southern schools in the 1950s and 1960s:

http://pbskids.org/wayback/civilrights/tp.html

The SCLC and the Montgomery bus boycotts:

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Viking, 2000. Biography of the boycott's heroine.

Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: W. Morrow, 1986.

Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen Eighties. New York: P. Lang Pub., 1987.

Kohl, Herbert R. She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell The Story Of Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: New Press, Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2005. A useful guide to teaching Mrs. Parks’ life and accomplishments.

Greensboro, CORE, and SNCC:

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE; A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

Wolff, Miles. Lunch at the Five and Ten, The Greensboro Sit-Ins: A Contemporary History. New York, Stein and Day, 1970.

Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002.

Don't miss the "SNCC 1960-1966" website, part of the ibiblio.org project, which has good brief articles and useful links for further exploration of SNCC's short but fascinating history:

http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/index.php

1961: Freedom Riders and the Kennedy administration:

Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Brauer, Carl M. John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Niven, David. The Politics of Injustice: the Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Stern, Mark. Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1992

The Kennedy Library and Museum has a very good website on the integration of "Ole Miss" for classroom use:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/meredith/index.htm

Mississippi, 1963-1964:

Ball, Howard. Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., 1988.

Morris, Willie. The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood. New York: Random House, 1998.

Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

The Johnson Administration and the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

Loevy, Robert D., ed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Rosenberg, Jonathan. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Like the Kennedy Library, the Johnson Presidential Library boasts a good educational web component with an excellent section on civil rights issues during the administration of this President:

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/lbjforkids/civil.shtm

Birmingham, Alabama:

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Black Power:

Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.

Ogbar, Jeffrey Ogbonna Green. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.


© The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2006. All Rights Reserved.