A POWERFUL AND INSPIRING RECORD OF ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PERIODS IN AMERICA'S HISTORY, MY SOUL IS A WITNESS PRESENTS THE FULL HISTORIC SCOPE OF THE HARD-FOUGHT BATTLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS. From the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which legal segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional, the Nashville sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides to the March on Washington, Bloody Sunday, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- and everything in between -- My Soul Is a Witness is the first comprehensive book-length chronology of the civil rights era in America. My Soul Is a Witness extends the examination of civil rights activities between 1954 and 1965 beyond the southern states to include the rest of the country. Although Martin Luther King, Jr., was a central towering figure of the era, this volume shifts the focus to the thousands of people, places, and events that the Civil Rights Movement encompassed. And while the movement began in the arena of education, My Soul Is a Witness covers events in the areas of employment, public accommodations, housing, voting rights, religion, entertainment, sports, and the military. The more than 2,500 entries are based on information found in articles and reports published in three sources: The New York Times, Jet magazine, and the Southern School News. The basic chronology is supplemented with longer features that explore topics in greater depth as well as highlight issues well known at the time but largely unknown today by scholars and the general public.
Poems, stories, and personal narratives--by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and others--celebrate the spirit in the lives of generations of African-American women.
One of the most pivotal moments in American history is brought to light through stirring, thought-provoking eyewitness accounts from people who have played active roles in the civil rights movement over the past 50 years.
MLK and the Practice of Spirituality The scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr. is seriously lacking in terms of richly nuanced and revelatory treatments of his spirituality and spiritual life. This book addresses this neglect by focusing on King's life as a paradigm of a deep, vital, engaging, balanced, and contagious spirituality. It shows that the essence of the person King was lies in the quality of his own spiritual journey and how that translated into not only a personal devotional life of prayer, meditation, and fasting but also a public ministry that involved the uplift and empowerment of humanity. Much attention is devoted to King's spiritual leadership, to his sense of the civil rights movement as "a spiritual movement," and to his efforts to rescue humanity from what he termed a perpetual "death of the spirit." Readers encounter a figure who took seriously the personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical aspects of the Christian faith, thereby figuring prominently in recasting the very definition of spirituality in his time. King's "holistic spirituality" is presented here with a clarity and power fresh for our own generation.
During the creation of the Psychomatrix Spirituality Inventory (PSI) at Harvard, Dr. Wolman found seven factors that comprise the spectrum of spiritual experience. By completing the PSI included in the book, readers will learn about their spirituality in each of these areas and how to improve their spiritual lives.
The electrifying story of the turbulent year when the sixties ended and America teetered on the edge of revolution NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society. Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham’s unique oral history of that tumultuous time, unveils anew that moment when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long, futile war abroad. Woven together from one hundred original interviews, Witness to the Revolution provides a firsthand narrative of that period of upheaval in the words of those closest to the action—the activists, organizers, radicals, and resisters who manned the barricades of what Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden called “the Great Refusal.” We meet Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department employee who released the Pentagon Papers; feminist theorist Robin Morgan; actor and activist Jane Fonda; and many others whose powerful personal stories capture the essence of an era. We witness how the killing of four students at Kent State turned a straitlaced social worker into a hippie, how the civil rights movement gave birth to the women’s movement, and how opposition to the war in Vietnam turned college students into prisoners, veterans into peace marchers, and intellectuals into bombers. With lessons that can be applied to our time, Witness to the Revolution is more than just a record of the death throes of the Age of Aquarius. Today, when America is once again enmeshed in racial turmoil, extended wars overseas, and distrust of the government, the insights contained in this book are more relevant than ever. Praise for Witness to the Revolution “Especially for younger generations who didn’t live through it, Witness to the Revolution is a valuable and entertaining primer on a moment in American history the likes of which we may never see again.”—Bryan Burrough, The Wall Street Journal “A rich tapestry of a volatile period in American history.”—Time “A gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the ’60s . . . This is rousing reportage from the front lines of US history.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “The familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book.”—New York Times Book Review “[An] Enthralling and brilliant chronology of the period between August 1969 and September 1970.”—Buffalo News “[Bingham] captures the essence of these fourteen months through the words of movement organizers, vets, students, draft resisters, journalists, musicians, government agents, writers, and others. . . . This oral history will enable readers to see that era in a new light and with fresh sympathy for the motivations of those involved. While Bingham’s is one of many retrospective looks at that period, it is one of the most immediate and personal.”—Booklist
Here is the remarkable story of U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton -- impassioned civil rights activist, hard-driving legislator, and one of the most powerful women in American history. They call her the "Warrior on the Hill," acknowledging the battles she's waged as a political pioneer across more than four decades of American history. Perhaps more than anyone else, she has taken to heart Eleanor Roosevelt's famous pronouncement that "every political woman needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide." Joan Steinau Lester shared much of the last forty years with Eleanor Holmes Norton. They met in 1958 when they were both students at Antioch College. Now an acclaimed author, Lester shares her friendship with the congresswoman and tells the story of one woman's rise to leadership. Charting forty years of political and personal challenge, Fire in My Soul shows Norton marching on the Capitol to demand a Senate hearing for Anita Hill; grilling Army generals about sex abuse; arguing before the Supreme Court to uphold first amendment rights, even for a segregationist; and much more. Norton's story is organically linked to Washington, D.C., home to her family for four generations, and reveals why she is now the voice of the city. This fascinating biography, told largely in Norton's words, showcases as never before the many facets of a woman who remains an iconic torch-bearer for the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Scores of conversations with Norton and nearly a hundred interviews with colleagues, family, and friends have made Fire in My Soul a remarkable document of how one extraordinary woman helped to effect lasting change in the ways we interact across racial and gender lines.
Brian Ward is Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne .; This book is intended for american studies, American history postwar social and cultural history, political history, Black history, Race and Ethnic studies and Cultural studies together with the general trade music.