The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed in April 1960 to advance civil rights. With a tremendous human rights mission facing them, the founding SNCC members included communication and publicity as part of their initial purpose. This book provides a broad overview of these efforts from SNCC's birth in 1960 until the beginning of its demise in the late 1960s and examines the communication tools that SNCC leaders and members used to organize, launch, and carry out their campaign to promote civil rights throughout the 1960s. It specifically explores how SNCC workers used public relations to support and promote their platforms and to build a grassroots community movement; and how the organization later rejected these strategies for a radical and isolated approach.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed in April 1960 to advance civil rights. With a tremendous human rights mission facing them, the founding SNCC members included communication and publicity as part of their initial purpose. This book provides a broad overview of these efforts from SNCC's birth in 1960 until the beginning of its demise in the late 1960s and examines the communication tools that SNCC leaders and members used to organize, launch, and carry out their campaign to promote civil rights throughout the 1960s. It specifically explores how SNCC workers used public relations to support and promote their platforms and to build a grassroots community movement; and how the organization later rejected these strategies for a radical and isolated approach.
This book is a journalistic journey of thousands of hours of research, writing and creative designs that is fearless, factual, and freeing. Ryan Bomberger tackles social issues like abortion, adoption, Planned Parenthood, fatherlessness, civil rights, LGBT and judicial activism, and the War on Common Sense. This pro-life, pro-family, pro-liberty book about equality and justice is made even more potent as it is authored by an adoptee and adoptive father who was conceived in rape.
In this Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family—and thousands of others—in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.
Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection -- yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing -- and, when necessary, using -- firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement's success. Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.
A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century. • “Timely and essential."—The Washington Post “A must-read for anyone who dares to believe that equal justice under the law is possible and is in search of a model for how to make it a reality.” —Anita Hill With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions--how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.
In Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon tells the compelling story of how a handful of dedicated young people, both black and white, forged one of the most successful grassroots organizations in American History. The book depicts some of the most violent and dramatic moments of civil rights history including Black Monday in Danville, Virginia; the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the March on Washington in 1964 and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1962. In addition to including his own photos, taken as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the book includes a selection of historic SNCC documents such as press releases, telephone logs, letters and minutes of meetings. This combination of pictures, eyewitness reports, and text takes the reader inside the civil rights movement, creating both a work of art and an authentic work of history.
During the civil rights era, masses of people marched in the streets, boycotted stores, and registered to vote. Others challenged racism in ways more solitary but no less life changing. These twenty-three stories give a voice to the nameless, ordinary citizens without whom the movement would have failed. From bloody melees at public lunch counters to anxious musings at the family dinner table, the diverse experiences depicted in this anthology make the civil rights movement as real and immediate as the best histories and memoirs. Each story focuses on a particular, sometimes private, moment in the historic struggle for social justice in America. Events have a permanent effect on characters, like the white girl in "Spring Is Now" who must sort through her feelings about the only black boy in her school, or the black preacher in "The Convert" who tells a friend, "This thing of being a man . . . The Supreme Court can't make you a man. The NAACP can't do it. God Almighty can do a lot, but even He can't do it. Ain't nobody can do it but you." If a character survives--and some do not--the event can become a turning point, a vision for a better world. The sections into which the stories are grouped parallel the news headlines of the day: School Desegregation (1954 on), Sit-ins (1960 on), Marches and Demonstrations (1963 on), and Acts of Violence. In the last section, Retrospective, characters look back on their personal involvement with the movement. Twenty writers--eleven black and nine white--are represented in the collection. Ten stories were written during the 1960s. That the others were written long after the movement's heyday suggests the potency of that time as a continuing source of creative inspiration.
