An account of the civil rights march that ended in the unlawful incarceration of African American protestors—and the basis for the 2017 documentary.In October 1965, nearly 800 young people attempted to march from their churches in Natchez to protest segregation, discrimination and mistreatment by white leaders and elements of the Ku Klux Klan. As they exited the churches, local authorities forced the would-be marchers onto buses and charged them with "parading with...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most ...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, searing account of the 1898 white supremacist riot and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina.By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and a...

The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, four hundred and fifty Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most...

In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives u...

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation.

A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchingsAfter World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War.Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. Fr...

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...

"[A] vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America." —U.S. Congressman John LewisForsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One ...

Eyes on the Prize traces the movement from the landmark Brown v*. the Board of Education* case in 1954 to the march on Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This is a companion volume to the first part of the acclaimed PBS series.

The violent history of the Ku Klux Klan from its formation in post civil war 1865, through its two revival eras of the 1920s, when one in four American men were Klansmen. Its demise and rebirth in the 50s,60s and 70s with the civil rights movement, through to what the organization is now and its activities in the 2010s

*Boys, let us get up a club.*With those words, six restless young men raided the linens at a friend’s mansion, pulled pillowcases over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. The six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan, and, all too quickly, their club grew into the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire with secret dens spread across the South.This is the story of how a secret terrorist group took root in America’s democracy. Filled w...