A wild journey through the shady side of Bluegrass politics, from bribe-takers to traitors to treasury raiders.In 1826, Governor Desha pardoned his own son for murder. In a horrific crime, Governor Goebel was assassinated in 1900. James Wilkinson was branded a traitor against Kentucky and the nation. "Honest Dick Tate" ran away with massive amounts of money from the state treasury. And in modern times, Operation BOPTROT resulted in perhaps the biggest scandal in th...

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...

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.

BLACK HISTORY 1619 TO 2019 is an inspiring and educational journey through history. It is an in-depth look at the events which shaped the lives and contributions of the African-American community in the United States of America. This book is designed to restore the integrity of African-American history and is based on extensive research and documentation related to the African-American experience from the era of slavery until modern times. In this landmark book, Sandra K. Yocum an...

Acclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating...

The Black History of the White House presents the untold history, racial politics, and shifting significance of the White House as experienced by African Americans, from the generations of enslaved people who helped to build it or were forced to work there to its first black First Family, the Obamas.Clarence Lusane juxtaposes significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for democratic, civil, and human rights by black Americans and d...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY • An “important, deeply affecting—and regrettably relevant” (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their wayAmerican freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, ma...

**Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in HistoryWinner of the Hillman Prize for Book JournalismFinalist for the Kirkus Prize for NonfictionNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the Chicago Public Library • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2022A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring...

On the evening of June 12, 1963 -- the day President John F. Kennedy gave his most impassioned speech about the need for interracial tolerance "Medgar Evers, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed by an assassin's bullet in his driveway. The still-smoking gun -- bearing the fingerprints of Byron De La Beckwith, a staunch white supremacist -- was recovered moments later in some nearby bushes. Still, Beckwith remained free for over thirty years, until Evers's w...

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America’s expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Ch...

On March 18, 2008, after the Jeremiah Wright incident, Senator Barack Obama went on national television and delivered what many called one of the most inspiring and thought provoking speeches ever delivered on the issue of race. After the speech, several news organizations reported that it was time for America to engage in discussions on race. Over the years, we have had several discussions on the subject, most of which focused on the relationship between blacks and whites but seldom have ...

An account of the 1962 Ole Miss riots, sparked by one man's stance against segregation in the American South—by the #1 New York Times –bestselling author of A Night to Remember ."[Lord's] account of the gathering storm at Oxford and Jackson is a marvel." — The New York TimesOn September 30, 1962, James H. Meredith matriculated a...