The 1925 trial of John Scopes in tiny Dayton, Tennessee, remains a defining moment in American history. This "trial of the century"--a "media event" before the term was coined--addressed issues that still affect our society today, such as control of the school curriculum, the ongoing tensions between science and faith in public schools, and the ramifications of teaching evolution and human origins.This book is the first encyclopedic treatment of the Scopes Trial. The text draws on ...

Winner of the National Book Award for NonfictionFinalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for HistoryFrom the leading historian and Guggenheim fellow, an electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle.Arc of Justice is a necessary contribution to what seems like an insoluble moral dilemma: race in America.” —Paul Hendrickso...

**The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series.“Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again“Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the New York Times bestselling...

A lively biography of the civil rights leader: "Boxed insets add historic context and more specific information . . . a nice fit for middle readers." — BooklistI helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I am only 34 when I give the "I Have a Dream" speech. I am Martin Luther King Jr.Learn all about a heroic man whose accomplishments are truly inspiring. This book features:illustrations throughouta timeline

**A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in NonfictionWinner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss AwardA brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers.**Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to...

An examination of the unsolved mystery of the Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who terrified early 20th century Atlanta, Georgia.As Atlanta finished rebuilding after the Civil War, a new horror arose from the ashes to roam the night streets. Beginning in 1911, a killer whose methods mimicked the famed Jack the Ripper murdered at least twenty black women, from prostitutes to working-class women and mothers. Each murder attributed to the killer occurred on a Satur...

A prizewinning historian pens this biography of C.L. Franklin, the greatest African-American preacher of his generation, father of Aretha, and civil rights pioneer.

In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's fi...

"A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln's birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercise. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children."Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed ...

Few moments in Civil Rights history are as important as the morning of Sunday April 9, 1939 when Marian Anderson sang before a throng of thousands lined up along the Mall by the Lincoln Memorial. She had been banned from the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall because she was black. When Eleanor Roosevelt, who resigned from the DAR over the incident, took up Anderson's cause, however, it became a national issue. The controversy showed Americans that discrimination was ...

African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans. These 1,000-3,000 word biographies, selected from over five thousand entries in the forthcoming eight-volume African American National Biography, illuminate African-American history through the immediacy of individual experience. From Esteban, the earliest known African to set foot in North America in 1528, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Wi...

A study of the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to interact with American culture in the 1920s.In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement.Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far...