For twelve history-making days in May 1961, thirteen black and white civil rights activists, also known as the Freedom Riders, traveled by bus into the South to draw attention to the unconstitutional segregation still taking place. Despite their peaceful protests, the Freedom Riders were met with increasing violence the further south they traveled.

Speak Now Against the Day is the astonishing, little-known story of the Southerners who, in the generation before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, challenged the validity of a white ruling class and a “separate but equal” division of the races.
 
The voices of the dissenters,  although present throughout the South’s troubled

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Examines events that led to lunch counter sit-ins in the United States during the 1960s and their influence, discussing segregation, the Freedom Rides, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other related topics.

"Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter."--

"C. T. Vivian's life was never defined by the discrimination and hardship he faced, although there were many instances of both throughout his lifetime. The late civil rights leader instead focused on his faith in God and his steadfast belief in nonviolence, extending these principles nationwide as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It's In the Action contains Vivian's recollections, ranging from finding religion at the young...

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation's leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme...

"Do not forget that 'skill and integrity' are the keys to success." This was the last piece of advice on a list Will Thurmond gave his son Strom in 1923. The younger Thurmond would keep the words in mind throughout his long and colorful career as one of the South's last race-baiting demagogues and as a national power broker who, along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, was a major figure in modern conservative politics. But as the historian...

This title examines an important historic event-the civil rights efforts in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, known today as Freedom Summer. Easy-to-read, compelling text explores the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in leading voter registration efforts and improving education in the state. Also examined are the murders of civil rights workers and the hate crimes they faced, considered in the social context of segregation....

Anne McCarty Braden (1924–2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies.

In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthyist politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial―even within the civil rights movement―in 1963 she became one of only five white southerners whose contributions to the

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"Lewis's role in the Nashville Movement - a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville through nonviolent sit-ins - made him a defining activist of his day and helped set the tone for the civil rights movement. Though he was repeatedly a victim of violence and intimidation, his belief in peaceful action, inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, became the core of his cause and vision. In this classic bestseller, John Lewis vividly...