The Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington, 60 Years Later

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. (audiobook also available)

Text of King's most influential speeches; includes his most well-known oration, "I Have a Dream", his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, and "Beyond Vietnam", a powerful plea to end the ongoing conflict. Includes contributions from Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, the Dalai Lama, and many others.

Anne Moody published her autobiography in 1968; it chronicles Anne’s life growing up in the Deep South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, making it one of few works that candidly details rural Black life during the 1940s and 1950s. This is a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person's ability to affect change. (audiobook also available)

First published in 1963, this is a stirring, intimate reflection on the nature of race and American nationhood that has inspired generations of writers and thinkers. With clarity, conviction, and passion, James Baldwin delivers a dire warning of the effects of racism that remains urgent today (audiobook also available).

In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota's best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in Minnesota. They bring us generously into experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships. Minnesota communities struggle with some of the nation's worst racial disparities. As its authors confront and consider the realities that lie beneath the numbers, this book provides an important tool to those who want to be part of closing those gaps.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.

A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy--from his family's roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing--telling the story of how one man's tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. (audiobook also available)

In this searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux.
(audiobook also available)

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, Eig gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. (audiobook also available)

March, a graphic novel trilogy, is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice--which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. (audiobook also available)

Holt counters popular representations of the civil rights movement as "the individual or collective acts of heroic and charismatic male leaders" in this concise and edifying account. Though well-known figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall appear, Holt focuses on how "the accumulated grievances of ordinary citizens" became the driving force for a sustained social movement aimed at achieving "revolutionary change."

Euchner weaves together many of the diverse, complex elements of the March on Washington, drawing on interviews from hundreds of participants, to offer a portrait of the famous (A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young) and the obscure (three young black men from Gadsden, Alabama).

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy.

A notable civil rights leader, Rustin is often cast into the historical shadows of the civil rights movement in part because of his sexuality, political engagement with the communist party during the Cold War, and being a conscientious objector to World War II. Houtman, Naegle, and Long provide an in-depth history of Bayard Rustin's life, from his early childhood to his death in 1987. Inspired by his Quaker upbringing and the nonviolent direct organizing tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, Rustin strongly believed in the value of community organizing and remained true to his values of equality, peace, and civil disobedience.