Research Guide: Civil Rights Topic Inspiration: Home

This anthology is a collection of key primary documents relating to desegregation in the United States. Topics discussed include the arguments offered for and against racial segregation, the role of federal, state and local governments, and the nature and importance of protest and civil disobedience. The final chapter is devoted to social and residential segregation in the North, which differed from the legally imposed segregation of the South.

Analyzes the history of lynching in the United States, including such aspects as its origins, proponent's rationalization, and the shift in form and meaning over time.

In a powerful narrative layered with revealing detail, Todd S. Purdum tells the story of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, recreating the legislative maneuvering and the larger-than-life characters who made its passage possible. From the Kennedy brothers to Lyndon Johnson, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen, Purdum shows how these all-too-human figures managed, in just over a year, to create a bill that prompted the longest filibuster in the history of the U.S. Senate yet was ultimately adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support. He evokes the high purpose and low dealings that marked the creation of this monumental law, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of new interviews that bring to life this signal achievement in American history.

The election of 1968 was immediately caught up in a swirl of powerful forces, and the nine men who sought the nation's highest office that year attempted to ride them to victory-or merely survive them. On the Democratic side, Eugene McCarthy energized the anti-war movement; George Wallace spoke to the working-class white backlash; Robert Kennedy took on the mantle of his slain brother. Entangled in Vietnam, Johnson, stunningly, opted not to run again, scrambling the odds. On the Republican side, 1968 saw the vindication of Richard Nixon, who outhustled Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan and George Romney, by navigating between the conservative and moderate wings of the Republican Party. The assassinations of first Martin Luther King, Jr., and then Kennedy seemed to push the country to the brink of chaos, a chaos reflected in the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a televised horror show. Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged as the nominee, and, finally liberating himself from Johnson's grip, nearly overcame the lead long enjoyed by Nixon who, by exploiting division and channeling the national yearning for order, would be the last man standing.

In American Maelstrom, Michael A. Cohen captures the full drama of this watershed election, establishing 1968 as the hinge between the decline of political liberalism, the ascendancy of conservative populism, and the rise of anti-government attitudes that continue to dominate the nation's political discourse. In this sweeping and immersive book, equal parts compelling analysis and thrilling narrative, Cohen takes us to the very source of our modern politics of division.

"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation.

Documents and personal writings examine how the protest movement of the 1960s impacted countries around the world, culminating in a series of protests in 1968, describing the protest methods used and government reactions to those protests.

In this brief book, Pulitzer Prize–winner Branch draws on his Parting the Waters (1989), Pillar of Fire (1998), and At Canaan’s Edge (2006) to recall the pivotal moments of the civil rights struggle. He focuses on 18 historical turning points, includingMartin Luther King’s first public address, before the Montgomery bus boycott, in 1955; the March on Washington, in 1963; King’s Nobel Peace Prize, in 1964; the expansion of the civil rights movement into an antiwar movement; the expansion of the struggle from the South to the North in the campaign to end segregated housing in Chicago; King’s response to the rising black power movement; the antipoverty crusade, of 1967; and King’s death in Memphis, in 1968. Each turning point is treated in a separate chapter that begins with a brief historical context that links them together. Photographs enhance this sweeping review of the civil rights movement and King’s relationships with several major figures, including J. Edgar Hoover, John and Robert Kennedy, and President Johnson, as the movement broadened its scope from civil rights to human rights. --Vanessa Bush --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This anthology is a collection of key primary documents relating to desegregation in the United States. Topics discussed include the arguments offered for and against racial segregation, the role of federal, state and local governments, and the nature and importance of protest and civil disobedience. The final chapter is devoted to social and residential segregation in the North, which differed from the legally imposed segregation of the South.

Explore with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed -- forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds.

This book explores the emotionally charged conditions and factors that incited the eruption of race riots in America between the Progressive Era and World War II.

From the Boston Massacre in 1770 to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, mob violence in the United States is often sparked by unjust court decisions, unfair taxes, unpopular wars, the fear of unemployment, and racial and ethnic prejudice. But there are also seemingly senseless riots over wild concerts and sports championships. What causes a peacefully assembled crowd to turn into a mindless, violent mob? What causes a police force or militia to lose control?

In this timely, comprehensive overview, Jules Archer describes and explains the causes of mob violence in the United States and suggests that unless we make some basic changes in the nature of our society, the despair and rage that ignite mob violence may always be with us.

As Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required these black women to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.