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In Peace and Freedom by
Call Number: 323.092 L161i 2015
Bernard LaFayette Jr. (b. 1940) was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leader in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, a Freedom Rider, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the national coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign. At the young age of twenty-two, he assumed the directorship of the Alabama Voter Registration Project in Selma - a city that had previously been removed from the organization's list due to the dangers of operating there. In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, LaFayette shares the inspiring story of his years in Selma. When he arrived in 1963, Selma was a small, quiet, rural town. By 1965, it had made its mark in history and was nationally recognized as a battleground in the fight for racial equality and the site of one of the most important victories for social change in our nation. LaFayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this book as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s from one of its greatest leaders.
Breach of Peace by
Call Number: 323.119 E841b 2018
Breach of Peace is a photo-history told in images old and new. The book includes the mug shots of all 328 Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, along with contemporary portraits of 98 Riders, supplemented by interviews and brief bios. (The 2008 edition had 82 profiles.) In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans--blacks and whites, men and women--entered Southern bus and train stations to challenge the segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters, and bathrooms. The Supreme Court had ruled that such segregation was illegal, and the Riders were trying to make the federal government enforce that decision. Though there were Freedom Rides across the South, Jackson soon became the campaign's focus. The 328 Riders arrested there were quickly convicted of breach of peace. The Riders then compounded their protest by refusing bail. "Jail, no bail!" was their cry, and they soon filled the city's jails. Mississippi responded by transferring them to Parchman, the infamous Delta prison farm, for the remainder of their time behind bars, usually about six weeks. New to the expanded edition are five portraits made in the maximum-security cells at Parchman during the fiftieth anniversary events of 2011. The mug shots of each Rider, bearing name, birth date, and other personal details, were duly filed away by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state investigative body dedicated to preserving white supremacy. By carefully preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement.
Freedom Riders by
Call Number: 323.097 A781f 2006
Here is the definitive account of a dramatic and indeed pivotal moment in American history, a critical episode that transformed the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.Raymond Arsenault offers a meticulously researched and grippingly written account of the Freedom Rides, one of the most compelling chapters in the history of civil rights. Arsenault recounts how in 1961, emboldened by federal rulings that declared segregated transit unconstitutional, a group ofvolunteers--blacks and whites--traveled together from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals, putting their bodies and their lives on the line for racial justice. The book paints a harrowing account of the outpouring of hatred and violence that greeted theFreedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi. One bus was disabled by Ku Klux Klansmen, then firebombed. In Birmingham and Montgomery, mobs of white supremacists swarmed the bus stations and battered the riders with fists and clubs while local police refused to intervene. The mayhem in Montgomery wascaptured by news photographers, shocking the nation, and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which after some hesitation and much public outcry, came to the aid of the Freedom Riders. Arsenault brings the key actors in this historical drama vividly to life, with colorful portraits ofthe Kennedys, Jim Farmer, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their courage, their fears, and the agonizing choices made by all these individuals run through the story like an electric current.The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months, some four hundred and fifty Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage in the years to come for the 1963Birmingham demonstrations, Freedom Summer and the Selma-to-Montgomery March. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.
Freedom's Main Line by
Call Number: 323.119 C367f 2009
Black Americans in the Jim Crow South could not escape the grim reality of racial segregation, whether enforced by law or by custom. In Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, author Derek Charles Catsam shows that courtrooms, classrooms, and cemeteries were not the only front lines in African Americans' prolonged struggle for basic civil rights. Buses, trains, and other modes of public transportation provided the perfect means for civil rights activists to protest the second-class citizenship of African Americans, bringing the reality of the violence of segregation into the consciousness of America and the world. In 1947, nearly a decade before the Supreme Court voided school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen black and white activists embarked on a four-state bus tour, called the Journey of Reconciliation, to challenge discrimination in busing and other forms of public transportation. Although the Journey drew little national attention, it set the stage for the more timely and influential 1961 Freedom Rides. The impact of the Freedom Rides, however, was unprecedented, fixing the issue of civil rights in the national consciousness. Later activists were often dubbed Freedom Riders even if they never set foot on a bus. With challenges to segregated transportation as his point of departure, Catsam chronicles black Americans' long journey toward increased civil rights. Freedom's Main Line tells the story of bold incursions into the heart of institutional discrimination, journeys undertaken by heroic individuals who forced racial injustice into the national and international spotlight and helped pave the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Selma, 1965 by
Call Number: 323.409 F153s
Selma, 1965 : the march that changed the South
Protest at Selma by
Call Number: 324.15 G243p
Protest at Selma : Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting rights act of 1965
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