I’m interested in learning more about the Civil Rights movement, and so I’m asking for recommendations about books on the subject. In particular, I’m interested in learning more about how the movement managed to succeed* rather than just a cut and dried “here’s the players and here’s what happened and on what dates.”
Yes, I’m aware that there may be those who believe the movement was not successful. I’d be happy to be pointed in the direction of a book or articles on such viewpoints should that be your view, but don’t want to derail the thread into a was the Civil Rights movement successful or not debate.
You might, if you haven’t, start with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and The Autobiography of Malcom X, along with Parting The Waters ('America in the King Years) by Taylor Branch, which won a Pulitzer.
I’d recommend reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s about the black migration movement from southern farms to northern cities in the twentieth century. I’ll grant that the civil rights movement isn’t its primary subject but it is mentioned in the book and the central topic forms the background of where the civil rights movement came from.
I can highly recommend Simply Justice, about the lead up to Brown v. Board of Education. It was fascinating to see how the lawyers strategized for decades to get to the point where they could win that case at the Supreme Court.
And for broader background, the fascinating How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson. All about the interplay between the pro-slavery movement and US western expansion, the undermining of Reconstruction and the struggles with Jim Crow, up to present-day “Jim Crow 2.0”.
I was eight years old and in it up to my neck due to my parents’ involvement. By the time we were run out of town, at least it was a town where anyone could buy a house anywhere in it. That was something of a success.
I recommend this book all the time. For people who have no real understanding of pre-Civil Rights Movement American, it’s full of deeply depressing details. OTOH, the people she profiles are incredible, and their stories are definitely worth reading. I’ll carry those stories with me the rest of my life.
One of my FAVORITE books: My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (Howell Raines).
It’s the story (through oral histories) of the civil rights movement as told by participants and observers, whites, Blacks, students, children, police, and members of the KKK (to name a few).
The title of the book is lifted from a conversation between MLK and Mother Pollard, who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. “King recounted in his writings that after several weeks of walking to her destinations rather than take the bus, he suggested to Mother Pollard, then about 72, that she might take the bus again for the sake of her health. She replied, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.’”
Wow Slithy_Tove, that sounds like a very interesting story. Have you considered starting an “Ask the Child of Activists in the Sixties Civil Rights Movement” thread in MPSIMS or something like that?
I’ve recounted some personal events here over the years, but there was a lot of ugliness which turns people off. Quick anecdote: the phone would ring, we’d be pulled out of bed to go to camp out on somebody else’s floor, but before we laid down my mom would have us kneel and pray for the souls of the people who’d called and threatened us.
But I’ve come to understand that, although human society is constantly changing, human nature doesn’t. Faulkner was right: “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”
I will relate that, even though it was in the works well beforehand, the assassination of MLK was when things really changed. That’s when the Civil Rights became the Black Power movement. White activists like my parents were told to leave, which came as quite the kick in the teeth. The younger ones gravitated to the anti war movement, but my parents were older and, by their own admission, would wait until my brother was old enough to register for the draft before committing to that one.