Books for Black History Month: Civil Rights

Each week during Black History Month, we’re highlighting a selection of books on an important Black history topic. This week, we’re focusing on the origins and impact of the civil rights movement.

Use code BHM22 for discount prices on these books and others through February 28.

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World
Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955
Lindsey R. Swindall

The Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs formed during the Great Depression to fight disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism. By following the cooperation between progressive activists from the Popular Front to the 1960s, Swindall highlights the intergenerational nature of civil rights and anticolonial organizing.

The Shadow of Selma
Edited by Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano

Rather than focusing on Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the 1965 civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, this volume considers the long-term impact that the thousands of unheralded activists who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge had on the systems that opposed them.

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Edited by Brian C. Odom and Stephen P. Waring

As NASA prepared for the 1969 Apollo 11 launch, many African American leaders argued that the funding would be better spent addressing poverty and discrimination at home. This volume examines the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.

Available for preorder in paperback now.

Ain’t Scared of Your Jail
Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement
Zoe. A. Colley

Imprisonment became a badge of honor for many protestors during the civil rights movement. It was a way to expose the evils of segregation and highlight to the rest of American society the injustice of southern racism. Using the narratives of many individuals and organizations, Colley shows how civil rights activists used imprisonment to further their cause. 

From Sit-Ins to SNCC
The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s
Edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies

Leading civil rights scholars offer new perspectives on student-oriented activism in the 1960s through essays on the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of Black nationalist ideology within the student movement, the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements, and more.

Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers
Reflections from the Deep South, 1964-1980
Edited by Kent Spriggs

Twenty-six civil rights lawyers, in their own words, reveal the abuses they endured and the barriers they broke during some of the most dramatic moments in civil rights history: the 1965 Selma March, the first civil judgment against the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation of ballot access for African Americans in Alabama.

Winning While Losing
Civil Rights, the Conservative Movement and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama
Edited by Kenneth Osgood and Derrick E. White

This pioneering collection of essays explores the paradoxical nature of civil rights politics in the years following the 1960s civil rights movement by chronicling the ways in which presidential politics both advanced and constrained the quest for racial equality in the United States.