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Personal recollections from everyday people who marched against segregation and injustice in Alabama, risking arrest or worse, in the early 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth: These are iconic names associated with the Birmingham campaign of the civil rights movement. But there were thousands of others who played crucial roles too, and this volume gives voice to many local residents who also risked their lives for the cause. Myrna Carter Jackson feels no shame about the police record she garnered while demonstrating against the harsh treatment of African Americans in the city. Carolyn Walker Williams, who knew the injustice black people faced in East Birmingham even as a child, was arrested at a protest for the first time while still in school. Gerald Wren grew up in the Smithfield neighborhood, part of which was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” as a result of the bombings of African Americans’ houses, churches, and schools. Journalist Nick Patterson interviews these and other Birmingham foot soldiers—and recounts the struggle and adversity overcome. Includes photos
Firsthand accounts from the Civil Rights Movement's frontlines
Union building and civil rights activism in a tightly segregated industrial city
The inspiring story of the 1963 Birmingham Children's March as seen through the eyes of four young people at the center of the action. The 1963 Birmingham Children's March was a turning point in American civil rights history. Black Americans had had enough of segregation and police brutality, but with their lives and jobs at stake, most adults were hesitant to protest the city's racist culture. So the fight for civil rights lay in the hands of children like Audrey Hendricks, Wash Booker, James Stewart, and Arnetta Streeter. We've Got a Job tells the little-known story of the four thousand Black elementary, middle, and high school students who answered Dr. Martin Luther King's call to "fill the jails." Between May 2 and May 11, 1963, these young people voluntarily went to jail, drawing national attention to the cause, helping bring about the repeal of segregation laws, and inspiring thousands of other young people to demand their rights. Drawing on her extensive research and in-depth interviews with participants, award-winning author Cynthia Levinson recreates the events of the Birmingham Children's March from a new and very personal perspective. Archival photography and informational sidebars throughout. Back matter includes an afterword, author's note, timeline, map, and bibliography.
Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "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. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.
“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." —Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.
This illuminating volume examines how the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama developed as a trauma of culture. Throughout the book, Gill asks why the “four little girls” killed in the bombing became part of the nation’s collective memory, while two black boys killed by whites on the same day were all but forgotten. Conducting interviews with classmates who attended a white school a few blocks from some of the most memorable events of the Civil Rights Movement, Gill discovers that the bombing of the church is central to interviewees’ memories. Even the boy killed by Gill’s own classmates often escapes recollection. She then considers these findings within the framework of the reception of memory and analyzes how white southerners reconstruct a difficult past.
These are the firsthand accounts of sisters Helen and Barbara Shores growing up with their father, Arthur Shores, a prominent Civil Rights attorney, during the 60s in the Jim Crow south Birmingham district—a frequent target of the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1948 and 1963, some 50 unsolved Klan bombings happened in Smithfield where the Shores family lived, earning their neighborhood the nickname “Dynamite Hill.” Due to his work, Shores’ daughter, Barbara, barely survived a kidnapping attempt. Twice, in 1963, Klan members bombed their home, sending Theodora to the hospital with a brain concussion and killing Tasso, the family’s cocker spaniel. The family narrowly escaped a third bombing attempt on their home in the spring of 1965. The Gentle Giant of Dynamite Hill is an incredible story of a family’s unfair suffering, but also of the Shores’ overcoming. This family’s sacrificial commitment, courage, determination, and triumph inspire us today through this story and the selfless service, work, and lives of Helen Shores Lee and Barbara Sylvia Shores.
There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessarylegislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy provided the blueprint for activists pursuing racial justice, and set the normative standard forliberal philosophies of civil disobedience.In this book, Erin R. Pineda argues that insofar as the Civil Rights Movement provides a crucial motivating example of what civil disobedience must be, the standard cultural narrative of the movement does more than misremember history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civildisobedience might fit into democratic politics more generally. Pineda contends that using the Civil Rights Movement as a disciplining example and moral exemplar is neither accidental nor random; it has been deeply influential in the formation of predominant ideas about civil disobedience, bothwithin academia and public discourse.Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of mainstream theories of civil disobedience and demonstrates their reliance on a stylized, politically expedient narrative in which civilly disobedient protestors must submit to legal punishment, use persuasive rather than coercive means, and appeal toconstitutional principles to signal legitimacy. Such theories take for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assume constitutional integrity and stability, and center the white citizen as the normative ideal, figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, andall-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concertwith anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account only by adopting a different theoreticalapproach--one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.
Time to board the bus! Liberty and her friend Abdullah, with their families and a diverse group of passengers, head off to their first stop: Jackson, Mississippi. Next on their map are Glendora, Memphis, Birmingham, Montgomery, and finally Selma, for a march across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge. As told through the innocent view of a child, Liberty's Civil Rights Road Trip serves as an early introduction to places, people, and events that transformed history. The story is inspired by an actual journey led by author Michael W. Waters, bringing together a multigenerational group to witness key locations from the civil rights movement. An author's note and more information about each stop on Liberty's trip offer ways for adults to expand the conversation with young readers. A portion of the publisher's sales proceeds will be donated to Foot Soldiers Park in Selma, Alabama, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring the history and continued relevance of the Selma movement.