The chaotic years after the Civil War are often seen as a time of uniquely American idealism - a revolutionary attempt to rebuild the nation that paved the way for the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. But Adam Fairclough rejects this prevailing view, challenging prominent historians such as Eric Foner and James McPherson. He argues that Reconstruction was, quite simply, a disaster, and that the civil rights movement triumphed despite it, not because of it. Fairclough takes readers to Natchitoches, Louisiana, a majority-black parish deep in the cotton South. Home to a vibrant Republican Party led by former slaves, ex-Confederates, and free people of color, the parish was a bastion of Republican power and the ideal place for Reconstruction to have worked. Yet although it didn't experience the extremes of violence that afflicted the surrounding region, Natchitoches fell prey to Democratic intimidation. Its Republican leaders were eventually driven out of the parish. Reconstruction failed, Fairclough argues, because the federal government failed to enforce the rights it had created. Congress had given the Republicans of the South and the Freedmen's Bureau an impossible task - to create a new democratic order based on racial equality in an area tortured by deep-rooted racial conflict. Moving expertly between a profound local study and wider developments in Washington, The Revolution That Failed offers a sobering perspective on how Reconstruction affected African American citizens and what its long-term repercussions were for the nation.

In "Teaching Equality," Adam Fairclough provides an overview of the enormous contributions made by African American teachers to the black freedom movement in the United States. Beginning with the close of the Civil War, when "the efforts of the slave regime to prevent black literacy meant that blacks . . . associated education with liberation," Fairclough explores the development of educational ideals in the black community up through the years of the civil rights movement. He traces black educators' connection to the white community and examines the difficult compromises they had to make in order to secure schools and funding. Teachers did not, he argues, sell out the black community but instead instilled hope and commitment to equality in the minds of their pupils. Defining the term teacher broadly to include any person who taught students, whether in a backwoods cabin or the brick halls of a university, Fairclough illustrates the multifaceted responsibilities of individuals who were community leaders and frontline activists as well as conveyors of knowledge. He reveals the complicated lives of these educators who, in the face of a prejudice-based social order and a history of oppression, sustained and inspired the minds and hearts of generations of black Americans.

In this major undertaking, civil rights historian Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later. No book until now has provided us with the full story of what African American teachers tried, achieved, and failed to do in educating the Southern black population over this critical century. This magisterial narrative offers a bold new vision of black teachers, built from the stories of real men and women, from teachers in one-room shacks to professors in red brick universities. Fairclough explores how teachers inspired and motivated generations of children, instilling values and knowledge that nourished racial pride and a desire for equality. At the same time, he shows that they were not just educators, but also missionaries, politicians, community leaders, and racial diplomats. Black teachers had to negotiate constantly between the white authorities who held the purse strings and the black community's grassroots resistance to segregated standards and white power. Teachers were part of, but also apart from, the larger black population. Often ignored, and occasionally lambasted, by both whites and blacks, teachers were tireless foot soldiers in the long civil rights struggle. Despite impossible odds-discrimination, neglect, sometimes violence-black teachers engaged in a persistent and ultimately heroic struggle to make education a means of liberation. A Class of Their Own is indispensable for understanding how blacks and whites interacted and coexisted after the abolition of slavery, and how black communities developed and coped with the challenges of freedom and oppression.

About the Contributor(s): Lewis V. Baldwin is Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of eleven books on Martin Luther King, Jr., including The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010). Rufus Burrow Jr. is Indiana Professor of Christian Thought at Christian Theological Seminary. He has authored or coauthored three books on King, including Martin Luther King, Jr. for Armchair Theologians (2009).

In Teaching Equality, Adam Fairclough provides an overview of the enormous contributions made by African American teachers to the black freedom movement in the United States. Beginning with the close of the Civil War, when "the efforts of the slave regime to prevent black literacy meant that blacks . . . associated education with liberation," Fairclough explores the development of educational ideals in the black community up through the years of the civil rights movement. He reveals the complicated lives of these educators who, in the face of a prejudice-based social order and a history of oppression, sustained and inspired the minds and hearts of generations of black Americans.

"The Star Creek Papers" is the never-before-published account of the complex realities of race relations in the rural South in the 1930s.

When Horace and Julia Bond moved to Louisiana in 1934, they entered a world where the legacy of slavery was miscegenation, lingering paternalism, and deadly racism. The Bonds were a young, well-educated and idealistic African American couple working for the Rosenwald Fund, a trust established by a northern philanthropist to build schools in rural areas. They were part of the "Explorer Project" sent to investigate the progress of the school in the Star Creek district of Washington Parish. Their report, which decried the teachers' lack of experience, the poor quality of the coursework, and the students' chronic absenteeism, was based on their private journal, "The Star Creek Diary," a shrewdly observed, sharply etched, and affectionate portrait of a rural black community.

Horace Bond was moved to write a second document, "Forty Acres and a Mule," a history of a black farming family, after Jerome Wilson was lynched in 1935. The Wilsons were thrifty landowners whom Bond knew and respected; he intended to turn their story into a book, but the chronicle remained unfinished at his death. These important primary documents were rediscovered by civil rights scholar Adam Fairclough, who edited them with Julia Bond's support.

Hailed as one of the best treatments of the civil rights movement, ""Race and Democracy"" is also one of the most comprehensive and detailed studies of the movement at the state level. This far-reaching and dramatic narrative ranges in time from the founding of the New Orleans branch of the NAACP in 1915 to the beginning of Edwin Edwards' first term as governor in 1972. In his new preface Adam Fairclough brings the narrative up-to-date, demonstrating the persistence of racial inequalities and the continuing importance of race as a factor in politics. When Hurricane Katrina exposed the race issue in a new context, Fairclough argues, political leaders mishandled the disaster. A deep-seated culture of corruption, he concludes, compromises the ability of public officials to tackle intransigent problems of urban poverty and inadequate schools.

"To Redeem the Soul of America" looks beyond the towering figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., to disclose the full workings of the organization that supported him. As Adam Fairclough reveals the dynamics within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he shows how Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Wyatt Walker, Andrew Young, and others also played a hand in the triumphs of Selma and Birmingham and the frustrations of Albany and Chicago. Joining a charismatic leader with an inspired group of activists, the SCLC built a bridge from the black proletariat to the white liberal elite and then, finally, to the halls of Congress and the White House.

During a public career spanning only twelve years, Martin Luther King Jr. transformed the South--and the nation--and reinvigorated American democracy. From the pulpit and from jail, he inspired African Americans to rebel against white supremacy, nonviolently defying racism, bigotry, and brutality. He also sought a better way of life for all poor and powerless people, black and white alike. In this concise and readable biography, Adam Fairclough chronicles the major events of King's life and assesses his achievements as the preeminent leader of the civil rights movement.

The biography begins with an examination of King's upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia, and a description of the conditions suffered by black southerners in the 1930s. After tracing King's intellectual growth through college, graduate school, and seminary, Fairclough then tracks his fortuitous involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott and his swift rise to prominence as a spokesman and leader. Subsequent chapters offer incisive accounts of King's major campaigns: the demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, where a wily police chief outwitted him; the militant protests in Birmingham, Alabama, where King transmuted police brutality into a historic victory for African Americans; and the campaign in Selma, Alabama, which paved the way for black political representation throughout the South. Fairclough also looks at other notable triumphs and struggles, from the inspirational "I Have a Dream" speech delivered at the March on Washington rally to King's ill-fated journey to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers.

Throughout, Fairclough charts the major stages of King's philosophical and political growth, examining his opposition to the Vietnam War, his response to Black Power, and his growing concern for economic justice. Fairclough rounds out his portrait with an assessment of King's legacy to America and his continuing relevance to the struggle throughout the world for freedom and equality.