Freedom's Sword is the first history to detail the remarkable, lasting achievements of the NAACP's first sixty years. From its pivotal role in overturning the Jim Crow laws in the South to its twenty-year court campaign that culminated with Brown v. the Board of Education, the NAACP has been at the forefront of the struggle against American racism. Gilbert Jonas, a fifty-year veteran of the organization, tracks America's political and social landscape period by period, as the NAACP grows to 400,000 members and is recognized by both blacks and whites as the leading force for social justice.
Jonas recounts the historic combined efforts of ordinary citizens and black leaders such as W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and Thurgood Marshall to root out white-only political primaries, separate schools, and segregated city buses. Freedom's Sword is a vivid and passionately written account of the single most influential secular organization in black America.

Freedom's Sword is the first history to detail the remarkable, lasting achievements of the NAACP's first sixty years. From its pivotal role in overturning the Jim Crow laws in the South to its twenty-year court campaign that culminated with Brown v. the Board of Education, the NAACP has been at the forefront of the struggle against American racism. Gilbert Jonas, a fifty-year veteran of the organization, tracks America's political and social landscape period by period, as the NAACP grows to 400,000 members and is recognized by both blacks and whites as the leading force for social justice.
Jonas recounts the historic combined efforts of ordinary citizens and black leaders such as W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and Thurgood Marshall to root out white-only political primaries, separate schools, and segregated city buses. Freedom's Sword is a vivid and passionately written account of the single most influential secular organization in black America.

Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, this collection addresses the significance of the "Brown" decision in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. The book stands as a historic document in its own right, preserving the reactions of many prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists fifty years after the decision.

Contributors are Kal Alston, Margaret L. Andersen, Kathryn H. Anthony, Nathaniel C. Banks, Bernice McNair Barnett, Christopher Benson, Ed Blankenheim, Julian Bond, Orville Vernon Burton, Jason Chambers, Constance Curry, Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Mary L. Dudziak, Joe R. Feagin, John Hope Franklin, Ophelia De Laine Gona, Lani Guinier, Darlene Clark Hine, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John Jennings, Ralph Lemon, George Lipsitz, Jim Loewen, Laughlin McDonald, David O'Brien, James C. Onderdonk, Sekou Sundiata, Christopher Teal, Nicholas Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, Juan Williams, and Joy Ann Williamson.

This eloquent and provocative autobiography, originally published in 1972, records a day by day, sometimes hour by hour, compassionate account of the events that took place in the streets, meetings, churches, jails, and in people's hearts and minds in the 1960s civil rights movement.

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting publication that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work of nine photographers who participated in the movement as activists with SNCC, SCLC, and CORE. Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers lived within the movement—primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework—and documented its activities by focusing on the student activists and local people who together made it happen. The core of the book is a selection of 150 black-and-white photographs, representing the work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey SNCC's organizing strategies, resolve in the face of violence, impact on local and national politics, and influence on the nation's consciousness. The photographs and texts of This Light of Ours remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of "ordinary" Americans among whom were the nation's courageous youth, and that the movement's moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives.

This new combined edition of We Shall Overcome and Freedom Is A Constant Struggle weaves together the leadsheets of 115 songs, 135 moving documentary photos, and stirring firsthand accounts. Grouped together in chapters on each of the key stages of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, they create a stunning vision of this critical moment in world history. Includes an introduction by the editors, Guy and Candie Carawan. Arranged chronologically, fully indexed. 312 pages.

Taking its title from the moving lyrics of the official song of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," Till Victory Is Won chronicles significant moments in African-American history through more than two hundred illuminating quotations from NAACP officers, members, and award recipients.

Focusing on five major topics -- Protecting Civil Rights, Achieving Educational Excellence, Nurturing Economic Development, Reaching Youth, and Gaining Political Power -- this extraordinary anthology inspires and informs. Featured voices include:

• Kweisi Mfume
• Duke Ellington
• Rosa Parks
• Hank Aaron
• Carter G. Woodson
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Thurgood Marshall
• Maya Angelou
• Harry Belafonte
• Sidney Poitier
• Sara Lawrence Lightfoot
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Halle Berry
• Michael Jordan
• Earvin (Magic) Johnson
• Colin Powell
• George Washington Carver
• Jesse Jackson
• Oprah Winfrey
• Lauryn Hill
• Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Toni Morrison
• Susan Taylor
• Langston Hughes
• Jackie Robinson
• Quincy Jones
• Alice Walker
• Spike Lee
• Cornel West
• Patti LaBelle
• James Earl Jones

...and countless others who share their perspectives on the life-changing work of the NAACP and its place in history.

Winner of the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award Even forty years after the civil rights movement, the transition from son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of SNCC seems quite a journey. In the early 1960s, when Bob Zellner's professors and classmates at a small church school in Alabama thought he was crazy for even wanting to do research on civil rights, it was nothing short of remarkable. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the Southern "way of life" he had been raised on but rejected. Decades later, he is still protesting on behalf of social change and equal rights. Fortunately, he took the time, with co-author Constance Curry, to write down his memories and reflections. He was in all the campaigns and was close to all the major figures. He was beaten, arrested, and reviled by some but admired and revered by others. The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, winner of the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award, is Bob Zellner's larger-than-life story, and it was worth waiting for.

"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.

"A provocative and powerful collection of eclectic writings on the central moral issue of our times". -- Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

"Double Exposure delivers a double dose of smart writing, controlled anger, and devasting common sense". -- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed

This book provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of the major topics surrounding our country s most troublesome and seemingly intractable social problem: the intersection of race and poverty.

The sixty-three contributions -- by some of the nation's leading thinkers and activists (Nathan Glazer, Roger Wilkins, Senator Bill Bradley, Brent Staples, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Manning Marable, Howard Winant, Benjamin DeMott, Max Frankel, Herbert Gans, Henry Hampton, Julian Bond, and many others), representing a variety of disciplines and backgrounds -- are organized under seven key topics: affirmative action; the "permanence of racism" thesis; the use and utility of racial and ethnic categories; multiculturalism; immigration; the "underclass" debate; and democracy/equality.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955. Till's death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book is also the basis for HBO's mini-series produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck, Aaron Kaplan, James Lassiter, Jay Brown, Ty Ty Smith, John P. Middleton, Rosanna Grace, David B. Clark, and Alex Foster, which is currently in active development.For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades. Anderson covers the events that led up to this probe in great detail, as well as the investigation itself. This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago over a ten-year period to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.