Martin Luther King Jr., the iconic civil rights leader, was born into a world where he did not enjoy the same rights or opportunities as white Americans. Yet, he prompted great societal change through remarkable, peaceful means. This compelling and comprehensive biography takes readers on the journey of King's life from young Georgia pastor to the iconic trailblazer who met a tragic end. A timeline provides a summary of significant moments in King's...

A groundbreaking collection based on oral histories that brilliantly plumb the leadership of African American women in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights-many nearly lost to history-from the latest winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women were generally not in the headlines; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels...

Describes the peaceful protest organized by teenager Barbara Rose Johns in order to secure a permanent building for her segregated high school in Virginia in 1951, and explains how her actions helped fuel the civil rights movement.

"John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson...

No discussion of the civil rights movement of the 1960s is complete without a close look at Martin Luther King Jr. This book is an invaluable source of biographical information that uses King's own immensely powerful words to tell the story of his life and the fight for equality. The Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, and the Civil Rights Act are just some historic events described. Readers will find that King's words still resonate...

A biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than...

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America - the right to cast a ballot...

It was 1961. John Lewis and Jim Zwerg are two young men boarding a bus and heading south for Montgomery, Alabama and the thick of the brewing Civil Rights struggle. They are idealists, committed to justice and equality and full of hope for change. This is their Freedom Ride. Arriving in town, suddenly they find themselves helpless in the clutches of an angry white mob armed with bats, chains, and hammers. Both men are beaten within an inch of their...