ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY BY JULIAN BOND*
CHOOSING READING MATERIALS is a daunting challenge. The civil rights bibliography is lengthy and constantly expanding. Books on the following list are followed by descriptions. If you are a fast reader, consume the Taylor Branch trilogy—they are the very best books on the American civil rights movement and tell its familiar story with fascinating new detail and analysis—Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.
Aldon Morris’s Origins of the Civil Rights Movement provides excellent background to the movement. Glenn Eskew’s But for Birmingham describes that city’s movement. Vincent Harding’s Hope and History places the civil rights movement in a modern context.
An exciting book that is certainly worthwhile, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, includes fifty-two women— Northern and Southern, young and old, urban and rural, Black, white, and Latina—who share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on the front lines of the civil rights movement. Another recommended book—written by my former TA when I taught at Harvard, Jeanne Theoharis—is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.
J. Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines places municipal politics in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham at the center of the freedom movement. Howell Raines’s My Soul Is Rested tells the movement story in the movement makers’ own words.
All the books on this list are worthy.
Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen: A Biography, by Jervis Anderson (University of California Press, 1998).
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault (Oxford University Press, 2006). Detailed and powerful history of participants in the Freedom Rides.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster, 1988). This is the Pulitzer Prize–winning first book of Branch’s three-volume history of the movement, which together cover the movement’s early years, the March on Washington, the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the Albany (Georgia), Birmingham, and St. Augustine movements, and much more.
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Volume 2 of Taylor’s trilogy includes the movement in the North, Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge.
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Volume 3 of Branch’s history includes the Selma voting rights campaign, the march to Montgomery, Black Power, the Meredith march, the Chicago Campaign, and anti–Vietnam War protests.
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (Scribner, 2003). Autobiography of the freedom fighter who headed SNCC for a time.
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, by Clayborne Carson (Harvard University Press, 1981). History of SNCC from the sit-ins and Freedom Rides through community organizing, Freedom Summer, Black Power, and dispersal.
Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, edited by Constance Curry et al. (University of Georgia Press, 2000). Nine first-person memoirs of the Southern freedom movement.
Silver Rights: The Story of the Carter Family’s Brave Decision to Send Their Children to an All-White School and Claim Their Civil Rights, by Constance Curry (Harcourt, 1998). The powerful story of an African American sharecropper family on a plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, who sent seven of their thirteen children to desegregate the all-white school system in 1965.
The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care, by John Dittmer (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Story of the courageous MCHR doctors, nurses, and health professionals who cared for the injured and struggled for justice and health-care equality during Freedom Summer and the antiwar movement, in Selma, Chicago, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and elsewhere.
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, by John Dittmer (University of Illinois Press, 1995). The movement in Mississippi from the point of view of the local people who lived it.
Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, by Mary L. Dudziak (Princeton University Press, 2002). Analyzing impact of Cold War foreign affairs on US civil rights reform and how international relations affected domestic issues, this book interprets the civil rights movement as a Cold War feature and argues that the Cold War helped facilitate social reforms, including desegregation.
But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, by Glenn T. Eskew (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Detailed historical examination of the Birmingham struggle in 1950s and 1960s.
Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972, by Adam Fairclough (University of Georgia Press, 1999). British scholar Fairclough examines the history of the civil rights movement in Louisiana from 1915, when the New Orleans branch of the NAACP was founded, through the start of the first administration of Governor Edwin Edwards in 1972. He has written the most comprehensive account yet of the movement in Louisiana. Especially valuable is the discussion of the movement during the decades before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, a period that many scholars have neglected.
Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, by James Farmer (Texas Christian University Press, 1998). Personal story of the CORE leader and one of the major figures of the movement.
Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, by Cynthia Griggs Fleming (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Biography of a major leader and activist in SNCC and the struggle for women’s rights.
The Making of Black Revolutionaries, by James Forman (University of Washington Press, 1997). Autobiography and movement history by SNCC executive director Jim Forman, originally published in 1972.
Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Catherine Fosl (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Biography of famed civil rights activist Anne Braden.
A White Preacher’s Message on Race and Reconciliation: Based on His Experiences Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Robert S. Graetz (New South Books, 2006). In addition to Graetz’s Montgomery bus boycott memoirs, this book includes provocative chapters on white privilege, Black forgiveness, and the present-day challenges for human and civil rights.
Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, by Joanne Grant (John Wiley & Sons, 1998). Profile of Ella Baker and her central role in the movement.
Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, by Vincent Harding (Orbis Books, 1990). Essays by movement veteran Vincent Harding on how the civil rights movement affected all aspects of American life.
Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir, by Dorothy Height (Public Affairs, 2003). Personal memoir of a major figure in the civil rights movement. A contemporary of Dr. King, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and Langston Hughes, Height was often the only woman involved in the movement at the highest leadership level.
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, edited by Faith Holsaert et al. (University of Illinois Press, 2012). An unprecedented women’s history of the civil rights movement, from sit-ins to Black Power, told by the largely little-known women who made it happen.
Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, by Michael Honey (W. W. Norton, 2007). Labor activist and historian Honey describes the strike and King’s effort to build a new mass movement to push beyond civil rights to economic justice for the poor and working class.
Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries (New York University Press, 2009). Story of SNCC organizing in Lowndes County, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and the emergence of Black Power.
Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality, by Richard Kluger (Vintage, 2004). Major overview of not only the Brown case but also the movement as a whole, first published in 1975. This edition, updated to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, includes analysis of the Republican “Southern strategy.”
Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America, by Nick Kotz (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Covers the interactions and relationship between King and LBJ around the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), with foreword by Julian Bond. Republished by Twin Palms in 2010, including a new afterword. This book by the SNCC photographer who covered major freedom movement campaigns and projects contains some of the most moving and powerful images to come out of the movement.
Freedom Summer, by Doug McAdam (Oxford University Press, 1968). Analysis of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, by Laughlin McDonald (Cambridge University Press, 2003). McDonald tells the story of the efforts of the white leadership in Georgia to maintain white supremacy by denying Blacks the right to vote and hold elected office. Narrated chronologically, most of the story is told by those who participated, from Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States, to Carl Sanders, governor of Georgia in the 1960s, to Emma Gresham, Black mayor of Keysville, in rural Burke County.
CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement 1942–1968, by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick (Oxford University Press, 1973).
Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964–1969, by Gregg L. Michel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). The Southern Student Organizing Committee was an organization of Southern white students who struggled in local white communities against racism, to end the war in Vietnam, and to build an interracial movement for justice and equality.
This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, by Kay Mills (Dutton, 1994). Moving biography of a central figure in the civil rights movement.
The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, by Aldon D. Morris (Free Press, 1986). Comprehensive study of the movement’s origin and strategies, with emphasis on the roles played by women.
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, by Robert J. Norrell (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). In this classic and compelling account, Norrell traces the course of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, capturing both the unique aspects of this key Southern town’s experience and the elements that it shared with other communities during this period.
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, by Charles Payne (University of California Press, 1995). Uses one Mississippi community to explain how the movement organized.
Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, by Gerald L. Posner (Random House, 1998). Argues that Ray was the lone assassin and that there was no broader conspiracy.
My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, by Howell Raines (Putnam, 1977). Personal statements and recollections of movement activists and leaders from the Montgomery bus boycott through King’s assassination.
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Knopf, 2006).
Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures, by Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser (Norton, 1989). History of the civil rights movement in songs, pictures, and interviews.
Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, by Patricia Sullivan (New Press, 2009). A history of the oldest, largest civil rights organization.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, by Jeanne Theoharis (Beacon Press, 2013). Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.
Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, by J. Mills Thornton (University of Alabama Press, 2006). Detailed, comprehensive history of the Montgomery bus boycott and movements in Selma and Birmingham, with heavy emphasis on municipal politics.
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, by Timothy B. Tyson (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Biography of Robert F. Williams and his advocacy of “armed self-reliance” by Blacks.
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, by Bruce Watson (Viking, 2010). Describes the overall freedom movement in Mississippi and the history of the Mississippi Summer Project, including personal stories of more than fifty participants.
*Professor Bond created this annotated bibliography for the civil rights tours he led through the South under the auspices of the University of Virginia from 2007 to 2015.