Civil Rights Movements

This work documents the importance of the civil rights movement and its lasting impression on American society and culture. This revealing volume looks at the struggle for individual rights from the social historian's perspective, providing a fresh context for gauging the impact of the civil rights movement on everyday life across the full spectrum of American society. From the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case to protests against the Vietnam War to the fight for black power, Civil Rights Movement: People and Perspectives looks at events that set the stage for guaranteeing America's promise to all Americans. In eight chapters, some of the country's leading social historians analyze the most recent investigations into the civil rights era's historical context and pivotal moments. Readers will gain a richer understanding of a movement that expanded well beyond its initial focus (the treatment of African Americans in the South) to include other Americans in regions across the nation.

Civil rights have been in the news with the rise of Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem at NFL games, and more. Yet civil rights activists have many other causes they are fighting for, such as calling attention to police brutality and combating racism in everyday life. The Civil Rights Movement started in the 1800s and remains a prominent movement within our modern society. Find out how activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer set the stage for activists in modern times and learn how activists are speaking out today to expand rights for African Americans.

The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.

Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.

Presents the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, from Reconstruction to the late 1960s, through excerpts from letters, newspaper articles, speeches, songs, and poems of the time.

Discusses the history of African Americans' struggle for equality, including the non-violent and violent protests of the 1960s, affirmative action, and the current state of race relations.

Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction

Offers a brief history of the African American struggle for freedom, equality, and civil rights.