Metropolitan Library System

A startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen through the eyes of some of the most important American writers
"Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights movement."—Robert Greene, The Nation
In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not...

When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different...

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging...

Before there was Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin. This fearless black teenager, who studied civil rights at her segregated high school in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. She felt and believed it violated her rights as a United States citizen. Colvin began a movement that led to the Montgomery bus boycott, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement. Fast facts and sidebars support the narrative...

"I have a dream"-no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. King's speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the "I Have a Dream" speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial...

In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this vibrantly written biography, Katherine Charron demonstrates Clark's crucial role — and the role of many black women teachers — in...