The best books on the Black American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s

The U. S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 ruling striking down racially segregated schooling kick-started the emerging Black freedom struggle across the U. S. South. Brown was actually five cases combined, from different locales, and Kluger’s masterful research richly and memorably details their roots in Black communities such as Clarendon County SC. NAACP litigators like Thurgood Marshall play major roles, but Kluger devotes great attention to how newly-arrived Chief Justice Earl Warren managed to unite his fellow justices behind a bombshell, landmark ruling. Constitutionally mandated desegregation would be no panacea for Black students and teachers, however, as David Cecelski’s valuable Along Freedom Road reports from Hyde County, NC.

Black southern mass action against segregation commenced in Montgomery, AL with the 1955-56 bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., to national fame, then finally broke through U. S. presidential ambivalence with the 1963 protests in Birmingham that were met with heavily-photographed police violence, and culminated with the 1965 Selma marches that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. These three Alabama cities represent the cornerstones of that dramatic 1955-1965 decade, and Thornton’s magisterial account of those movements’ local roots make it perhaps the most interpretively significant work of civil rights history ever written. A very close second is Adam Fairclough’s Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972.

Outside cities like that famous Alabama trio, most of the civil rights movement’s actual work took place in rural counties and small towns where combatting segregation could be even more dangerous than in Birmingham. Leading that charge was SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Mississippi was the centerpiece of SNCC’s courageous local organizing. Charles Payne powerfully and poignantly captures the beauty and the perils of that work while also painfully reporting how in subsequent decades memories of that bravery too quickly faded. Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle remains the best organizational history of SNCC, and Francoise N. Hamlin’s Crossroads at Clarksdale is like Payne’s great book a valuable chronicle of Black courage and commitment in the Mississippi Delta.

The Black freedom struggle of the 1960s was by no means limited to the South, and up until his tragic assassination in early 1965, no one better captured the often bitter anger of Black Americans trapped in exploitative Northern ghettos than the eloquent Malcolm X. An ex-con who rose to prominence in the sect-like Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm broke from the Nation’s limiting strictures in early 1964 and blossomed as a powerful advocate of human equality, Black freedom, and a true Islamic faith before NOI gunmen ended his incredibly promising life at the tragically early age of 39. Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography offers unvarnished assessments and acute interpretive judgments while powerfully capturing Malcolm’s ability to grow and reinvent himself multiple times.

Purposefully racist policies in major Northern cities often focused on the financial exploitation of upwardly-aspiring African Americans, with government-endorsed predatory lending practices impoverishing—and often leaving homeless—thousands of Black home-buying families. “Redlining” may be a familiar word, but the actual mechanisms of financial discrimination require a penetrating, clear-eyed examination, and Beryl Satter’s powerful account of how last-resort ‘contract buying’ left newly-arrived Black residents in the West Side Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale vulnerable to being fleeced by racist manipulators is one of the most important books ever written about the Black freedom struggle in the north.