100 books like Bloody Lowndes

Though this book is not a study of movement organizing, it shows just how necessary the task of political and economic empowerment remains, if people are to escape cycles of low wages, dangerous work, persistent racism, and public neglect. This book inspired me, and even more so my students, for the connections it uncovered in a declining North Carolina railroad town: a growing, fiercely competitive, and radically unsafe poultry processing industry; persistent neighborhood segregation and racial disrespect, despite the widespread integration of Blacks and women into workplaces; the exclusion of Blacks and poor whites from local political power; the growth of mother-only and time-pressed poor families increasingly reliant on low wages and cheap food to get by. These are only a few of the topics Simon compressed into his lucid and readable portrait of the tragedy of chicken and the unfinished business of our time.

Even some of my most historically aware students are often stunned to learn that the largest poor people’s organization of the 1960s and 1970s was the National Welfare Rights Organization. This is the story of the Black mothers who built one of NWRO’s most dynamic and creative local chapters. Through its dramatic, inspiring characters, this book made it plain to me just how much gender justice is indivisible from racial and economic justice. They staged massive protests in the Las Vegas strip with an amazing cast of allies. Then they moved on, and leveraged resources from far and wide to build "Operation Life," a social service, healthcare, and job training agency that they ran themselves.

All my selections capture unheralded activists undertaking the “social learning” at the core of movement building. Inevitably, a movement against one injustice will uncover larger and denser fabrics of inequality and disempowerment. Lipsitz and Perry collaborated in producing an incredible synthesis of personal biography and broad social and historical analysis. This book opened my eyes to the forgotten history of a northern freedom movement that challenged entrenched and enduring structures of big city inequality. Lipsitz follows Perry from a campaign to open up jobs for St. Louis bank tellers in 1963, to an “unviolent” campaign organizing Louisiana timber workers for voting rights and labor rights in 1965. Perry's subsequent efforts as a St. Louis war on poverty housing coordinator were educations in themselves: most memorably, he organized rent strikes and coordinated an unprecedented campaign to remedy the devastating effects of lead paint poisoning on children.

When I read this book, I knew plenty about Martin Luther King’s ties to the labor movement. What I did not know—and what it took Honey twenty years to piece together—was an understanding of the 1,200 workers whose desperate straits and courageous creative nonviolence called King to Memphis in 1968. Honey uncovers the small triumphs hidden from view if we only look at the large tragedy of King’s assassination. Sanitation workers fought for safer working conditions, adequate wages, and trade union recognition from a city administration that literally treated them like garbage. A labor dispute transformed into a nonviolent community revolt. I remain in awe of the book’s richly textured portraits, among them Reverend Ralph Jackson, a peaceful protester brutalized by police, who forged a "campaign to end police brutality and improve housing, jobs, wages, and education across the city."

I wanted a good middle-grade book to introduce my son to the Birmingham Children’s March.   Doing so was important to me since his mother grew up in Birmingham, a little girl in 1963.  Levinson’s book features the stories of four children, one who was my wife’s schoolmate, who marched and were fire-hosed. With historical photographs and interviews, the book is an inviting and moving introduction for middle-graders to the why and how of the Movement and the bravery of the youngest activists.

I chose this picture book because it’s so well-written (including an unforgettable kid-friendly explanation of “Jim Crow”), because it’s a first-hand account by someone who took part in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery when she was only four years old, and because I liked the way the author showed the organizers as an “orchestra” composed of leaders such as Dorothy Cotton, Ralph Abernathy, and her own parents, Andrew and Jean Childs Young, rather than a solo act by Martin Luther King.

In May 1963, three thousand African American children allowed themselves to be arrested in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation. The youngest, Audrey Faye Hendricks, was an elementary school student. This picture book biography tells the story of how she came to march with a bunch of high schoolers and about the bravery she had to summon up for her stay in jail.

Dick J. Reavis was a white teenager from Texas when he joined the Civil Rights movement in 1965. If White Kids Die is his clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of his experiences in Alabama for the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. It’s a fascinating, grassroots view from a foot soldier of the movement, someone far removed for the glamorous leadership positions.

Following his stint with SNCC, Reavis later joined SDS and became a prominent anti-war protester in Austin. During his time in the Movement, Reavis endured beatings, jailings, denunciations, and poverty. All of that, as it turned out, was good preparation for his eventual career: a life in journalism. He has since become a legendary journalist in Texas, famed for his tough and daring reporting. He once told me: “I knew Spanish, knew how to live poor, knew how to lie to bosses."

Now teaching at UT Austin after founding the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, Joseph recently wrote a twin biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. called The Sword and the Shield. His first published book, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour (2006), was a thriller; it helped shift the prevailing narrative of the core years of the Civil Rights era toward the essential legacies of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and other Black “radicals” whose contributions were too long willfully neglected.

Why We Can't Wait is an easy way to get into the psychology of MLK. It is a 1964 book by Martin Luther King Jr. about the nonviolent movement against racial segregation in the United States, and specifically the 1963 Birmingham campaign. The way it is written makes it understandable from a 1:1 perspective. I am connected to this because it helps a person be actionable in their own way about causes they care about. No frills, just action!