The best Civil Rights Movement books

Sensational is a vivid history that brings to light the “girl stunt reporters” of the Gilded Age who went undercover to expose corruption and abuse in America—pioneers whose influence continues to be felt today.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, women journalists across the United States risked reputation and safety to expose the hazardous conditions under which many Americans lived and worked. In various disguises, they stole into sewing factories to report on child labor, fainted in the streets to test public hospital treatment, posed as lobbyists to reveal corrupt politicians. Inventive writers whose in-depth narratives made headlines for weeks at a stretch, these “girl stunt reporters” changed laws, helped launch a labor movement, championed women’s rights, and redefined journalism for the modern age.

When Barack Obama won his first presidential primary in early 2008, I knew next to nothing about him and began reading his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Frustrated by Obama’s use of pseudonyms for most of his acquaintances, and by the incurious profiles of him that journalistic outlets were offering up, I began what would become nine years of work researching Obama’s life from his childhood in Hawaii through his formative political years in Illinois politics and his break-through election to the U. S. Senate in 2004. I conducted more than 1,000 personal interviews for Rising Star, and Obama himself read most of the book in typescript in tandem with over eight hours of White House conversations between the two of us about it. Named by the Washington Post as one of the Ten Best Books of 2017, Rising Star made both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists, and will likely remain the definitive account of Obama’s pre-presidential life.

The endlessly fascinating Robert La Follette (1855-1925) represented Wisconsin in the House of Representatives, as governor, and, for twenty-one years, in the U.S. Senate.  As the nation rapidly transformed into an urban-industrial giant, he tackled some of its biggest problems, including political corruption, environmental devastation, and worker exploitation.  “The supreme issue, involving all the others,” he declared, “is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many.” La Follette was a leader in the fight to more equitably redistribute the nation’s wealth and power.

La Follette’s wife, Belle Case La Follette, was a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage and racial equality as well as world peace. Together they created a remarkably close family, generating a political dynasty.

This is a history of America in the 1920s, one that connects the decade’s controversies to today’s culture wars. We can see growing tension between cities and towns in the 1920s in our battles between red states and blue states. Nativism and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s reverberate in today’s bitter debates over immigration and racism. In Prohibition, an effort intended in part to keep immigrants in line, we see precursors to the war on drugs and mass incarceration. The fight over women’s role in politics, work, and the home raged in the 1920s, and still does so today. And the Protestant fundamentalism that frames the Religious Right emerged as a powerful force for the first time in the 1920s Scopes Trial. So, while many historians point to the 1960s as the starting point for the battle over American values and ideals, this history traces these conflicts to the newly modern 1920s.

A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.

Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.

Theodora of Byzantium is a scandalous teenage actress and Constantinople’s most sought-after courtesan. But she didn’t choose that life. Her mother and sister were actresses, so in Byzantium’s rigid and patriarchal society Theodora must be one, too. She vows that one day she’ll free herself from the whims of men and the shame of flaunting her body for money.

Theodora’s only route to personal freedom is to break society’s rules and seduce men of wealth and power. The religious and political enemies she makes in the process, however, put the lives of Theodora and her sister, Comito, in danger.

Stirring poems and stunning collage illustrations combine to celebrate the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a champion of equal voting rights.

Despite fierce prejudice and abuse, even being beaten to within an inch of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer was a champion of civil rights from the 1950s until her death in 1977. Integral to the Freedom Summer of 1964, Ms. Hamer gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention that, despite President Johnson’s interference, aired on national TV news and spurred the nation to support the Freedom Democrats. Featuring vibrant mixed-media art full of intricate detail, Voice of Freedom celebrates Fannie Lou Hamer’s life and legacy with a message of hope, determination, and strength.

In this new biography of Martin Luther King, we look at his life through the prism of his evolving faith and through his complex, emerging, religious lives.

Readers will learn about Martin Luther King's diverse religious and intellectual influences, of an increasingly radical cast of thought, and of a mélange of intellectual influences that he aligned in becoming the spokesperson for the most important social movement of twentieth-century American history. Not only does Harvey chronicle King's metamorphosis and its impact on American and African American life, but he seeks to explain his "afterlives"--how in American culture King became transformed into a mainstream civil saint, shorn of his radical religious critique of how power functioned in America. Harvey's concise biography will allow readers to see King anew in the context of his time and today.

While uncovering a long-lost reel-to-reel audio tape of MLK’s first “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in Rocky Mount, NC over nine months before the March of Washington, I wrote Origins of the Dream to trace King’s use of seven poems by Langston Hughes. I learned that King’s animating metaphor was as much poetic as it was prophetic. In fact, Hughes and King knew each other, exchanged letters, and even traveled together to Nigeria in 1960.

As such, King played a dangerous game of embracing the ideas of a poet who had been the subject of redbaiting and had his reputation tarnished in most circles after testifying on television before Joseph McCarthy in 1953. Hughes’s revolutionary verses were often intentionally concealed within King’s speeches from 1963-66 as King had to be most cautious about publically aligning himself with the left during the years he most hoped to win mainstream political support.