Black American Studies: Civil Rights

A segregated drinking fountain in North Carolina (Getty)

• Civil Rights

• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Protest Against a Racist Court System (Martin Luther King Jr., 1958)
• Must We Hate? (Archibald Macleish, 1963)
• Letter From Birmingham Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963)
• A Freedom Budget for All Americans (Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, 1967)
• Death at an Early Age (Jonathan Kozol, 1967)
  • Part II: Where Ghetto Schools Fail (Jonathan Kozol, 1967)
• Dynamite (Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, 1967)
• The Crisis In American Cities (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967)

• Modern analysis:

• Segregation Now … (Nikole Hannah-Jones, 2014)
• School Districts Still Face Fights—and Confusion—on Integration(Nikole Hannah-Jones, 2014)
• Freedom Summer, 1964: Did It Really Change Mississippi? (Nikole Hannah-Jones, 2014)
• King Wanted More Than Just Desegregation (Eve L. Ewing, 2018)
• The Civil-Rights Movement’s Generation Gap (Bree Newsome, 2018)
• Coretta Scott King and the Civil-Rights Movement’s Hidden Women (Jeanne Theoharis, 2018)
• King’s Message of Nonviolence Has Been Distorted (Dara T. Mathis, 2018)
• Is King All That We Are Allowed to Become? (Mychal Denzel Smith, 2018)
• Thank you, The Atlantic, 6/16/20

"John Lewis was militant and gentle, a fighter and a peacemaker, brave and self-effacing, confident and humble. He was a listener whom others wanted to hear. He was a man of infinite faith and hope who nonetheless saw and experienced the profound shortcomings, even evils, of our world and our country. He was a partisan when he needed to be, but a unifier at all times."  Washington Post, 19 June 2020. Representative John Lewis died on 17 June 2020.