There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975


Jason Sokol - 2006
    Now, in his brilliant debut book, historian Jason Sokol explores the untold stories of ordinary people experiencing the tumultuous decades that forever altered the American landscape. So often historical accounts of the era have focused on the movement’s most dramatic moments and figures, and paid greatest attention to the brave steps taken by blacks to effect long-awaited change. In this riveting book, Sokol goes beyond the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 student sit-ins, and the soul-stirring speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and into the lives of middle- and working-class whites whose world was becoming unrecognizable to them. He takes us to New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, where, in 1960, a painful episode of school integration brought out the fiercest prejudices in some and made accidental radicals of others; to Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham and Pickrick Fried Chicken in Atlanta, and thousands of lunch counters in between, where “some white employees greeted black customers as though they had been patrons for years; others slammed doors in their faces; still more served them hesitantly and reluctantly.” There Goes My Everything traces the origins of the civil rights struggle from World War II, when some black and white American soldiers lived and fought side by side overseas (leading them to question Jim Crow at home), to the beginnings of change in the 1950s and the flared tensions of the 1960s, into the 1970s, when strongholds of white rule suddenly found themselves overtaken by rising black political power. Through it all, Sokol resists the easy categorization of whites caught in the torrent of change; rather, he gives us nuanced portraits of people resisting, embracing, and questioning the social revolution taking place around them. Drawing on recorded interviews, magazine bureau dispatches, and newspaper editorials, Sokol seamlessly weaves together historical analysis with firsthand accounts. Here are the stories of white southerners in their own words, presented without condescension or moral judgment. An unprecedented picture of one of the historic periods in twentieth-century America.

History of the Early Settlement and Indian Wars of West Virginia


Wills De Hass - 1851
     This area was dangerous and many who had ventured there alone had never returned. But slowly over the course of this century settlers continued to push further west until regions such as West Virginia were populated with more and more adventurous young men and women. The settlement of these lands did not occur without difficulties and colonizers frequently came into conflict with the local Native American populations. Wills De Hass’s remarkable book History of the Early Settlement and Indian Wars of West Virginia is a fascinating history of how the lands of the west were first settled by white emigrants in the eighteenth century and how these settlers came into frequent strife with the Native American tribes who had previously lived there. Beginning with Columbus’ discovery of this great continent Wills De Hass charts the colonization of this expansive land. He records with brilliant detail the early encounters that Europeans had with the men and women that they found already living across the region and explains how various nations from across the Atlantic made their first tentative footholds on this newly discovered land. De Hass records how settlers were not only conflict with Native Americans but also with each other as this region descended into war, firstly during the French and Indian War and shortly afterwards during the American War of Independence. Particularly fascinating throughout the book are the biographical sketches of various well-known frontiersmen who were particularly influential in the Ohio Valley and northwestern Virginia. This book is perfect for anyone interested in the early settlement of western regions prior to 1795 and how this area was frequently in conflict as settlers attempted to assert their rights against the wishes of the Native American populations. Wills de Hass was a lecturer and writer on archaeological and historical subjects. His book History of the Early Settlement and Indian Wars of Western Virginia was first published in 1851 and De Hass passed away 1910.

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones


Carole Boyce Davies - 2007
    Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean


Gerald Horne - 2018
    To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe's colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus's arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling "liberty and justice for all." The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England's conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe's colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created "these United States," and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this "free" land amounted to "combat pay" for their efforts as "white" settlers.Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, "to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life."

Plantation Jesus: Race, Faith, and a New Way Forward


Skot Welch - 2018
    God wasn’t bothered by Jim Crow. Baby Jesus had white skin. Meet Plantation Jesus: a god who is comfortable with bigotry, and an idol that distorts the message of the real Savior. That false image of God is dead, right? Wrong, argue the authors of Plantation Jesus, an authoritative new book on one of the most urgent issues of our day. Through their shared passion for Jesus Christ and with an unblinking look at history, church, and pop culture, authors Skot Welch and Rick Wilson detail the manifold ways that racism damages the church’s witness. Together Welch and Wilson take on common responses by white Christians to racial injustice, such as “I never owned a slave,” “I don’t see color; only people,” and “We just need to get over it and move on.” Together they call out the church’s denials and dodges and evasions of race, and they invite readers to encounter the Christ of the disenfranchised.With practical resources and Spirit-filled stories, Plantation Jesus nudges readers to learn the history, acknowledge the injury, and face the truth. Only then can the church lead the way toward true reconciliation. Only then can the legacy of Plantation Jesus be replaced with the true way of Jesus Christ.

Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt


Hasan Kwame Jeffries - 2009
    The group, whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther, was formed in part to protest the barriers to black enfranchisement that had for decades kept every single African American of voting age off the county's registration books. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most African Americans in this overwhelmingly black county remained too scared even to try to register. Their fear stemmed from the county's long, bloody history of whites retaliating against blacks who strove to exert the freedom granted to them after the Civil War.Amid this environment of intimidation and disempowerment, African Americans in Lowndes County viewed the LCFO as the best vehicle for concrete change. Their radical experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael who used the Lowndes County program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California-based activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the LCFO panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This party and its adopted symbol went on to become the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, yet long-obscured is the crucial role that Lowndes County"historically a bastion of white supremacy"played in spurring black activists nationwide to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways.Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells, for the first time, the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.

Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr.


Stephen B. Oates - 1982
    On April 4th, 1968 a shot rang out in the Memphis sky bringing to a close the life of the last great American hero, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jnr.Although known to most for the delivery of his "I Have a Dream" address, which followed the peaceful march on Washington DC of 250,000 people, and as the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at age thirty-five), King in his eleven years as elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership to the then burgeoning civil rights movement, travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.Let the Trumpet Sound is the detailed examination of this life, written by Stephen B Oates, winner of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award.

The Chisholm Trail: A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail


Sam P. Ridings - 2014
     It ran for eight hundred miles, from San Antonio, Texas to Abilene, Kansas, and was instrumental in creating the famous image of the cowboy. But how was this trail created? Who devised its route? And why were the cattle drives across states so important for the economy of the southwest? Sam P. Riding’s fascinating book The Chisholm Trail: A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail gives an in-depth overview of the route was created, who rode along it and how it eventually superseded by the emergence of the railways. Through the course of the book Ridings provides details on many of the famous figures who were associated with the trail including the route’s founder Jesse Chisholm, famous ranchers like Joseph G. McCoy and Charles Goodnight, gunslingers such as Billy the Kid, and of course men who attempted to keep the peace like Charles A. Siringo. Sam P. Ridings rode the trail many times throughout his life during the trail’s golden era and so was able to gather information from the cowboys who knew the route better than anyone else. This work is full of fascinating stories of incidents that occurred along the length of the trail, from gunfights to religious revivals, Native American raids to cattle stampedes, during the short but vibrant years that the trail was in full use. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the southwest in the aftermath of the Civil War and how the image of the cowboy came into being. Sam P. Ridings was a frequent traveler on the Chisholm Trail and collected many of his stories from the men and women who had lived and worked on the trail during its golden years. His book The Chisholm Trail: A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail was first published in 1936. Ridings passed away in Kansas in 1942.

John McGraw


Charles C. Alexander - 1988
    His career in baseball spanned forty years and two eras—from the game’s raucous early days to its emergence as big business.Charles C. Alexander, a professor of history at Ohio University, Athens, and the author of Ty Cobb, calls John McGraw “perhaps the single most significant figure in baseball’s history before Babe Ruth transformed the game with his mammoth home runs and unparalleled showmanship.”

Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found


Gilbert King - 2018
    She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who was protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface.Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful, page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson


George L. Jackson - 1970
    Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre


Carole Boston Weatherford - 2021
    The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa's Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption


Bryan Stevenson - 2014
    The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching — a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.

Through Apache Eyes: Verbal History of Apache Struggle (Annotated and Illustrated)


Geronimo Chiricahua - 2011
    Yet, the one constant in the history of the Apache People is their constant struggle to survive in a world where they are surrounded by various enemies, including other Indian tribes, the Mexicans and finally their brutal nemesis the United States Army. Attacked, tricked, lied to and double crossed by all of those who surround and outnumber them, the Apache people continued their struggle until they were for all intent and purposes almost totally wiped out. One Apache’s name stands out in their brave yet woeful history and it is Geronimo, who at age 30 witnessed the massacre of his mother, wife and two young children.I’ve taken his recollections or accounts of the struggle of the Apache people and intertwined them with some archeological facts about this extraordinary tribe. In addition, I have searched and included some of the best photos of Apaches from that era, which I collected from Library of Congress Archives. What impressed me most about Geronimo was his brevity of words, yet his ability to take a knife to the heart of anyone who reads his verbal history. Like most Apaches, Geronimo said little, but what he did say was profound and truthful. But most powerful is what Geronimo didn’t say in his recollections. It is between this silence one can feel the pain, sorrow, pride and bravery of the Apache People. Chet DembeckPublisher of One

The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country


Amanda GormanAmanda Gorman - 2021
    Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.