Thomas,Velma Maia. *We Shall Not be Moved. New York, Crown Publishers, 2002. E185.6.T48 2002

From the Publisher:
We Shall Not Be Moved takes readers on an interactive journey through the freedom struggles of the 20th century, tracing 100 years of battles for justice and equality on all fronts, from Marcus Garvey to the mid-century civil rights movement, from the Tuskegee Airmen to school integration, from Paul Robeson to Malcolm X. The interactive elements include reproductions of letters from soldiers in World War II, a flyer advertising the original March on Washington, a sign urging black riders to boycott the buses in Montgomery, and other facsimiles of artifacts that give readers a unique, hands-on connection to this remarkable history.

About the Author:
Velma Maia Thomas created and curates the Black Holocaust exhibit and is the author of Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation, Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration, and No Man Can Hinder Me: The Journey from Slavery to Emancipation Through Song. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

http://www.velmamaiathomas.com

Bridges, Ruby. *Through My Eyes. New York, Scholastic Press, September 1999. F379.N59B75 1999

From the Publisher:
On November 14, 1960, a tiny, six-year-old black child, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. From where she sat in the school's office, Ruby Bridges could see parents marching through the halls and taking their children out of classrooms. The next day, Ruby courageously walked through the angry mob once again and into a school where, this time, she saw no other students. The white children did not go to school that day, and they wouldn't go to school for many days to come. Surrounded by racial turmoil, Ruby, the only student in a classroom headed by one wonderful teacher, learned to read and add. This is the story of a pivotal event in history related here as Ruby Bridges saw it unfold around her. Ruby's poignant words, quotations from writers and from other adults who observed her, along with dramatic photographs recreate an amazing story of innocence, courage, and forgiveness. Ruby Bridges' story is an inspiration to us all.

About the Author:

http://www.rubybridges.org

Irons, Peter H. *Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promises of the Brown Decision. New York, Viking Books, September 2002. KF4155.I758 2002

From the Publisher:
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court sounded the death knell for school segregation with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. So goes conventional wisdom. In fact, writes Peter Irons, today many of our schools are even more segregated than they were on the day when Brown was decided. In this groundbreaking legal history, Irons explores the 150-year struggle against Jim Crow education, showing how the great victory over segregation was won, then lost again. The author of several award-winning books, Irons ranges from 1849 to the present as he describes a battle that has stretched across most of American history. He skillfully weaves a gripping legal drama out of the stories of brave, now-forgotten men and women, of luminaries such as Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren, and explores the impact of the Brown decision on the communities actually involved in the case. Perceptive, fascinating, and devastating, Jim Crow's Children is a major contribution to the national debate over race and its implications for the American educational system.

About the Author:
Peter Irons is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five previous award-winning books. The most recent, A People’s History of the Supreme Court was awarded the Silver Gavel Certificate of Merit by the American Bar Association.

Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy New York, Oxford University Press, November 2002. KF4155.P37 2002

From the Publisher:
[I]n a concise, moving narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits (at great personal cost); to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision. Others include segregationist politicians like Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon; and controversial Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Most Americans still see Brown as a triumph--but was it? Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. Could the Court--or President Eisenhower--have done more to ensure compliance with Brown? Did the decision touch off the modern civil rights movement? How useful are court-ordered busing and affirmative action against racial segregation? To what extent has racial mixing affected the academic achievement of black children? Where indeed do we go from here to realize the expectations of Marshall, … and others in 1954?

About the Author:
James T. Patterson won the Bancroft Prize in History for Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. Author of numerous books concerning modern American life, he is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University.

Taylor, Quintard. *The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District, from 1870 Through the Civil Rights Era (the Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture-Book Series in Western History and Biography. Seattle, University of Washington Press, May 1994. F899.S49N475 1994

From the Publisher:
Through much of the twentieth century, black Seattle was synonymous with the Central District - a four-square-mile section near the geographic center of the city. Quintard Taylor explores the evolution of this community from its first few residents in the 1870s to a population of nearly forty thousand in 1970. With events such as the massive influx of rural African Americans beginning with World War II and the transformation of African American community leadership in the 1960s from an integrationist to a "black power" stance… Seattle both anticipates and mirrors national trends. Thus, the book addresses not only a particular city in the Pacific Northwest but also the process of political change in black America.

About the Author:
In July 2002, Quintard Taylor began his fourth year as the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History. His most recent work, Seeking Eldorado: African Americans in California, (co-edited with Lawrence B. de Graaf and Kevin Mulroy) was released by the University of Washington Press in 2001. A second anthology, African American Women Confront the American West, 1600-2000, (with Shirley Moore) was published by the University of Oklahoma Press, in the summer of 2003.

http://www.artsci.washington.edu/newsletter/Autumn99/Taylor.htm

Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality New York, Oxford University Press, January 2004. KF475.K58 2004

From the Publisher:
In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

About The Author:
Michael J. Klarman is the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. After graduating from Stanford Law School, Klarman clerked for the honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then completed his doctoral thesis in legal history at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his spouse, Lisa Landsverk, and their four children.

Titles with an * are currently in the Brown v. Board of Education display located on the fourth floor of the Law Library.