The History section includes books that discuss historical moments that were motivated by and/or influenced social justice movements.
Browse the books below to see a sample of our Famous People section. Click on the books to view them in the library catalog.
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.
In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism's wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom.
Cornel West is at the forefront of thinking about race. In Race Matters he addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans. He never hesitates to confront the prejudices of all his readers or wavers in his insistence that they share a common destiny. Bold in its thought and written with a redemptive passion grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, Race Matters is a book that is at once challenging and deeply healing.
Girl Gurl Grrrl both illuminates our current cultural moment and transcends it. Hunt captures the zeitgeist while also creating a timeless celebration of womanhood, of blackness, and the possibilities they both contain. She blends the popular and the personal, the frivolous and the momentous in a collection that truly reflects what it is to be living and thriving as a black woman today.
In the early 1950s, Rosa Parks-who was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, and worked as a seamstress most of her life- became active in the American Civil Rights Movement and worked as a secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She also attended the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Parks refused to obey a public bus driver's orders to give up her seat in the "colored" section of the bus to a white man. She was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct. Partially in response to her arrest, Martin Luther King, Jr., then a relatively unknown Baptist minister, led the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, which forced the public transportation authority to end the practice of racial segregation on public buses. This event helped spark many other protests against segregation. Meanwhile, in 1956, Parks's case ultimately resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that segregated bus service was unconstitutional. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' brave act of civil disobedience. The Montgomery Advertiser presents a tribute to Ms. Parks and the impact her stand against inequality had on civil rights, illustrated with rich stories and stunning photos from the archives of the Advertiser.
