National Network for Equitable Library Service

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation-that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies.

James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality. The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath.

The story of Foster Beck, the author's late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories-when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old.

When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. When one of his first professors mistakes him for a maintenance worker, it is a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his early career.

A national best-selling author and founder of the TransAfrica forum, Randall Robinson is one of the most respected voices of the African-American community. In this powerful book, he convincingly argues that African Americans must fight the growing presence of modern prisons, which hold an alarmingly disproportionate number of black inmates.

The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years. This version of the autobiography is presented in two parts, as authorized by the author's estate. Part one tells of his painful early years in the Jim Crow South. Part two follows his journey North.

Branch condenses his three-volume chronicle on race and democracy to its pivotal scenes, taking listeners on a journey into a political revolution that would change the face of America.

Two generations of Civil Rights activists tell their stories in alternating chapters, spanning the 60s and 70s. During the course of their seperate and remarkable journeys, the two women find themselves incarcerated and on the front lines as the struggle for equality rages in the segregated South.

Born into slavery, Callie House helped create the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in 1899 as a freedwoman. The organization, one of the first of its kind, campaigned for the reparations promised to African American freedmen by petitioning the government. Callie, their leader and voice of the movement, defied conventions of race, class, and gender with her ideas.

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag.