"On August 28, 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his most memorable and inspiring speech to a country divided by riots over racial injustice. With the words "I have a dream," King invoked his vision of a racially harmonious America, where "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."" "This elegant gift edition of Dr. King's unforgettable speech is the perfect way to share his powerful message of hope and compassion. Featuring the complete text and a foreword by King's daughter, the Reverend Bernice A. King, I Have a Dream presents a moving portrait of a visionary at the peak of his influence."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Prizewinning Lincoln scholar Allen C. Guelzo presents, for the first time, a full scale study of Lincoln's greatest state paper. Using unpublished letters and documents, little-known accounts from Civil War-era newspapers, and Congressional memoirs and correspondence, Guelzo tells the story of the complicated web of statesmen, judges, slaves, and soldiers who accompanied, and obstructed, Abraham Lincoln on the path to the Proclamation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Not just an autobiography of the civil rights worker and founder of CORE but also a history of the recent black struggle for equality.

On the evening of June 12, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy gave his most impassioned speech about the need for interracial tolerance —Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed by an assassin’s bullet in his driveway. The still-smoking gun—bearing the fingerprints of Byron De La Beckwith, a staunch white supremacist—was recovered moments later in some nearby bushes. Still, Beckwith remained free for over thirty years, until Evers’s widow finally forced the Mississippi courts to bring him to justice.The Autobiography of Medgar Evers tells the full story of one the greatest leaders of the civil rights movement, bringing his achievement to life for a new generation. Although Evers’s memory has remained a force in the civil rights movement, the legal battles surrounding his death have too often overshadowed the example and inspiration of his life.Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable have assembled the previously untouched cache of Medgar’s personal documents, writings, and speeches. These remarkable pieces range from Medgar’s monthly reports to the NAACP to his correspondence with luminaries of the time such as Robert Carter, General Counsel for the NAACP in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Most important of all are the recollections of Myrlie Evers, combined with letters from her personal collection. These documents and memories form the backbone of The Autobiography of Medgar Evers— a cohesive narrative detailing the rise and tragic death of a civil rights hero.

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This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.

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Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800—1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War. When does principled resistance become anarchic brutality? How can a murderer be viewed as a heroic freedom fighter? The case of John Brown opens windows on these timely issues. Was Brown an insane criminal or a Christ-like martyr? A forerunner of Osama bin Laden or of Martin Luther King, Jr.' David Reynolds sorts through the tangled evidence and makes some surprising findings. Reynolds demonstrates that Brown’s most violent acts–his slaughter of unarmed citizens in Kansas, his liberation of slaves in Missouri, and his dramatic raid, in October 1859, on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia–were inspired by the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity of the day. He shows us how Brown seized the nation’s attention, creating sudden unity in the North, where the Transcendentalists led the way in sanctifying Brown, and infuriating the South, where proslavery fire-eaters exploited the Harpers Ferry raid to whip up a secessionist frenzy. In fascinating detail, Reynolds recounts how Brown permeated politics and popular culture during the Civil War and beyond. He reveals the true depth of Brown’s achievement: not only did Brown spark the war that ended slavery, but he planted the seeds of the civil rights movement by making a pioneering demand for complete social and political equality for America’s ethnic minorities. A deeply researched and vividly written cultural biography–a revelation of John Brown and his meaning for America.

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v. 1. Ella Baker -- Elaine Brown -- Stokely Carmichael -- Angela Davis -- W.E.B. Du Bois -- James Farmer -- Louis Farrakhan -- Marcus Garvey -- Fannie Lou Hamer -- Dorothy Height -- Jesse Jackson -- Martin Luther King, Jr. -- v. 2. Spike Lee -- John Lewis -- Malcolm X -- Thurgood Marshall -- Huey P. Newton -- Rosa Parks -- A. Philip Randolph -- Al Sharpton -- Ida B. Wells-Barnett -- Roy Wilkins -- Robert F. Williams -- Whitney Young.

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Rosa Parks: A Biography captures the story of this remarkable woman like no other biography of her before it. It examines the entire scope of Rosa Parks's life, from her birth in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to her 1943 enrollment in the Montgomery NAACP to the dramatic events of the 1960s, and her continuing work up to her death in 2005. Each chapter provides an exploration of a period in Parks's life, portraying the people, places, and events that shaped and were shaped by her. Readers will see in Parks, not an inadvertent tripwire of history, but a woman whose lifelong struggle against racism led her inexorably to a moment where she took a courageous stand by sitting down and not moving.