Teaching About the Civil Rights Movement: Biographies

DESCRIPTION: the story of the 1930s, the Alabama Sharecroppers Union as told by 84-year-old Nate Shaw.

DESCRIPTION: A classic account of growing up in 1940s Mississippi and Anne Moody’s subsequent involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She is one of the original protestors at the Woolworth’s counter in Jackson; after college she helped lead a voter registration drive in rural Canton, Mississippi. She describes finding her own name on a Klan “wanted” list and seeing a boy beaten as FBI agents watch from across the street. She knows she can no longer return safely to her hometown and feels estranged from family members who do not share her passionate commitment to fight racism. She is easy on no one, not even Martin Luther King, whose nonviolent stance she eventually questions. (review by Erica Bauermeister.) HS

DESCRIPTION: Ransby chronicles Baker’s long and rich political career as an organizer, intellectual, and teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries.

DESCRIPTION: This is the remarkable story of the UFW’s first woman organizer, eloquently written for young adults…. In this clear and moving narrative, enhanced by photographs of the period, Jessie De La Cruz comes to life. Her feelings and experiences are captured against a background of the Depression and the Civil Rights and labor movements. ES/MS

DESCRIPTION: This book is a personal memoir of a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement. A contemporary of Dr. King, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Langston Hughes, and often the only woman involved in the Movement at the highest leadership level.

DESCRIPTION: This autobiography, written by Black Panther Minister of Information Cleaver while he was in California’s Folsom State Prison, was one of the most popular and influential books of the 1960s.

DESCRIPTION: Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white woman who in the 1940s broke from her segregationist and privileged past and became a lifelong crusader who sought to awaken the consciences of white southerners to the reality of racial injustice. Branded a communist and seditionist by southern politicians who used McCarthyism to prop up segregation as it crumbled, Braden nevertheless became a role model to students who launched the 1960s sit-ins, and to successive generations of peace and justice activists. Braden’s story connects southern reform drives of the 1930s and 1940s to the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s and to the continuation of racial justice campaigns today. The book reveals how the Cold War directly impacted the Civil Rights Movement.

DESCRIPTION: Journalist Mills has written a moving, inspiring biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. The daughter and wife of poor Mississippi sharecroppers, Hamer was in the forefront of major struggles in Mississippi involving voter registration and economic and educational rights for its black citizens. To Mills, Hamer’s ability to influence people came from a combination of energy, powerful public speaking, and an extraordinary talent in music and singing. (Library Journal) MS/HS

DESCRIPTION: Alabama sharecropper, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and now a sixth-term United States congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life. Arrested more than 40 times and severely beaten on several occasions, he was one of the youngest yet most courageous leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Walking with the Wind offers rare insight into the movement and the personalities of all the civil rights leaders — what was happening behind the scenes, the infighting, struggles, and triumphs. Lewis takes us from the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he led more than 500 marchers on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” (Los Angeles Times)

DESCRIPTION: Beals, one of the “Little Rock Nine,” writes movingly of desegregating Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957-58. The horrors the nine black students faced are told in a teenager’s voice, simply and sadly. Robbed of normal adolescence, Beals grew up fast….This [is] a highly readable tale of courage in the face of persecution that deserves to be read, especially by young people. (School Library Journal) MS