A wide selection of documents that provides the historical setting of today's protest thought and actions. Writings by: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, John Brown, Tom Hayen, William Bradford Huie, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Stokely Carmichael. Revised and updated. "By far the fullest documentary history of three and one-half centuries of Negro-American protest and agitation available at the price."--New York Times

In 1959, newly-widowed and pregnant Ruby Washington and her thirteen-year-old half brother, Easton, board a bus in rural South Carolina, destined for Oakland, California. There, far from the violent events that forced her to flee her home, Ruby hopes to make a new life for her family. Ruby gives birth to a daughter, Lida, and strives to raise the girl and Easton. But as their Oakland neighborhood changes during the turbulent 1960s, the three are driven apart by forces that Ruby cannot control. Easton becomes involved with civil rights activism and the Black Panthers; Lida, keeping a hurtful family secret to herself, spirals into a cycle of dependency and denial. Finally, Lida's sons Love LeRoy and Li'l Pit must fend for themselves in the inhospitable streets of America, leaving one city for another, searching for a home. Centered around three generations of a family and set against the larger dispossession of African-Americans, Leaving is a blend of history and intimately-observed everyday life-a remarkable debut novel.

Winner of the Richard L. Wentworth Prize in American History, Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize, and the William Rockhill Nelson Award On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions. Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in this unexpected locus of the civil rights movement. Based on interviews with more than eighty participants in and observers of Wichita's civil rights struggles, this powerful study hones in on the work of black and white local activists, setting their efforts in the context of anticommunism, FBI operations against black nationalists, and the civil rights policies of administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon. Through her close study of events in Wichita, Eick reveals the civil rights movement as a national, not a southern, phenomenon. She focuses particularly on Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a key figure in the local as well as the national NAACP. Lewis initiated one of the earliest investigations of de facto school desegregation by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and successfully challenged employment discrimination in the nation's largest aircraft industries. Dissent in Wichita offers a moving account of the efforts of Lewis, Vivian Parks, Anna Jane Michener, and other courageous individuals to fight segregation and discrimination in employment, public accommodations, housing, and schools. This volume also offers the first extended examination of the Young Turks, a radical movement to democratize and broaden the agenda of the NAACP for which Lewis provided critical leadership. Through a close study of personalities and local politics in Wichita over two decades, Eick demonstrates how the tenor of black activism and white response changed as economic disparities increased and divisions within the black community intensified. Her analysis, enriched by the words and experiences of men and women who were there, offers new insights into the civil rights movement as a whole and into the complex interplay between local and national events.

The turbulent history of one of South Carolina's historically black colleges and its significant role in the civil rights movement Since its founding in 1896, South Carolina State University has provided vocational, undergraduate, and graduate education for generations of African Americans. Now the state's flagship historically black university, it achieved this recognition after decades of struggling against poverty, inadequate infrastructure and funding, and social and cultural isolation. In South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America, William C. Hine examines South Carolina State's complicated start, its slow and long-overdue transition to a degree-granting university, and its significant role in advancing civil rights in the state and country. A product of the state's "separate but equal" legislation, South Carolina State University was a hallmark of Jim Crow South Carolina. Black and white students were indeed provided separate colleges, but the institutions were in no way equal. When established, South Carolina State emphasized vocational and agricultural subjects as well as teacher training for black students while the University of South Carolina offered white students a broad range of higher-level academic and professional course work leading to a bachelor's degree. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, South Carolina State was an incubator for much of the civil rights activity in the state. The tragic Orangeburg massacre on February 8, 1968, occurred on its campus and resulted in the deaths of three students and the wounding of twenty-eight others. Using the university as a lens, Hine examines the state's history of race relations, poverty and progress, and the politics of higher education for whites and blacks from the Reconstruction era into the twenty-first century. Hine's work showcases what the institution has achieved as well as what was required for the school to achieve the parity it was once promised. This fascinating account is replete with revealing anecdotes, more than sixty photographs and illustrations, and a cast of famous figures including Benjamin R. Tillman, Coleman Blease, Benjamin E. Mays, Marian Birnie Wilkinson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Modjeska Simkins, Strom Thurmond, Essie Mae Washington Williams, James F. Byrnes, John Foster Dulles, James E. Clyburn, and Willie Jeffries.