On February 5th, 1946, the Ferguson brothers were concluding a night out celebrating Charles Ferguson's reenlistment in the Army... Charles, wearing his military uniform, walked with his brothers Alphonso, Joseph, and Richard towards the Freeport Bus Terminal to go home. A provisional Freeport police officer named Joseph Romeika stopped the brothers over a disorderly conduct complaint. Words were exchanged, and Officer Romeika killed Charles, Alphonso and shot Joseph within minutes of the initial stop. Following the unarmed shooting, Romeikia was acquitted despite changing stories of eyewitnesses. Discover how the shooting became a catalyst for civil rights efforts and immortalized in a Woody Guthrie protest song.

Long Island has been in the corridors of almost all major turning points of American history, but Long Island has been overlooked as a battleground of the civil rights movement. Since early colonization by the English settlers in the 17th century, the shadow of slavery has bequeathed a racial caste system that has directly or indirectly been enforced. During World War II, every member of society was asked to participate in ending tyranny within European and Asian borders. Homeward-bound black soldiers expected a societal change in race relations; instead they found the same racial barriers they experienced prior to the war. They were refused homes in developments such as Levittown, denied mortgages, and had their children face limited educational opportunities. Collective efforts from organizations such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) employed civil disobedience as a tactic to fracture racial barriers.

By the close of World War II, Long Island had transformed from a rural corridor to a suburban behemoth. The region became a nationally recognized manufacturing and innovation hub for the military and possessed one of the fastest-growing middle-class populations in the country. But behind the manicured lawns and cookie-cutter cape homes, locals were adapting to new Cold War conflicts and facing anxieties of a potential nuclear fallout. Secret nuclear missile sites and classified government laboratories were established on the outskirts of Suffolk County, often among unaware residents. Soviet spy rings traversed across the island, seeking to steal industry secrets and monitor military installations. Author Christopher Verga and veteran journalist Karl Grossman bring to life the often overlooked history of the Cold War era in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

This book extends what we know about the development of civil rights and the role of the NAACP in American politics. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, secured the support of Congress, and won a landmark criminal procedure case in front of the Supreme Court.

Here is the courageous, groundbreaking story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men. "An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” —The Washington Post Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

In 1890, a group of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans were accused of gunning down New Orleans police chief David Hennessy, who had come between two rival waterfront gangs. Nineteen men were indicted; nine stood trial. After six of the nine accused were acquitted and the remaining three awarded mistrials, a vigilante mob of 8,000 people fought their way into the Parish Prison and killed eleven of the defendants. The incident drew anti- American ire from across the world, and even brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Italy until formal reparations were made. Tom Smith presents an in-depth and nuanced account of the episode that was the greatest mass lynching in our nation's history, and which popularized the term Mafia in the American lexicon.

Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Tour said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.