A history professor describes the impact and history of the opening speech made during the March on Washington by the trade unionist Philip Randolph, whose vision and fight for equal economic and social citizenship began in 1941.

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people—about two-thirds black and one-third white—held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” oration. And just blocks away, President Kennedy and Congress skirmished over landmark civil rights legislation. As Charles Euchner reveals, the importance of the march is more profound and complex than standard treatments of the 1963 March on Washington allow. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day—the peak of the movement—Euchner brings back the tension and promise of that day. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, Euchner shows freedom fighters as complex, often conflicted, characters. He explores the lives of Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the march organizers who worked tirelessly to make mass demonstrations and nonviolence the cornerstone of the movement. He also reveals the many behind-the-scenes battles—the effort to get women speakers onto the platform, John Lewis’s damning speech about the federal government, Malcolm X’s biting criticisms and secret vows to help the movement, and the devastating undercurrents involving political powerhouses Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. For the first time, Euchner tells the story behind King’s “Dream” images. Euchner’s hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses of the masses on the National Mall—ordinary people who bore the scars of physical violence and jailings for fighting for basic civil rights. The event took on the call-and-response drama of a Southern church service, as King, Lewis, Mahalia Jackson, Roy Wilkins, and others challenged the throng to destroy Jim Crow once and for all. Nobody Turn Me Around will challenge your understanding of the March on Washington, both in terms of what happened but also regarding what it ultimately set in motion. The result was a day that remains the apex of the civil rights movement—and the beginning of its decline.

While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered for efforts to end segregation and secure the rights of African Americans, the larger economic vision that animated much of the movement is often overlooked today. That vision sought economic justice for every person in the United States, regardless of race. It favored production for social use instead of profit; social ownership; and democratic control over major economic decisions. The document that best captured this vision was the Freedom Budget for All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources, 1966-1975, To Achieve Freedom from Want published by the A. Philip Randolph Institute and endorsed by a virtual ‘who’s who’ of U.S. left liberalism and radicalism. Now, two of today’s leading socialist thinkers return to the Freedom Budget and its program for economic justice. Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates explain the origins of the Freedom Budget, how it sought to achieve “freedom from want” for all people, and how it might be reimagined for our current moment. Combining historical perspective with clear-sighted economic proposals, the authors make a concrete case for reviving the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and building the society of economic security and democratic control envisioned by the movement’s leaders—a struggle that continues to this day.

Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

A. Philip Randolph's career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist shaped the course of black protest in the mid-20th century. This book shows that Randolph's push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform.

The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities (Elizabethtown, South Carolina, Chapman, Alabama, and Bogalusa, Louisiana). By restoring black lumber workers to the history of southern industrialization, William P. Jones reveals that industrial employment was not incompatible - as previous historians have assumed - with the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined African American life in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, he complicates an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture. William P. Jones is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein.