Slow march toward freedom -- Seeds of protest -- Bloody Sunday -- My feets is tired, but my soul is rested -- A season of suffering

This moving firsthand account puts the 1965 struggle for Civil Rights in Selma, Alabama, in very human terms.

A memoir of the Civil Rights Movement from one of its youngest heroes--now in paperback will an all-new discussion guide. As the youngest marcher in the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Albama, Lynda Blackmon Lowery proved that young adults can be heroes. Jailed eleven times before her fifteenth birthday, Lowery fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. for the rights of African-Americans. In this memoir, she shows today's young readers what it means to fight nonviolently (even when the police are using violence, as in the Bloody Sunday protest) and how it felt to be part of changing American history. Straightforward and inspiring, this beautifully illustrated memoir brings readers into the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, complementing Common Core classroom learning and bringing history alive for young readers.

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

On March 7, 1965, a peaceful voting rights demonstration in Selma, Alabama, was met with an unprovoked attack of shocking violence that riveted the attention of the nation. In the days and weeks following "Bloody Sunday," the demonstrators would not be deterred, and thousands of others joined their cause, culminating in the successful march from Selma to Montgomery. The protest marches led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a major piece of legislation, which, ninety-five years after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, made the practice of the right to vote available to all Americans, irrespective of race. From Selma to Montgomery chronicles the marches, placing them in the context of the long Civil Rights Movement, and considers the legacy of the Act, drawing parallels with contemporary issues of enfranchisement. In five concise chapters bolstered by primary documents including civil rights legislation, speeches, and news coverage, Combs introduces the Civil Rights Movement to undergraduates through the courageous actions of the freedom marchers.

“Spider, we could have marched, we could have protested forever, but if it weren’t for guys like you, it would have been for nothing. The whole world saw your pictures. That’s why the Voting Rights Act passed.” —Martin Luther King, 1965 “Spider Martin, more than any other photographer of our time, has used his camera to document the struggle for civil rights and social change in the State of Alabama. . . . In viewing Spider’s collection, one is literally walking through the pages of American history.” —John Lewis, 1996 “It is largely because of [Martin’s] talent that we, as a people and a nation, so vividly remember ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Although violence broke out at many other places, and on many other days, the images from this critical day are forever emblazoned in the public consciousness.” —Andrew Young, 1992 On March 7, 1965, six hundred people led by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, set out to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery to demand the right to vote. The march ended violently on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as Alabama state troopers beat and gassed the unresisting marchers. But images of “Bloody Sunday” seared the national conscience and helped galvanize the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. Spider Martin captured many indelible images of Bloody Sunday as a photojournalist for the Birmingham News. His photographs of the Selma marches and the civil rights struggle were seen all over the world, appearing in such publications as Time, Life, Der Spiegel, Stern, the Saturday Evening Post, and Paris Match. Drawn from Martin’s archive at the Briscoe Center for American History, this book gathers several dozen of the most powerful and poignant images, many of which have never been published, for the first time in a single volume. A lasting testament to the courage of the civil rights generation, they also reveal a rookie photographer’s determination to bear witness to a movement that transformed the American nation.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."