The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by
2014 NAACP Image Award Winner: Outstanding Literary Work-Biography/Autobiography 2013 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians Choice Top 25 Academic Titles for 2013 The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement. This revised edition includes a new introduction by the author, who reflects on materials in the Rosa Parks estate, purchased by Howard Buffett in 2014 and opened to the public at the Library of Congress in February 2015. Theoharis contextualizes this rich material--made available to the public for the very first time and including more than seven thousand documents--and deepens our understanding of Parks's personal, financial, and political struggles. Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, scholar Jeanne Theoharis excavates Parks's political philosophy and six decades of activism. Theoharis masterfully details the political depth of a national heroine who dedicated her life to fighting American inequality and, in the process, resurrects a civil rights movement radical who has been hidden in plain sight far too long.
Waging a Good War: a military history of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by
#1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world. "Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America . . . Riveting." --Charles Kaiser, The Guardian In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America's greatest moral revolution--the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization--the hallmarks of any successful military campaign. An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the Movement's triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance--involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement's adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool--the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement's later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America's civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change--and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.