Play 2026 Book Bingo
Books About the Civil Rights Movement
By: Angela & Melissa
Updated:
As an Amazon Associate and member of other affiliate programs, we may earn a referral fee from qualifying purchases.Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time researching books set in the 1950s and 1960s for our Decades Reading Challenge, and along the way we’ve discovered many excellent books about the Civil Rights Movement. This year, in honor of America’s Semiquincentennial, it felt more important than ever to take a closer look at this pivotal time in our history.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery nationwide, Black Americans continued to face legalized discrimination and were denied equal protection and voting rights for another century. Jim Crow laws from 1877 into the 1960s created social, educational, and economic disadvantages, especially throughout the South. In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of Supreme Court decisions and laws moved our country closer to equal civil rights, in response to pressure from both everyday citizens and vocal leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.
The fiction and nonfiction books on our list explore the history of the Civil Rights movement from many perspectives, including activists, students, families, journalists, and ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the struggle for equality. Some of the titles below focus directly on landmark protests, school integration, voting rights, and influential leaders, while others are stories set against the broader backdrop of segregation and racial violence during the era.
Fiction Focused on the Civil Rights Movement
People of Means
Book Summary
Freda Gilroy arrived at Nashville’s Fisk University in 1959, eager to begin to uphold the tradition of Black Excellence instilled in her by her family back in Chicago. But she soon discovers a level of racism that she never knew in her hometown. A chance encounter with a young man draws her into the growing Civil Rights Movement, and she finds herself torn between two worlds and forced to decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice in the fight for justice and equality.
Three decades later, in 1992, Freda’s daughter, Tulip, is a PR professional in Chicago on track for a big promotion. But the recent ruling in the Rodney King trial is weighing heavily on her, and she feels called to action. As she seeks to uplift her community, she makes an irreversible professional misstep. Can she find the courage to step off the safe path and follow her heart the way her mother did years ago?
Freshwater Road
Book Summary
Celeste, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, travels to Mississippi as a volunteer during “Freedom Summer.” She is assigned to run the One Man, One Vote office in the town of Pineyville, where just a few years earlier there were notorious lynchings.
Having grown up leading a sheltered life in Michigan, Celeste is surprised by the conditions she encounters and the segregation that still exists. Throughout the summer, she makes a few new friends in Pineyville, but others in the town feel threatened by her and the work of the other volunteers. They don’t like the idea of changes in the South.
Celeste holds a children’s education class in the mornings and an adult voter-preparation class in the evening. All the while, she also struggles with loneliness, her father’s concerns back in Detroit, and the feelings she’s developing for a young man named Ed.
Thoughts on This Book
This is a great pick for readers who enjoy character-driven novels, while those who prefer plot-driven novels often feel that the story moves along a bit too slowly.
Although it is sometimes listed as a YA title, this book was published by the author as adult fiction.
The Last House on the Street
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
In 2010, architect Kayla Carter’s husband dies tragically while working on the construction of the family’s dream home in the quiet town of Round Hill, North Carolina. Kayla tries to stay strong for her young daughter, but she knows that the new house will always hold upsetting memories. A mysterious older woman shows up at Kayla’s office who seems to know too much about the family and warns Kayla not to move into the trophy home in Shadow Ridge Estates. The property is rumored to be haunted, but the true history of the land may hide even darker secrets.
In the 1965 timeline, the author takes us back to Round Hill during a very turbulent time in American history. College student Ellie Hockley was raised to be a proper Southern lady, but she envisions a different future than the one that’s expected of her. She plans to spend her summer break helping to register Black voters. As she aids the fight for civil rights, she’ll discover the frightening true nature of her neighbors’ prejudices.
When these two women’s stories ultimately come together, the truth will finally be revealed.
What to Expect in This Novel
This book weaves together history, suspense, and social justice. Reviewers call the book enthralling, but it will also likely make you feel anger and heartache because Chamberlain does not shy away from digging deep on tough topics.
The First Ladies
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
95% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
This historical fiction novel tells the story of the friendship between two powerful and influential women in American history.
Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, was one of the first Black female activists. Through her work as both an activist and an educator, she helped lay a foundation for the civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt shared Mary’s passion for education and women’s rights, and was eager to make her acquaintance. The two became fast friends and confidantes.
After Eleanor’s husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected president in 1932, the two women began to collaborate even more closely. Eleanor became quite a controversial First Lady for pursuing her own agenda, separate from FDR, and particularly for her outspoken stance on civil rights.
When Eleanor begins to receive threats as a result of her close relationship with Mary, both women use it as motivation to fight even harder for equality.
About the Authors
After reading and loving The Personal Librarian, we were so excited to see the writing duo of Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray collaborating again on this novel. While the book is set before the 1950s–60s era, civil rights advocacy is a central part of the novel.
Lies We Tell Ourselves
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Sarah Dunbar, an honors student at her previous high school, is placed in remedial classes when she becomes one of the first Black students to attend the formerly all-white Jefferson High School in Virginia. She is spat on and tormented by not only classmates but also teachers.
Linda Hairston is the teenage daughter of one of the town’s most vocal opponents of school integration. She’s always been taught that the races should be separate but equal, but when she’s assigned to work on a school project with Sarah, she’ll have to confront this notion head-on.
Told through alternating perspectives, we see both girls confront deeply ingrained prejudices as they begin to question the societal norms they’ve been taught.
Historical Context
This historical fiction novel was inspired by real events, but the characters are all fictional. While Sarah Dunbar is not based on a specific individual, her experiences reflect the real struggles of students who participated in school integration during the Civil Rights Movement.
The Peach Seed
Book Summary
Fletcher Dukes is a 70-something grandfather and widower in Southwestern Georgia. One day, he takes his older sister to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries and spots a woman, Altovise, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a teenager. They grew up marching together in Albany, Georgia, during the Civil Rights Movement. As a sign of his love, Fletcher gave Altovise a delicately carved peach seed monkey, which was an important and long-standing tradition in his family. But the summer before college, a protest went wrong, and they were split apart.
He’s unsure if he should try to reconnect with her, especially as he has his hands full between his sister losing her sight and his daughter and grandson both struggling with addiction. Fletcher’s story is told not only through his lifetime but goes back to the family patriarch, Malik, in 1796 Senegal, when he was captured and enslaved and brought to Georgia.
Why This Book Made the List
While this character-driven novel alternates between multiple timelines and points of view in short chapters, the characters’ participation in the Albany Movement (a landmark grassroots civil rights coalition formed in 1961) is an important part of the story.
The Lions of Little Rock
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
88% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Twelve-year-old Marlee Nisbett is a shy and quiet girl who rarely speaks outside her family. Her world changes when she befriends Liz, a new student who is confident and outspoken.
Their friendship faces a severe test when Liz abruptly leaves school amid rumors that she was passing as white in the segregated school system. Despite societal pressures and personal risks, Marlee is determined to maintain their friendship.
As she navigates the challenges of a racially divided community, Marlee becomes more courageous and outspoken, advocating for integration and equality.
Consider This Before Reading
While this book has high reviews overall, one of our long-time readers noted that she felt like it drifted a bit too far into white savior territory.
This novel offers a fictional story set a year following the famous Little Rock Nine integration crisis of 1957. While the characters in this book are not based on real people, the story is based on the lesser-known but historically accurate follow-up events. In 1958, Governor Orval Faubus ordered Little Rock’s public high schools closed for the entire 1958–59 school year (a period known as “the Lost Year”) to prevent further integration.
With Love from Harlem
Book Summary
Jazz prodigy Hazel is only 23, but she’s already a film star and fierce advocate for civil rights. When she encounters Harlem’s electrifying preacher-turned-politician, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., he’s the perfect other half to create a Harlem power couple…except that he’s already married.
Over the next 17 years, their relationship eventually leads to marriage, but things don’t get any easier. Hazel’s star is rising in the jazz world, and Adam is elected to Congress. What is Hazel willing to sacrifice for her family, and what will she refuse to give up?
Why This Book Made the List
While much of the book takes place in the 1940s, Hazel and Adam’s story also includes 1950s and 1960s activism and political persecution.
This is a romantic, history-rich drama that features many real people from Harlem beyond Hazel Scott and Adam Clayton Powell Jr, including Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin.
Fiction Set During the Civil Rights Era
The Dry Grass of August
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
91% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
When thirteen-year-old Jubie and her family, including three siblings, her mother, and the family’s Black maid, Mary Luther, head from North Carolina to Florida on vacation, she has no idea how the summer trip would change her life forever.
As the family drives farther south, Jubie starts noticing more anti-integration signs and racial tension. Soon, her mother finds it more difficult to find a safe place for Mary Luther to use the restroom. But Jubie still never predicted the shocking turn their trip would take. She’s left confronting her parents’ failings and wondering where her own convictions lie.
More About This Book
Author Anna Jean Mayhew worked on this novel for 18 years before its release, when she was 71. Her persistence paid off, with The Dry Grass of August winning the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.
Kin
Book Summary
Vernice and Annie have known each other their whole lives. They were raised in the same small town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Bonded at an early age by the loss of their mothers (one through death and the other through abandonment), the girls formed a deep friendship. But they are fated to lead very different lives.
After her mother’s death, Vernice’s aunt is determined to give her a stable home, and at the age of 18, Vernice moves to Atlanta to attend Spelman College. There, she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into a wealthy family.
Annie, on the other hand, is constantly haunted by the hole in her life left by her mother’s abandonment and is fixated on the idea of finding her. Her efforts to track her mother down set her on a journey into a world of peril and adversity that will lead her to a battle for her own life.
Thoughts on This Book
Tayari Jones, the author of An American Marriage, is a master at writing complex relationships. Set in the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a time of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, Kin is a novel about powerful bonds of friendship and sisterhood, as well as mothers and daughters.
Before picking this book, you should be aware that it does not have a concrete ending that ties up all of the loose ends, but rather leaves certain questions up to the reader’s interpretation. Keep this in mind if you prefer a story with a clear and definitive conclusion.
Anywhere You Run
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Jim Crow laws ruled Mississippi in the summer of 1964, and three innocent men had just been brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. After surviving a heinous attack, twenty-two-year-old Violet kills the man responsible. But she knows she’ll be blamed, so she runs from Jackson.
Violet’s sister, Marigold, works for the Mississippi Summer Project, which advocates for Black voting rights. Marigold hoped to attend law school, but a pregnancy changed her plans. She now heads north, hoping to raise her baby outside of segregated Mississippi.
While the sisters leave Jackson for their own reasons, they don’t realize that one man is pursuing them both for his own dark secrets.
The Secret Life of Bees
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
97% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Still reeling from her mother’s death years earlier, 14-year-old Lily Owens runs away with Rosaleen, the Black woman who has raised and cared for her since her mother’s death. The two escape to Tiburon, South Carolina, where an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters takes them in.
Lily is introduced to the world of bees and honey, the Black Madonna, and the town that holds the secret to her mother’s past.
Why This Book Made the List
This novel unfolds amid the racial tensions surrounding the Civil Rights Act. Although the novel primarily explores family, grief, and belonging, the characters also confront segregation, prejudice, and racial violence, making the social upheaval of the era an important part of the story.
A Calamity of Souls
Book Summary
Set in the volatile year of 1968 in southern Virginia, this novel centers on Jack Lee, a white lawyer in Freeman County, Virginia, and Desiree DuBose, a Black civil rights attorney from Chicago. Together, they defend Jerome Washington, a Black gardener wrongfully accused of murdering his wealthy white employers.
As Jack confronts his own biases and the town’s racism, he and Desiree forge a tense but determined partnership amid mounting threats, legal roadblocks, and personal tragedy.
Against a system rigged for conviction, they uncover deceit, corrupt motives, and surprising evidence that challenge the initial assumptions about the crime.
The Two Lives of Sara
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
92% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Young, angry, and pregnant, Sara is forced to flee Chicago. She boards a bus to still-segregated Memphis. When she arrives, she is welcomed by Mama Sugar, the matriarch of The Scarlet Poplar boardinghouse.
In Memphis, Sara learns about the push for civil rights spreading across the country. She loves discussing education, politics, and the hope for a brighter future with her new friend, Jonas. He is a schoolteacher, and soon, their friendship begins to bloom into something more.
However, secrets from Mama Sugar’s past unexpectedly catch Sara and Jonas in the crosshairs. Sara must again make impossible decisions.
Thoughts on This Book
The story includes civil rights organizing in 1960s Memphis, but Sara’s personal survival, relationships, and motherhood remain the principal story throughout.
Reviewers praise the poignant language and the author’s writing, but warn that this story of generational trauma will break your heart.
The Help
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
97% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Skeeter has returned home from college to her family’s cotton plantation, where – despite trying to act like a proper Southern lady – she seems to constantly disappoint her mother.
Her true ambition, however, is to be a writer. The only job she’s able to find is one she is completely unqualified for – writing a housekeeping advice column for the local paper. Having virtually no experience of her own with housekeeping, Skeeter turns to her friend’s maid, the very poised Aibileen, for help.
As she gets to know Aibileen and Aibileen’s friend, the very sassy Minny, more intimately, Skeeter is inspired to help tell their stories, and she pitches the idea to write the stories of twelve Black maids – a very risky project for all of them.
Our Thoughts on This Book
This is one of Angela’s favorite books of all time! It’s full of characters that are easy to love (and others not so much), and by the end you’ll be so invested in their stories that you won’t want the book to end!
The good news is that, when you do reach the final page, you can watch the movie to enjoy these women all over again.
Mockingbird Summer
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
86% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
In 1964, a racial divide cuts through the town of High Cotton, Texas, just as plainly as the train tracks, but cultural shifts are on the horizon. And the friendship between two girls, one local and one new to town, is about to escalate the tension.
Corky is 13 years old, right on the cusp between childhood and adolescence. Her family just hired a new housekeeper from Haiti, and Corky is quick to befriend her daughter, America. Corky has been reading a new “grown-up” novel called To Kill a Mockingbird, and she’s eager to share it with America. But America’s take on the book is very different from Corky’s… and much more personal.
As the summer goes on, Corky learns that America can run as fast as Olympian Wilma Rudolph, and she invites America to play on her church softball team. It seems like fun and games, but the invitation crosses the color lines and sparks a firestorm in High Cotton. It will be a season of big changes for the town with lifelong impacts on the girls.
Our Thoughts on This Book
We’ve been enthusiastically recommending Lynda Rutledge’s West With Giraffes to anyone who would listen for the past few years, so we were very excited when she published Mockingbird Summer. However, Melissa ended up being a bit disappointed that the story’s discussion of the difficult issues of the era was a bit surface-level. Nonetheless, the book continues to have a rating of 4.2 on Goodreads, so we wanted to include it on this list for your consideration.
One Blood
Book Summary
Grace was raised in post-segregation Virginia by her beloved grandmother. She is just a young teen when she and her grandma are sent North to live with her Aunt Hattie. Hattie is socially ambitious and believes that leaving behind her Southern roots is the key to her upward mobility. Suddenly Grace is thrust into a world of fancy teas and debutante balls.
Despite feeling like a fish out of water, Grace befriends the smart, handsome son of one of society’s grand dames. But when Dale gets caught up in a racial police killing, and Grace finds herself pregnant, Hattie hides her away and betrays her niece.
Lolo is beautiful, intelligent, and fierce, but her life has not been easy. She moves north, but in doing so she gives up her personal dreams and does what she must to survive, eventually starting a family of her own.
Years later, Lolo’s daughter, Rae, discovers that she’s adopted. When Rae herself is about to become a mother, she knows that she must learn more about herself and her two mothers.
What to Expect in This Book
This book is described as Homegoing meets The Mothers. Keep in mind that it spans multiple generations and continues well beyond the era of the Civil Rights Movement.
Boy’s Life
Book Summary
Twelve-year-old Cory Mackenson lives in the seemingly idyllic town of Zephyr, Alabama, during an era of profound change. In 1964, segregation and racial prejudice are parts of daily life, and the threat of white supremacist violence always lies just below the surface. But Cory, a young aspiring writer, is more interested in other things. He’s certain he’s sensed spirits whispering in the churchyard. He’s heard of the weird bootleggers who lurk in the dark outside of town. He’s seen a flood leave Main Street crawling with snakes. And he’s thrilled by all of it.
When Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake, his father dives in hoping to rescue the driver, but instead finds a beaten corpse with copper wire around its neck and handcuffed to the steering wheel. The unanswered questions surrounding the unsolved murder begin to haunt them.
Their search for the truth takes them into a world where innocence and evil collide, and what lies before them is the stuff of fear and awe, magic and madness, fantasy and reality. As Cory searches for clues, he also becomes increasingly aware of both injustice and the shifting attitudes of the Civil Rights era.
Consider This Before Reading
Racism, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, and changing racial attitudes are significant elements in this book, but the Civil Rights Movement is just one thread in this coming-of-age story that combines murder mystery, horror, and magical realism.
Also keep in mind that this book was written back in 1991, so while reviewers recognize the author’s anti-racist intentions, some nonetheless find some of the racial characterizations in the book to feel dated or stereotypical.
If you are looking for something other than the typical historical fiction fare, this one is worth your consideration. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in 1991 and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1992.
Memphis
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
93% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
This novel spans over seventy years while tracing three generations of a Southern Black family.
In the summer of 1995, 10-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister escape her father’s explosive temper by fleeing to her mother’s hometown of Memphis. Here, half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built a majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass. He was then lynched just days after becoming the city’s first Black detective.
As she gets older, Joan finds comfort in art and begins painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their mysterious neighbor, Miss Dawn, who holds secrets to the past. Her stories will help Joan discover how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are part of a long family tradition. With a paintbrush in her hand, Joan comes to understand that her mother, her grandmother, and the women before them made impossible choices to allow her more choices of her own.
What to Expect in This Book
The Civil Rights Movement itself is not depicted in great detail in this story, but it strongly shapes later generations. While the novel does not give many specifics about marches, organizing, school integration, or other movement activities in Memphis, the impact of the movement is visible in the family history surrounding 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, and a major act of racial violence changes the North family.
Reviewers say that the city of Memphis is described in such detail that it becomes a character in the novel. Told in a non-linear timeline, this story blends real historical events into the fictional narrative. It’s described as heartbreaking and engrossing.
Wade in the Water
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
In this coming-of-age story, Ella is eleven years old and lives in segregated Ricksville, Mississippi. While her Ma and Ma’s lover Leroy find the smart Ella to be a nuisance, she ignores them and focuses on her love of God, Mr. Macabe, and Nate, the tough owner of the local diner.
One day, Ms. St. James, a well-to-do White woman, appears looking for Ella. No one understands why she is looking for the girl. Yet the unlikely duo forms a deep bond. While the rest of the community hopes Ms. St. James will disappear and not return, Ella will do anything to keep her coming back.
Ella and Ms. St. James each have secrets, and the consequences are devastating when they are revealed.
Why This Book Made the List
This story is told in an alternating timeline between the 1960s and 1980s and from the dual POVs of Ella and Ms. St. James.
While it is primarily set in 1982, when the characters investigate a racially motivated crime from the past, it explores the repercussions of Jim Crow-era violence, making it worthy of your consideration for this reading prompt.
Be aware that this novel includes severe child abuse, including sexual abuse.
Summer of ’69
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
97% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
This might just be the perfect historical fiction beach read for the summer – a family drama that brings the 60s to life in vivid, nostalgic detail.
Each year, the Levin family’s children look forward to spending their summer in Nantucket with their grandmother. But in the summer of ’69, thirteen-year-old Jessie is the only sibling who can make the trip. One of her older sisters is pregnant with twins, the other is caught up in the civil rights movement, and her older brother has recently been deployed to the war in Vietnam.
The summer proves to be an eventful one – Vietnam, Woodstock, the moon landing, the Chappaquiddick affair, Jessie struggling with her first heartbreak, and her grandmother with a few secrets of her own.
Why This Book Made the List
One character in the novel becomes involved in civil rights protests, but keep in mind that is just one strand in a larger family story that touches on many other issues of the era as well as broader changes in social expectations.
Novella Sequels
If you enjoy Hilderbrand’s Summer of 69, then you’ll also want to grab the novella-length sequel, Summer of ’79, which is available on Kindle or as an Audible audiobook. Another short story follow-up, Summer of ’89, is available in the recently published story collection Endless Summer.
Nonfiction About the Civil Rights Movement
A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation
Book Summary
In 1956, Clinton, Tennessee, became the first town in the former Confederacy to attempt court-ordered school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education. Twelve Black students entered the all-white Clinton High School, confronting harassment, threats, and resistance from segregationists determined to stop integration.
During her graduate studies, author Rachel Louise Martin was sent to this same town to help locals build a museum to commemorate these events. But she quickly discovered that not everyone wanted to talk about it. For years, she wondered why, and eventually went back to interview more than 60 townspeople (including nearly a dozen of the first students to desegregate Clinton High) in order to piece together what really happened back in 1956.
In this book, she reconstructs this overlooked chapter of the Civil Rights Movement through the experiences of students, parents, teachers, residents, activists, and agitators. She learned about death threats and beatings, picket lines and cross burnings, and neighbors that turned on neighbors.
Book Summary
While many men played essential roles at the forefront of the civil rights movement, many brave women took on vital roles behind the scenes. Their quiet work led to significant contributions, but few know their names.
To write this book, the author met with nine spectacular women, several now in their 90s, to gather and document their previously untold stories in the form of first-person essays. The author left the stories in the direct words of the featured women, which means you lose a little of the flow that comes with great editing, but you gain a more personal feel and history told directly from those who lived it.
Another Women’s History Title to Consider
For a look at an amazing woman who broke through racial barriers to start her own business in 1906, try Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker. She became a millionaire and focused on philanthropy, working to advance equal rights before the civil rights movement. Self Made is also an excellent 4-episode mini-series on Netflix starring Octavia Spencer.
Warriors Don’t Cry
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
Three years after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, nine Black teenagers were chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The author of this memoir, Melba Beals, and her eight classmates were known as the Little Rock Nine. As they walked up the steps to the school flanked by the heavily armed Arkansas National Guard, surrounded by a rampaging mob, they became reluctant warriors on the battlefield of the civil rights movement.
Another Book by This Author
If you enjoy this book, you may also want to pick up March Forward, Girl, another Beals memoir of her earlier years, which is written in language that’s appropriate for younger readers, but with an important story that is just as captivating to adults.
Book Summary
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, this book examines what it calls “The Year of Birmingham.” Author Diane McWhorter, a journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with Black activists and former KKK members, as well as personal memories to paint an extraordinary portrait of the city in 1963. It was the year that became a major turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle.
The Three Mothers
Book Summary
Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin are common names from the Civil Rights movement, but what about Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin? These three women are the mothers who raised extraordinary sons.
All three Black women grew up in the period of Jim Crow laws and experienced many trials and indignities of prejudices against them. Despite this hard life, each woman raised her son to become leaders in the dream of achieving justice and dignity for all.
Why This Book Made the List
While this non-fiction book is about the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, it explicitly examines the ways in which they shaped three central civil rights figures and covers the movement’s formative and active years.
Brown Girl Dreaming
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
91% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
This highly-rated memoir is written through vivid poems as the author shares what it was like to grow up African American in the 1960s and 1970s as awareness of the civil rights movement grew.
The poems give you a glimpse into Jacqueline Woodson’s soul as a child and the experiences she had that made her into a successful writer today.
Thoughts on This Book
One of our readers described this memoir-in-verse as “absolutely beautiful writing and an important story”.
Book Summary
If you grew up hearing that Rosa Parks was simply a tired, quiet seamstress whose single act of defiance launched the modern Civil Rights Movement, this biography will set the record straight. This book will introduce you to Parks’s politics and years of activism that are often overlooked in simplified tellings of her role in history.
The Warmth of Other Suns
Book Girls’ Readers Rate This Book
100% Would Recommend to a Friend
Book Summary
In this masterfully written nonfiction work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles the decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. Spanning 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
The history of this epic migration is told through the lives of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who left sharecropping in 1937 and relocated from Mississippi to Chicago, where she later proudly cast her vote for Barack Obama when he ran for his US Senate seat for Illinois senate seat; George Starling fled Florida for Harlem in 1945, where he fought for civil rights; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career and who later became the personal physician to Ray Charles.
This book not only captures the personal side of each story – including the treacherous and exhausting cross-country journey and the process of adapting to their new lives- but also addresses how the migration changed these cities with Southern food, faith, and culture, and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work.
Why This Book Made the Lit
While this book focuses on the Great Migration rather than the Civil Rights Movement, the migration fundamentally shaped Black America and the conditions from which the movement developed.
In addition to being highly rated by our readers and winning numerous prizes when it was published, TIME Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the 10 best books of the decade in 2019.
In Honor of the Semiquincentennial
The United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Join us for our Reading Through US History Mini Reading Challenge to explore six pivotal moments in the country’s history.
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