While the world may know the major names of the Civil Rights movement, there are countless lesser-known heroes fighting the good fight to advance equal justice for all, heeding the call when no one else was listening, often risking their lives and livelihoods in the process. This book shines a light on everyday people called to do extraordinary things--like Pauli Murray, whose early work informed Thurgood Marshall's legal argument for Brown v. Board of Education; Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus months before Rosa Parks did the same; and Gwen Carr, whose private pain in losing her son Eric Garner stoked her public activism against police brutality. -- adapted from jacket

"The Black Power movement is usually associated with heroic, iconic figures, like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, but largely missing from stories about the Black freedom struggle are the hundreds of ordinary foot soldiers who were just as essential to the movement. Stayed on Freedom presents a new history of Black Power by focusing on two unheralded organizers: Zoharah Robinson and Michael Simmons. Robinson was born in Memphis, raised by her grandmother who told her stories of slavery and taught her the value of self-reliance. Simmons was born in Philadelphia, a child of the Great Migration. They met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where Robinson was one of the only woman project directors in Mississippi Freedom Summer, after she had dropped out of college to work in the movement full-time. Falling in love while organizing against the war in Vietnam and raising the call for Black Power, their simultaneous commitment to each other and social change took them from SNCC, to the Nation of Islam, to a global movement, as they fought for social justice well after the 1960s. By centering the lives of Robinson and Simmons, Stayed On Freedom offers a history of Black Power that is more expansive, complex, and personal than those previously written. Historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power linked the political futures of African Americans with those of people in Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, making it a global movement for workers and women's rights, for peace and popular democracy. Robinson's and Simmons's activism blurs the divides -- between North and South, faith and secular, the US and the world, and the past and the present -- typically applied to Black Power. And, in contrast to conventional surveys of the history of civil rights, Stayed on Freedom is an intimate story anchored in lives of the people who made the movements move, where heroism mingles with uncertainty over decades of intensive political commitment. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Robinson and Simmons, their families and their friends, in addition to immense archival research, Berger weaves a joyous and intricate history of the Black Power movement, providing a powerful portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world"--

"The fascinating biography of Eunice Hunton Carter, a social-justice and civil rights trailblazer and the only woman prosecutor on the Luciano trial. Eunice Hunton Carter rose to public prominence in 1936 as both the only woman and the only person of color on Thomas Dewey's famous gangbuster team that prosecuted mobster Lucky Luciano. But her life before and after the trial remains relatively unknown. In this definitive biography on this trailblazing social justice activist, authors Marilyn S. Greenwald and Yun Li tell the story of this unknown but critical pioneer in the struggle for racial and gender equality in the 20th century. Working harder than most men because of her race and gender, Greenwald and Li reflect on Carter's lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, and community organizer, and later as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organ izations. Greenwald and Li show that Carter worked harder than most men because of her race and gender. They reflect on her lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, and community organizer, and later as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organizations. Carter was both a witness and participant in many pivotal events of the early and mid 20th century, including the Harlem riot of 1935 and the social scene during the Harlem Renaissance. Using transcripts, letters, and other primary and secondary sources from several archives in the United States and Canada, the authors paint a colorful portrait of how Eunice continued the legacy of the Carter family that valued education, perseverance, and hard work: a grandfather who was a slave that bought his freedom and became a successful businessman in a small colony of former slaves in Ontario, Canada; a fathe r who nearly single-handedly integrated the nation's YMCAs in the Jim Crow South; and a mother who provided aid to black soldiers in France during World War I, and who became a leader in several global and domestic racial equality causes. Carter's inspirational multi-decade career working in an environment of bias, segregation and patriarchy in Depression-era America helped pave the way for those who came after her"--

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white. In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.

"How Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School catalyzed social justice and democratic education. For too long, the story of life-changing teacher and activist Myles Horton has escaped the public spotlight. An inspiring and humble leader whose work influenced the Civil Rights Movement, Horton helped thousands of marginalized people gain greater control over their lives. Born and raised in early twentieth-century Tennessee, Horton was appalled by the disrespect and discrimination that was heaped on poor people-both black and white-throughout Appalachia. He resolved to create a place, available to all, where regular people could talk to each other, learn from one another, and get to the heart of issues of class and race and right and wrong. And so in 1932, Horton cofounded the Highlander Folk School, smack in the middle of Tennessee. Education in Black and White is the first biography of Myles Horton in 25 years and focuses, in particular, on the educational theories and strategies he first developed at Highlander to serve the interests of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. His personal vision became an essential influence on everyone from Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Eleanor Roosevelt and Congressman John Lewis. Stephen Preskill chronicles how Myles Horton gained influence as an advocate for organized labor, an activist for civil rights, a supporter of Appalachian self-empowerment, an architect of an international popular education network, and a champion for direct democracy, showing how the example he set remains education's last best hope today"--

The civil rights movement that looms over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This rich history of that early movement introduces us to a contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals who employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down. --from publisher description.