The Civil Rights Movement (Eyewitness History (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

The civil rights movement that spanned the years following the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked a watershed period for human rights in America. Julian Bond, former communications director of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), notes in his introduction that "the words 'civil rights' summon up memories and images in modern minds of grainy television footage of packed mass meetings, firehoses and police dogs, of early-1960s peaceful protestors replaced over time by violent rioters, of soul-stirring oratory and bold actions, of assassination and death." The civil rights movement was also a movement of courage, of perseverance, of strength and of triumph. Its eyewitnesses and its many participants saw the Montgomery Bus Boycott, school integration, the freedom rides, the march on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Movement covers the key years 1954-1965 in detail. It also traces the roots of the civil rights movement to the 19th century in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation through the Reconstruction period, with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the denial of basic rights to blacks. The Civil Rights Movement, the latest volume in Facts On File's acclaimed Eyewitness History series, provides hundreds of firsthand accounts of the movement - from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials and press statements, which illustrate how historical events appeared to those who lived through them. Among the eyewitness testimonies included are those from Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, President Lyndon Johnson, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy. In addition to the firsthand accounts, each chapter provides an introductory essay and a chronology of events. The book also includes such critical documents as the Formation of the NAACP, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, The Southern Manifesto, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Civil Rights Act of 1991 as well as capsule biographies of more than 100 key figures, a bibliography, an index and 80 black-and-white photographs.

Sara Bullard is editor of Teaching Tolerance, a national educational magazine, and director of the Teaching Tolerance Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Julian Bond is currently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Professor at Williams College.