BOOKS

To begin, it may be helpful to have a general overview of the subject and for that purpose, there isn’t a more accessible reference than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  It came out in 1980 and has been revised over the years (most recently in 2015), but it remains a steady source of American history from the bottom up.  Zinn was one of the leading social historians who examined the roots of American race, gender, and labor relations from Christopher Columbus to the Clinton administration. He is especially insightful on Native American, Black and women’s issues.

Since we are in the midst of months dedicated to Black and Women’s history, here are books that focus on three women central to both topics:

First, The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis is a biography of a woman that most Americans think they know well.  She’s the prim seamstress who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama and started the civil rights movement.  But she had previously been involved in defending the Scottsboro boys, trained at the Highlander Folk School in civil rights activism, and was one of the founders of the local NAACP.  After she left Montgomery she worked with the Black Panthers and admired Malcolm X –so this biography provides a much needed revision of the Rosa Parks many thought they knew.

Next, Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movements tells the story of a woman who is not as well-known as she should be.  Baker was an organizer for the NAACP and worked with Dr. King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but left to support the students sitting in at lunch counters in the early 1960s.  She was the main influence on the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and remained a major voice in the civil rights movement but acted mostly behind the scenes.

A companion reading to Prof. Ransby’s Ella Baker is Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson by Jo Ann Robinson and David J. Garrow.

Robinson was the founder of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s.  The Council was organized along the lines of the League of Women Voters and was responsible for maintaining the solidarity of the bus boycott.  Robinson was well connected socially and politically and kept women from riding the buses to work by providing rides with neighbors with cars.  She is another woman who is not well known but was key to the early days of the civil rights movement.

The following are suggestions for reading on topics of current interest:

  

Brian Stephenson, Just Mercy

Nominated as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Stephenson’s memoir is an account of his creation of the Equal Justice Initiative dedicated to defending the wrongly condemned, the poor, and women and children trapped in the criminal justice system.  His successful defense of Walter McMillian who was sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit transformed his understanding of justice and mercy.  This is an inspiring argument for true mercy and compassion in the pursuit of justice.

 

White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo

D’Angelo describes what it means to be white and why most Americans take offense at any discussion of race because racism is deeply embedded in white identity.   She advises Americans to  “breathe, listen, and reflect” in order to overcome anger, guilt, and silence that characterizes white fragility and to try to assume a “less white identity” in order to let go of and face their internalized racial superiority.

 

Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontent, Isabel Wilkinson

Journalist Isabel Wilkinson looks at American racism as a system of social stratification characterized by ideas about hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion and purity by comparing them with similar concepts found in India and Nazi Germany.

 

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkinson

In this earlier work, Wilkinson described the effects of the Great Migration on southern Blacks to cities in the North and West Coast from the 1920s to the 1970s by following several families through generations of change as they adapt to different cultures, economies and social structures.

 

How to Be an Anti Racist, Ibram X, Kindi

Historian Kindi discusses concepts of racism and offers his proposals for ways that individuals can make systemic changes that could combat racism in American society.

 

Separated:  Inside an American Tragedy, Jacob Soboroff

An analysis of the Trump administration’s policies of separating children from the parents and why, despite its illegality, it continued. A powerful narrative based on chronological events along with his own story as a father and son caught in the system.

Begin Again:  James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lesson for Today, Eddie Glaude, Jr.

A New York Times best seller, Glaude analyzes Baldwin’s ideas about race, sexuality and activism in relation to the current Black Live Matter Movement.  He uses these topics to explain why America has failed to take advantage of opportunities to “begin again.”