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155 books match the query 'Civil rights movements' and 8 start with n

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New Deal / New South

Anthony J. Badger

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

The twelve essays in this book, several published here for the first time, represent some of Tony Badger’s best work in his ongoing examination of how white liberal southern politicians who came to prominence in the New Deal and World War II handled the race issue when it became central to politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s thought a new generation of southerners would wrestle Congress back from the conservatives. The Supreme Court thought that responsible southern leaders would lead their communities to general school desegregation after the Brown decision. John F. Kennedy believed that moderate southern leaders would, with government support, facilitate peaceful racial change. Badger’s writings demonstrate how all of these hopes were misplaced. Badger shows time and time again that moderates did not control southern politics. Southern liberal politicians for the most part were paralyzed by their fear that ordinary southerners were all-too-aroused by the threat of integration and were reluctant to offer a coherent alternative to the conservative strategy of resistance.

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Newspaper Wars

Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965

Sid Bedingfield

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Against all odds, the seeds of social change found purchase in mid-twentieth century South Carolina. Newspaperman John McCray and his allies at the Lighthouse and Informer challenged readers to "rebel and fight"--to reject the "slavery of thought and action" and become "progressive fighters" for equality. Newspaper Wars traces the role journalism played in the fight for civil rights in South Carolina from the 1930s through the 1960s. Moving the press to the center of the political action, Sid Bedingfield tells the stories of the long-overlooked men and women on the front lines of a revolution. African American progress sparked a battle to shape South Carolina's civic life, with civil rights activists arrayed against white journalists determined to preserve segregation through massive resistance. As that strategy failed, white newspapers turned to overt political action and crafted the still-prevalent narratives that aligned southern whites with the national conservative movement. A fascinating portrait of a defining time, Newspaper Wars analyzes the role journalism played--and still can play--during times of social, cultural, and political change.

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No Color Is My Kind

Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston

Thomas R. Cole

University of Texas Press, 2021

In 1959, a Black man named Eldrewey Stearns was beaten by Houston police after being stopped for a traffic violation. He was not the first to suffer such brutality, but the incident sparked Stearns’s conscience and six months later he was leading the first sit-in west of the Mississippi River. No Color Is My Kind, first published in 1997, introduced readers to Stearns, including his work as a civil rights leader and lawyer in Houston’s desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. This remarkable and important history, however, was nearly lost to bipolar affective disorder. Stearns was a fifty-two-year-old patient in a Galveston psychiatric hospital when Thomas Cole first met him in 1984. Over the course of a decade, Cole and Stearns slowly recovered the details of Stearns’s life before his slide into mental illness, writing a story that is more relevant today than ever.

In this new edition, Cole fills in the gaps between the late 1990s and now, providing an update on the progress of civil rights in Houston and Stearns himself. He also reflects on his tumultuous and often painful collaboration with Stearns, challenging readers to be part of his journey to understand the struggles of a Black man’s complex life. At once poignant, tragic, and emotionally charged, No Color Is My Kind is essential reading as the current movement for racial reconciliation gathers momentum.

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No Color Is My Kind

The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston

By Thomas R. Cole

University of Texas Press, 1997

No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men—one Jewish and one African American—set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns’ life before his slide into madness—as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston’s desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. While other southern cities rocked with violence, Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leon Jaworski, and Dan Rather, all of whom—along with Stearns—maneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly. Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness.

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No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed

The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement

By Cynthia E. Orozco

University of Texas Press, 2009

Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context.

Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.

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No One Ever Asked

The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Worker

Arnold Rochvarg

University of Missouri Press, 2025

This engaging work by legal scholar Arnold Rochvarg presents a narrative history of the mid-1960s civil rights movement centered around the experiences of a white woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who quit college to join the movement and became involved with many of the important events and persons of the day.

Rochvarg, the cousin of the woman around whom the narrative revolves, had for over fifty years been intrigued by the mystery surrounding the seven-year disappearance of his cousin Iris during the 1960s. Once he finally approached her about her rumored involvement in the civil rights movement, she generously shared her experiences with him and arranged for him to meet others with whom she had worked. His book corroborates and enhances the stories he was told through traditional research based on primary and secondary sources.

More than a review of significant events of the mid-1960s, No One Ever Asked is also the story of the challenges and sacrifices of young civil rights workers both Black and white, young persons who not only faced violence and personal harm, but in many cases became estranged from their families because of their involvement in the movement. Rochvarg approaches history from the “bottom-up,” focusing on persons whose stories have never been told but have something to add to an understanding of the history of the movement. Many of them, even sixty years later, have never shared their stories because, as in the case of the central character of this book, no one ever asked them.

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Nothing Less Than Equality

The Battle over Segregated Education in the Nation’s Capital

Tikia K. Hamilton

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A critical analysis of African Americans’ collective efforts to obtain educational equality before Brown v. Board of Education.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which barred racial segregation in American public schools, wasn’t the only path for Black parents, teachers, and activists who sought equality of educational opportunity. Some believed that the solution to inequality lay in pressing the federal government to live up to the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal” by providing more resources to Black schools. And for a time, this seemed true in Washington, DC, where Black activists leveraged their status as residents of the nation’s capital to advocate on behalf of Black education. However, disappointments with the “separate but equal” strategy and a sea change in activism led to an embrace of integration.

In Nothing Less Than Equality, Tikia K. Hamilton reveals the rich and complex history of educational activism in Washington prior to Brown v. Board of Education, illuminating complex dynamics that provide a counterpoint and backdrop to the landmark Supreme Court case. Hamilton thoroughly examines the multipronged strategies employed by parents, teachers, attorneys, and activists to democratize education, demonstrating that there was no linear path to Brown.

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Nothing Like Sunshine

A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination

Ben Kamin

Michigan State University Press, 2010

Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, coming of age in the 1960s, a forbidden friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the blood of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama.
The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's notorious Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself, as well as detailing Kamin's search-for Clifton, for America, for the key to understanding what race relations really are in the United States. Simultaneously, it is the story of the emerging rabbi's search for the legacy of his spiritual mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., taking Kamin from Cincinnati to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans and other points, and constantly bringing him home to his friend Clifton and "the heaving hallways" of that high school.

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