For twelve history-making days in May 1961, thirteen black and white civil rights activists, also known as the Freedom Riders, traveled by bus into the South to draw attention to the unconstitutional segregation still taking place. Despite their peaceful protests, the Freedom Riders were met with increasing violence the further south they traveled.

"This is a story about America during and after Reconstruction, one of history's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In a stirring account of emancipation, the struggle for citizenship and national reunion, and the advent of racial segregation, the renowned Harvard scholar delivers a book that is illuminating and timely. Real-life accounts drive the narrative, spanning the half century between the Civil War and Birth of a Nation. Here, you will...

Places important topics in context so that readers will understand the connection between black history and the sweep of America's story. This volume covers the many acts of violence that were perpetrated against the Freedom Riders on their journey through the South.

"This unique blend of memoir and history interweaves autobiography with the history of the slave trade and the American South"--Provided by publisher.

"In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful...

"Spanning 30 years of American history, from the twilight of Kennedy's Camelot to the days leading up to Bill Clinton's election, We Are All Good People Here explores the intimate and complex friendship between Eve Whalen and Daniella Strum. Eve, privileged child of an old Atlanta family, meets Daniella in the fall of 1962, on their first day at the all-girls Belmont College in Virginia, where the two are paired as roommates and become fast friends....

A startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen through the eyes of some of the most important American writers In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston handled the paradoxical relationship between diversity and equality. For some, white culture was fundamentally...

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century - but they've never been as intense as they are in the 2010s and 2020s. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest,...

"EJI's new report, Reconstruction in America, documents nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs in America than previously detailed. The report examines the 12 years following the Civil War when lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white leaders created an American future of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws--an era from which our nation has yet to recover"--Equal Justice Initiative website,...