David J. Garrow

Clayborne Carson

Director Clayborne Carson, Ph.D.

Gerald Gill

Vincent Harding

Darlene Clark Hine

Examines the background of the Civil Rights movement

Civil Rights Reader : Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990

The Eyes on the Prize

For all of the continuity of African-American history, including the long history of struggle, the years between 1945 and 1970 represented a new moment. It was a time of new possibilities and new vision, a time when black Americans were determined to be the architects of an inclusive America that championed human rights for all. In We Changed the World, Vincent Harding, himself a participant in the Southern freedom movement, documents what was perhaps the most critical chapter in African-American history, the fight for civil and human rights.In the streets and in the courts, a new generation of black activists--including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, writers James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and baseball legend Jackie Robinson--forced the federal government to admit that segregation was wrong and must be remedied. Their efforts paid off. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding legal segregation. Americans could no longer easily avoid the implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s central message: "If democracy is to live segregation must die." By 1964, African Americans had much to be optimistic about. Protests in Birmingham and Mississippi and the much publicized murders of civil rights activists forced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public accommodations of every kind throughout the country.The civil rights movement freed all African Americans to move beyond protest and to take charge themselves. The Black Power movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the urban rebellions--all contributed to the transformation of American politics and the role of black Americans in the life of the nation. African Americans did indeed change the world, but only after a long struggle that began when the first Africans arrived in this country. It is a struggle that continues to this day.

African Americans 1945-1970

We Changed the World

In these eloquent essays, the noted scholar and activist Vincent Harding reflects on the forgotten legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the meaning of his life today. Many of these reflections are inspired by the ambiguous message surrounding the official celebration of King's birthday. Harding sees a tendency to freeze an image of King from the period of his early leadership of the Civil Rights movement, the period culminating with his famous "I Have a Dream Speech". Harding writes passionately of King's later years, when his message and witness became more radical and challenging to the status quo at every level. In those final years before his assassination King took up the struggle against racism in the urban ghettos of the North; he became an eloquent critic of the Vietnam war; he laid the foundations for the Poor People's Campaign. This widening of his message and his tactics entailed controversy even within his own movement. But they point to a consistent expansion of his critique of American injustice and his solidarity with the oppressed. It was this spirit that brought him to Memphis in 1968 to lend his support to striking sanitation workers. It was there that he paid the final price for his prophetic witness.

Martin Luther King, the Inconvenient Hero

In these eloquent essays that reflect upon King's legacy over the past two decades and the meaning of his life today, a portrait emerges of a man constantly evolving and going deeper into the roots of violence and injustice--a man whose challenge remains as timely and necessary as ever.

Presents Black history in America as a force of strong resistance to racism and slavery rather than accommodation and discusses the people and events of this struggle

The Black Struggle for Freedom in America

There is a River

Daisaku Ikeda

'I have a dream' declared Martin Luther King in 1967. Those words, which echoed round the world, soon became immortal. King gave his life in the cause of eradicating racism, eliminating poverty and resolutely opposing all forms of war and violence. This dialogue brings together two figures who likewise have striven in all their activities to promote peace and fight discrimination: one a Christian theologian, historian and nonviolent activist who knew King personally and who moved in 1958 from Chicago to the American South to participate in the nascent struggle for civil rights; the other a foremost Buddhist leader who has been inspired in his own thinking by King's example. Vincent Harding and Daisaku Ikeda here bring the wisdom of their respective traditions and experiences to reflect on the personal cost of fighting for justice, and the courage that that entails. Their conversations range widely, across issues which include war and violence, the continuing blight in America of institutionalized racism, the need to overcome global disparities of wealth and the consequent dangers of materialism and consumerism

On Rights, Values and Freedom

The Courage to Dream

From an unflinchingly black perspective, Harding writes of the struggle of heroic African americans to achieve freedom from slavery. Index; photographs.

Vincent Harding

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