Beyond even its most memorable quotes and leaders, the civil rights movement is one of the
most inspiring and important chapters of United States history. A century after the abolition of
slavery, the CRM represented the culmination of the African-American struggle, relentless and
often tragic, for equal social, political, and economic rights.
As such, anyone seeking to learn from African-American history should take the time to read
civil rights books and appreciate the work of civil rights authors. Studying nonfiction books
about the civil rights movement will leave readers not just better scholars, but more educated
participants in American society.
First, Some Advice: How to Study the Civil Rights Movement
In order to fully appreciate this time period, it’s important to see the fight for black equality
as more than its disjointed highlights, like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech or
Rosa Parks’s refusal to comply with segregated busing.
It’s not that the highlights don’t matter, but reading the best books on civil rights
movement figures and events should inspire a holistic appreciation for the millions of people
who made it not only successful but possible in the first place. The following recommendations
reflect such a commitment to approach civil rights history from many different angles.
Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power:
Community Organizing in Radical Times
Case in point, let’s start with Amy Sonnie and James Tracy’s research on the lesser known
civil rights activists of working-class America. Our authors, both social justice advocates, set
out to show that protests against major issues in the 1960s and 1970s, like persistent social
inequality and the Vietnam War, were comprised of more than just (usually white) college
activists.
Tracing the histories of Latino immigrants, feminists, white “hillbillies” in rural areas, and
other groups, Sonnie and Tracy present a narrative of rich, intersectional diversity. Familiar
faces, like the Black Panthers, crop up alongside the Young Patriots Organization, White
Lightning, and other constituents of the “New Left” whose mobilization against social ills would
threaten, but for the authors’ research, to fall into undeserved historical obscurity. Upon finishing
this civil rights book, readers will never question the importance of poor and working-class
organizers in pushing for a more equitable American society.
Bearing the Cross
Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, historian David Garrow’s Bearing the
Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference uses
interviews, recordings, government files, and memoirs to zero in on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life
and activism during the 1950s and 1960s. In following King’s legacy, Barrow gives us one of the
most thorough books about civil rights written after the movement’s heyday and among the
best civil rights books in terms of historical rigor.
Though tracing a more conventional tale of African-American activism, Barrow fleshes out
the Montgomery bus boycotts, King’s non-violent initiatives, and tireless collaboration with local
black organizers in such detail as to teach any reader something excitingly new. Yet Bearing the
Cross argues against seeing King’s life as the stuff of legend, for “‘[b]y idolizing those whom we
honor, we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise.’”
The Fire Next Time
Written by one of the most influential essayists in American history, The Fire Next Time does
not belong with other civil protest books that try to provide an academic overview of American
race relations. Instead of a bird’s eye view, James Baldwin gives us deeply personal, up-close
insights on the black experience, generational injustice, race and religion, and other prominent
issues in the early 1960s.
The book is divided into two essays, one of which serves as a letter to Baldwin’s fourteen-
year-old nephew, and constituted at its publication a powerful attempt to communicate to white
Americans the full extent to which “Negroes in this country… are taught really to despise
themselves” from birth,” for “[t]his world is white and they are black.” Religion figures heavily
in Baldwin’s contemplations, particularly his own Christian upbringing and what is, in his view,
the significance of the rise of Islam in black communities.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As essential reading for any college course on the matter, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
recounts the civil rights movement from the perspective, as dictated to author Alex Haley, of one
of its most popular, influential figures. Tracing Malcolm X’s life story, readers are privileged
with the unique perspective of the man who, through fiery speeches from his Harlem mosque,
elevated the Nation of Islam to country-wide prominence.
In doing so, Malcolm X teaches readers that different civil rights movements emerged amid
the social tumult of post-war America. Instead of Dr. King, we meet figures like The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad. Instead of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we join Malcolm
X on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Rather than discard the work of historians like, as mentioned,
David Barrow, this autobiography instead prompts readers to consider that black nationalism,
militancy, and radicalism signified alternative, though no less sincere, pursuits of justice.
Warriors Don’t Cry
In Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central
High, readers witness the hard-fought gains made on one of the civil rights movement’s most
important battlegrounds: education. This memoir is among the most remarkable books about
segregation because of its unique perspective; it follows author Melba Pattillo Beals and the rest
of the “Little Rock Nine” on their pathbreaking commitment to integrate Central High School in
Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.
Beals and eight other teenagers faced white mobs, death threats, and violence for attending
the all-white high school, prompting President Dwight Eisenhower to order the Army’s 101st
Airborne Division to personally escort them there. And yet the book remains uplifting; at sixty-
five years old, Beals reflects that the events have given her the strength not to fear the future, for
“it is all ultimately part of a wonderful mystery, unraveling with each day.”
A More Beautiful and Terrible History
This one’s a bit of a curveball. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and
Misuses of Civil Rights History, historian Jeanne Theoharis explores how the civil rights
movement has been remembered and mythologized since it actually happened – and, more
importantly, what our national memory gets wrong about it. The book’s throughline is that the
movement was far more radical and disruptive than “as the legend goes,” and the activists
involved, rather than on an “acceptable,” inevitable path towards victory, faced overwhelming
opposition from most Americans at the time.
Reckoning properly with these realities of the “old” movement will give this book’s readers
a more historically grounded perspective on modern civil rights activists. In A More Beautiful
and Terrible History, Theoharis teaches us that learning history matters, but just as important is
that we remember history with all of its rich complexity and avoid whitewashing its
uncomfortable truths.
Silent Covenants
In Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Radical
Reform, the late lawyer and activist Derrick Bell analyzes the long-term impact of Brown v.
Board of Education, the iconic 1954 Supreme Court case which found that segregation in public
schools, under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” was unconstitutional.
In one of the best books on civil rights movement legal analysis, Bell argues forcefully that
Brown, despite its promise at the time, has not produced equality in public education. The book’s
title comes from Bell’s thesis that racial policy decisions are primarily determined by unspoken
“interest-convergence factors” without consideration of which policymakers cannot form
effective improvement strategies. Even as readers grapple with Bell’s conclusion that Brown was
a sort of misdirect – outlawing segregation did not inherently lead to progress for black students
– they will learn much from this esteemed scholar and resilient pragmatist about how best to
achieve reform.
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
It’s a story fit for a heroic drama: hundreds of activists, black and white, varying in age,
riding interstate buses in the South to challenge segregation in public transport, beaten,
firebombed, and arrested in the process. Historian Raymond Arsenault recounts the bravery of
these iconic activists in gripping, colorful detail.
Freedom Riders is one of the best books on the civil rights movement for readers looking
to learn about 1960s America as events unfolded on the ground. Its editor’s note credits the
author with a “southern gift for story-telling,” but Arsenault’s prose is supported by more than
200(!) personal interviews, along with other sources and archival footage, that bring the Freedom
Riders and surrounding characters to life. Readers will come across big names, including
President Kennedy, but learn most about those who participated in, as Arsenault describes it, “a
dangerous experiment designed to awaken the conscience of a complacent nation.”
Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-
1957
Books on civil rights movement events often focus on domestic issues of inequality, and for
good reason. But it’s important to understand that black activists at the time connected their
struggles with those of other oppressed peoples around the world. Penny Von Eschen’s Race
Against Empire documents the latter story: how black intellectuals approached African-American
inequality through lenses of anti-colonial politics and its accordant critique of U.S. foreign
policy.
Following early appeals to the United Nations, conferences in Europe, and independence
movements in Africa and Asia, Von Eschen’s work puts the civil rights movement in a much
more global context than in which we usually understand it; indeed, it’s a call to view “civil
rights” itself as only one aspect of a larger push for liberation everywhere. In this book, Von
Eschen thus echoes Malcolm X’s remark that injustice is “not just an American problem, but a
world problem.”
Black Is a Country
In Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, Nikhil Pal Singh
maintains the position, long entrenched in civil protest books, that celebrating victories of the
past matters as much as recognizing that more work needs to be done in the future.
Like Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire, Singh reflects upon the civil rights movement’s
more radical, internationalist bend. Drawing from intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard
Wright, Singh constructs a history of black activists who unflinchingly criticized American
democracy and asks what we can learn from their global visions of justice in today’s politics. In
particular, he openly warns that denying the legacies of historical racism risks giving America an
undeserved exoneration, being “restored to an identity with itself and with the destiny of all of
humanity”: this is a problem, Singh argues by quoting Langston Hughes, because “such an
America never was.”
Movement Matters
Let’s switch gears a bit. In Movement Matters: American Antiapartheid Activism and the
Rise of Multicultural Politics, David Hostetter traces how the civil rights movement and, as
we’ve discussed, more internationalist pursuits of racial justice led Americans to protest against
the apartheid system of institutionalized racial segregation, and the U.S. government’s support
thereof, that existed in South Africa until the early 1990s.
Unlike the other books listed here, Movement Matters focuses specifically on how social
justice advocates in the United States mobilized against another country’s policy of oppression.
Like with books on the American civil rights movement, Hostetter doesn’t pretend that
antiapartheid activists were united in their opposition to racial injustice. Indeed, much of his
research does not explore the history of apartheid so much as tense debates among antiapartheid
activists, on issues like whether to practice non-violent protest or armed rebellion, about the best
way to end it.
Voices of Freedom
Finally, we have a book that, as much as is possible, ties together everything we’ve discussed
so far. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights
Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s is, well, exactly what the title suggests. Here we
have a colossal recounting, from almost 1,000 interviews, of the civil rights movement’s critical
events.
Starting with the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and continuing until Boston’s busing
desegregation crisis in the 1970s, Hampton and Fayer’s journey blends historical background
with personal drama, academic insights with narrative. The authors stress that their work is not a
“book of facts,” that “[i]n no way was the civil rights movement confined to these episodes.”
However, as much as any single book can be, this is a rewarding overview for readers who aren’t
intimidated by its sweeping drama and ambitious scope.