During the panel discussion with Judge Brenda Cole and Dr. Vicki Crawford at our Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration on January 18, 2025, an audience member asked the question, “What books can we add to our learning… to our family libraries?”
Left to right: Dr. Vicki Crawford, Dr. La’Neice Littleton, and Judge Brenda Cole at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration, January 18, 2025
Dr. La’Neice Littleton, panel moderator and Atlanta History Center Director of Community Collaborations, was happy to share her recommended book list, many of which can be found at our Kenan Research Center and available to read on your next visit. Check our her recommendations below!
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Edited by Dr. Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods
The essays presented here range from studies of individual women to studies of the school and housing integration fight, organizers in the Mississippi Delta, the Highlander Fold School and South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools, and the Free Southern Theater
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By Karcheik Sims-Alvarado
Since Reconstruction, African Americans have served as key protagonists in the rich and expansive narrative of American social protest. Their collective efforts challenged and redefined the meaning of freedom as a social contract in America. During the first half of the 20th century, a progressive group of black business, civic, and religious leaders from Atlanta, Georgia, challenged the status quo by employing a method of incremental gradualism to improve the social and political conditions existent within the city. By the mid-20th century, a younger generation of activists emerged, seeking a more direct and radical approach towards exercising their rights as full citizens. A culmination of the death of Emmitt Till and the Brown decision fostered this paradigm shift by bringing attention to the safety and educational concerns specific to African American youth. Deploying direct-action tactics and invoking the language of civil and human rights, the energy and zest of this generation of activists pushed the modern civil rights movement into a new chapter where young men and women became the voice of social unrest.
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By Winston A Grady-Willis
Challenging U.S. Apartheid is an innovative, richly detailed history of Black struggles for human dignity, equality, and opportunity in Atlanta from the early 1960s through the end of the initial term of Maynard Jackson, the city’s first Black mayor, in 1977. Winston A. Grady-Willis provides a seamless narrative stretching from the student nonviolent direct action movement and the first experiments in urban field organizing through efforts to define and realize the meaning of Black Power to the reemergence of Black women-centered activism. The work of African Americans in Atlanta, Grady-Willis argues, was crucial to the broader development of late-twentieth-century Black freedom struggles.
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By Tera W Hunter
Tera Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former master. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we see the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.
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Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith–instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.
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By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
More than two decades after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas – his call for racial equality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, and his insistence on the power of nonviolent struggle to bring about a major transformation of American society – are as vital and timely as ever. The wealth of his writings, both published and unpublished, that constitute his intellectual legacy are now preserved in this authoritative, chronologically arranged, multivolume edition. Faithfully transcribing the texts of his letters, speeches, sermons, student papers, and articles, this edition has no equal.” “Volume II begins with King’s doctoral work at Boston University and ends with his first year as pastor of the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It includes papers from his graduate courses and a fully annotated text of his dissertation. There is correspondence with people King knew in his years before graduate school and a transcription of the first known recording of a King sermon. We learn, too, of King’s marriage to Coretta Scott.” “Accepting the call to serve Dexter, King followed the church’s tradition of socially active pastors by becoming involved in voter registration and other issues of social justice. In Montgomery he completed his doctoral work, and he and Coretta Scott began their married life.” “King’s early papers document the formative experiences of a man whose life and teachings have had a profound influence not only on Americans but on people of all nations.
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By Coretta Scott King
The life story of Coretta Scott King–wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist–as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, she was an avowed feminist–a graduate student determined to pursue her own career–when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for fifteen years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela’s election. Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life.
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By W.E.B. Du Bois
This classic groundbreaking work of American literature first published in 1903 is a cornerstone of African-American literary history and a seminal work in the field of sociology. W.E.B. Du Bois, who drew from his own experiences as an African-American living in American society, explores the concept of “double-consciousness”-a term he uses to describe living as an African-American and having a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
With Du Bois’ examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, his explanation of the meaning of emancipation and its effect, and his views on the roles of the black leaders of his time, The Souls of Black Folk is one of the important early works in the field of sociology. His fourteen essays have had a lasting impact on civil rights and the discussion of race in the United States. -
By Rhondda Robinson Thomas
Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history. This book traces “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” a Clemson English professor’s public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson’s past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.