Books about Desegregation from Amazon.com

As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America..
Price: $6.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Taken a half-century ago, these photographs depict the desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was so moved at the beating of veteran Alex Wilson that he ordered 1,200 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to Little Rock, and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to quell the "disgraceful occurrences." "A Life Is More Than a Moment" carries us back to those painful and turbulent times, but it does not leave us there. In addition to these immortal photos, photographer Will Counts also took new portraits of many of the original subjects when he returned to Little Rock in 1997. Essays by Robert S. McCord, Ernest Dumas, and Will Campbell chart the path leading to the crisis and define its impact on the civil rights movement. This book shows an ugly hatred, but in the end, it is also a book of hope and reconciliation..
Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book is about my personal experiences and feelings as part of the "Norfolk 17," who went through the hardship of the initial school desegregation debacle from 1958 to 1962 in Norfolk, Virginia. It will provide some historical events, but more importantly, a first-hand account of what truly happened. I am a firm believer of the notion that formal history books are written by winners of war (i.e., one-sided, whoever is in control). Just like a well-prepared photo album, formal history books hide the "dirty laundry." In order to find the truth, one must necessarily dig deep, and sometimes the truth is so deep that it is still buried within people?s feelings. Therefore, bringing it out and presenting it to the world in the written form, as I do with this book, will be a great service for the present and the future and will help preserve the memories of the past no matter how painful they may be.

Some of the stories you will read about may shock you, such as the verbal attacks when confronted by bigots, the extent of racial hatred, and the actual physical attacks exhibited like the incident with Lavera Forbes. I hope all who read the book will compare it to reports and writings offered by others on the same subject..
Price: $12.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In 1958, facing court-ordered integration, a Virginia governor closed public schools in three cities. White moderates quickly protested against the school closings and eventually defeated the resistance to school desegregation in 1959. This text explores this period in the history of Virginia..
Price: $20.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement—the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County, North Carolina For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight.

The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining—rather than enhancing—this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South..
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an "ideal" racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital--a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers--creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America..
Price: $8.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as the "capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change.

Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings.

Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty..
Price: $7.83 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Make room on your library shelf . . . for John Egerton's magnificent Speak Now Against the Day. His book is a stunning achievement: a sprawling, engrossing, deeply moving account of those Southerners, black and white, who raised their voices to challenge the South's racial mores. . . . (This) is an eloquent and passionate book, and . . . one we cannot afford to forget."--Charles B. Dew, New York Times Book Review..
Price: $7.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]