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Civil Rights Movement
A wide range of historians, writers, and public figures reflect on “the most important, or interesting, or overlooked way in which America has changed"
In August 1950, I began working with a group of business and professional executives to establish a non-profit organization in New York that would place college women in jobs and steer them along their career paths. We called ourselves the Alumnae Advisory Center.
On summer evenings toward the end of his life, Robert Todd Lincoln liked to be driven up the road from Hildene, his home in Manchester, Vermont, to the Equinox House for dinner.
A child of the South's "Lost Cause," Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national government for the first time since Reconstruction. In so doing, he changed the nation forever.
“I think one man is just as good as another,” he said, “as long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” Yet Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national g
Writing a biography is an act of self-discovery.
In the late 1960s, I was a reporter on the staff of a big-city daily newspaper in the border South. My beat was local politics, which at the time had edged into civil rights and sometimes racial confrontations. The issues were clear.
In the densely printed 51-page index to Taylor Branch’s splendid new chronicle of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, there are just three references to Paul Robeson, all of them inconsequen
30 years ago, John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, became an itinerant Southern black for four weeks. His account of the experience, "Black like Me," galvanized the nation.
On a sunny November day in 1959, a tall, brown-haired Texan entered the home of a New Orleans friend. Five days later, an unemployed, bald black man walked out.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to look through a collection of photographs of New York in the 1920s with the amiable old man who had made them then for a news agency.
Twenty years ago blacks were virtually disenfranchised throughout the South. Now their votes may elect our next President.
JESSE JACKSON’S impressive performance during the long primary season of 1984 has made one thing absolutely clear: If the Democratic candidate hopes to unseat Ronald Reagan in November, he will have to count heavily on black votes.
A century after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern blacks still were denied the vote. In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr, set out to change that—by marching through the heart of Alabama.
From the frozen steps of Brown Chapel they could see the car moving toward them down Sylvan Street, past the clapboard homes and bleak, red-brick apartments that dotted the Negro section of Selma, Alabama.
Nobody was murdered or maimed, but nobody backed down for twenty years in the struggle over school integration in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Who finally won?
When one weary woman refused to be harassed out of her seat in the bus, the whole shaky edifice of Jim Crow began to totter
In 1955,
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