Books by David J. Garrow
“I think it’s important for students to not just read about historical moments, but actually read text from the historical moment. And so this book is excellent because it’s a collection of speeches, and other primary source materials that students can read and study and understand.” Read more...
The best books on The Civil Rights Era
Lerone Martin, Historian
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
by David J. Garrow
***Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography***
“This book is Pulitzer Prize winner. It became a standard narrative of King’s life and the life of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It’s an amazing book. David Garrow spent years researching and writing it. It is a long book, but you can still cut it up into chunks so the students can read about the career of Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott, to Albany, to what happens in St. Augustine in Florida and Birmingham. The entire career of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is in the book, and it gives students a solid grasp of the role of faith; Martin Luther King’s faith, how faith influenced him, how it shaped his activism, and how that activism mobilized communities for campaigns for justice and freedom. It’s an excellent text.” Read more...
The best books on The Civil Rights Era
Lerone Martin, Historian
Interviews where books by David J. Garrow were recommended
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1
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
by Barbara Ransby -
2
God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
by Charles Marsh -
3
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
by David J. Garrow -
4
The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle
by Clayborne Carson, Darlene Clark Hine, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill & Vincent Harding -
5
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and assisted by Alex Haley, Laurence Fishburne (narrator)
The best books on The Civil Rights Era, recommended by Lerone Martin
The best books on The Civil Rights Era, recommended by Lerone Martin
The struggle for Black freedom in America has been going on since the first enslaved Africans were brought to the continent, but it was the civil rights era of 1954 to 1968 that finally resulted in a raft of legislation that gave equal citizenship to Black people in the United States. Here, Professor Lerone Martin of Stanford University recommends the best books to understand the American civil rights movement, with a focus on some of the individuals who were key to its success.
