San Antonio College Library

The prose and dramatic writings of Lorraine Hansberry provide autobiographical information about the author's life, thoughts, feelings, and career.

"John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson...

This is a personal memoir of a young white woman, newly graduated from college, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and set out to reverse, redress, and reshape the mind of America on the matter of race. The author describes the involvement of major figures such as Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy; the cold-blooded murder of the author's three fellow workers in Mississippi; the...

"W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction...

"As a white Yale Law School graduate, Meltsner began his career with the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, working initially under Thurgood Marshall and later under Jack Greenberg. From his vantage point at LDF, Meltsner witnessed and participated in litigation support of the civil rights movement in the South. As the movement shifted north and the fight for desegregation gave way to black-power slogans, Meltsner remained involved with the LDF and...

This scripted narrative follows Rosa Parks' life from the time she was a private-school student, to her rise to infamy. Part of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Parks fought against discrimination and segregation. But, it was her refusal to relinquish her seat on a bus and subsequent arrest, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which thrust her into the spotlight. This American-made film directed by Julie Dash features...

To mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2005, PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown speaks with civil rights author Nick Kotz and Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University.

The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement and presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks.

The author describes his experiences working to defend rights, discussing cases and issues he faced, beginning in 1963, on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union, as co-founder of Human Rights Watch, and as president of the Soros Foundations and Open Society Institute.