San Antonio College Library

"Zilphia Horton was a pioneer of cultural organizing, an activist and musician who taught people how to use the arts as a tool for social change, and a catalyst for anthems of empowerment such as "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall Not Be Moved." Her contributions to the Highlander Folk School, a pivotal center of the labor and civil rights movements in the mid-twentieth century, and her work creating the songbook of the labor movement influenced countless...

In protest against the Vietnam War - one of the most divisive conflicts in US history - American musicians wrote and performed hundreds of songs calling for peace and criticising the US government's handling of the war.

During the Vietnam War, American G.I.s inscribed their military issued lighters with poems. Zippo songs is a song cycle by Phil Kline based upon these poems.

A biography of 'Strange Fruit' from its genesis at the hands of Abel Meeropol to its popularization by Billie Holiday to its enduring power and appeal today. The author chronicles its effect on those who experienced it firsthand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students, budding activists, even the waitressess and bartenders who worked the clubs. This is the story of a song that foretold the Civil Rights Movement and the lady who dared...

Biography of the African American labor leader, journalist, and civil rights activist, A. Philip Randolph. Randolph won the first national labor agreement for a black union, The Sleeping Car porters. His threat of a protest march on Washington forced President Roosevelt to ban segregation in the federal government and defense industries at the onset of WWII and again he forced Truman to integrate the military. Finally with the 1963 March on Washington,...