Table of Contents

Introduction: The Human Tradition and Civil Rights
Part I: Hope is Born
Chapter 1: Abraham Galloway: Prophet of Biracial America
Chapter 2: Homer Plessy: Unsuccessful Challenger to Jim Crow
Chapter 3: James K. Vardaman: "A Vote for White Supremacy" and the Politics of Racism
Part II: Should We Stay or Should We Go?
Chapter 4: Ida B. Wells: Higher Law and Community Justice
Chapter 5: A. Philip Randolph: Labor and the New Black Politics
Chapter 6: Lucy Randolph Mason: "The Rest of Us"
Part III: Awakenings
Chapter 7: Amzie Moore: The Biographical Roots of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
Chapter 8: James Lawson: The Nashville Civil Rights Movement
Chapter 9: Charles Sherrod and Martin Luther King Jr.: Mass Action and Nonviolence in Albany
Part IV: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Chapter 10: Diane Nash: "Courage Displaces Fear, Love Transforms Hate": Civil Rights Activism and the Commitment to Nonviolence
Chapter 11: Mae Bertha Carter: These Tiny Fingers
Chapter 12: Robert F. Williams: "Black Power" and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle
Part V: The Borning Movement
Chapter 13: Judith Brown: Freedom Fighter
Chapter 14: José Angel Gutiérrez: La Raza Unida and Scholarship for Social Justice
Chapter 15: Leonard Peltier: A Small Part of a Much Larger Story
Chapter 16: Sylvia Rivera: Fighting in Her Heels: Stonewall, Civil Rights, and Liberation

About the Author

Susan M. Glisson is director of the Institute for Racial Reconciliation and assistant professor of southern studies at the University of Mississippi.

Reviews

Glisson's volume convincingly argues that the civil rights movement was not always top-down and that local grassroots organizers deserve recognition from scholars and the general public alike.
*The Journal Of Mississippi History*

Susan Glisson has assembled a stellar cast of scholars to tell the stories of individual Americans engaged in the struggle for human rights. This remarkable collection of essays is at once inspiring and sobering. It demonstrates that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things. But it also reminds us of the distance still to be traveled before this country lives up to its democratic promise.
*John Dittmer, DePauw University*