Scholars & Bibliography


List of Scholars and Anonotated Bibliography

List of Scholars

  • Dr. David C. Carter
  • Dr. Robert Corley
  • Dr. Glenn T. Eskew
  • Dr. Tondra Loder-Jackson
  • Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries
  • Mrs. Peggy Wallace Kennedy
  • Dr. Danielle McGuire
  • Dr. John McKerley
  • Dr. Bernard Lafayette
  • Dr. Andrew Manis
  • Dr. Carolyn Maull McKinstry
  • Dr. Jeanne Theoharis

Annotated Bibliography

Carter, David C.  The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration. 1965-1968 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

A study of the shifting relationships between the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and grassroots advocates of racial and economic equality. The book extends the traditional timeline of the civil rights movement beyond passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham:  The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Birmingham served as the stage for some of the most dramatic and important moments in the history of the civil rights struggle. In this vivid narrative account, Glenn Eskew traces the evolution of nonviolent protest in the city, focusing particularly on the sometimes, problematic intersection of the local and national movements.  Eskew describes the changing face of Birmingham’s civil rights campaign, from the politics of accommodation practiced by the city’s black bourgeoisie in the 1950s to local pastor Fred L. Shuttlesworth’s groundbreaking use of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1963, the national movement, in the person of Martin Luther King Jr., turned to Birmingham. The national uproar that followed on Police Commissioner Bull Connor’s use of dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators provided the impetus behind passage of the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paradoxically, though, the larger victory won in the streets of Birmingham did little for many of the city’s black citizens, argues Eskew. The cancellation of protest marches before any clear-cut gains had been made left Shuttlesworth feeling betrayed even as King claimed a personal victory. While African Americans were admitted to the leadership of the city, the way power was exercised–and for whom–remained fundamentally unchanged.

 Loder-Jackson, Tondra. State University of New York Press; Reprint edition (July 2, 2016). 

Schoolhouse Activists examines the role that African American educators played in the Birmingham, Alabama, civil rights movement from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on multiple perspectives from education, history, and sociology, Tondra L. Loder-Jackson revisits longstanding debates about whether these educators were friends or foes of the civil rights movement. She also uses Black feminist thought and the life course perspective to illuminate the unique and often clandestine brand of activism that these teachers cultivated. The book will serve as a resource for current educators and their students grappling with contemporary struggles for educational justice.

 “Schoolhouse Activists provides an insightful narrative into the role of African American educators during the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama from the late nineteenth century to present day. This text should play a prominent role in future discussions given the limited and partial information on the roles of educators during the Civil Rights Movement.” — Journal of Negro Education

 Jeffries, Hasan Kwame.  Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. NYU Press, 2009.

African Americans in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, aided by activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), established an all-black, independent political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group, whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther, was formed in part to protest the barriers to black enfranchisement that had for decades kept every single African American of voting age off the county’s registration books. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most African Americans in this overwhelmingly black county remained too scared even to try to register. Their fear stemmed from the county’s long, bloody history of whites retaliating against blacks who strove to exert the freedom granted to them after the Civil War.

Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells, for the first time, the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.

 Kennedy, Peggy Wallace.  Broken Road, George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation. Bloomsbury, December 3, 2019.

The daughter of one of America’s most virulent segregationists, writes a memoir that reckons with her father George Wallace’s legacy of hate–and illuminates her journey towards redemption.

In the summer of 1963, Peggy Wallace Kennedy was a young girl watching her father stand in a schoolhouse door as he tried to block two African American students from entering the University of Alabama. This man, former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace, was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and his political stunts. But he was also a larger-than-life father to young Peggy, who was taught to smile, sit straight, and not speak up as her father took to the political stage. At the end of his life, Wallace came to renounce his views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But Peggy, after her own political awakening, dedicated her life to spreading the new Wallace message-one of peace and compassion.

In this powerful new memoir, Peggy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.”

Lafayette, Bernard.  In Peace and Freedom: My Journey to Selma. University Press of Kentucky-October 9th, 2013.

 In this electrifying memoir, written with Kathryn Lee Johnson, LaFayette shares the inspiring story of his years in Selma. When he arrived in 1963, Selma was a small, quiet, rural town. By 1965, it had made its mark in history and was nationally recognized as a battleground in the fight for racial equality and the site of one of the most important victories for social change in our nation.

LaFayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this book as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s

Manis, Andrew. A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth. The University of Alabama Press, 1999.

When Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth suffered only a bump on the head in the 1956 bombing of his home, members of his church called it a miracle. Shuttlesworth took it as a sign that God would protect him on the mission that had made him a target that night. Standing in front of his demolished home, Shuttlesworth vigorously renewed his commitment to integrate Birmingham’s buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. The incident transformed him, in the eyes of Birmingham’s blacks, from an up-and-coming young minister to a virtual folk hero and, in the view of white Birmingham, from obscurity to rabble-rouser extraordinaire.

From his 1956 founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights through the historic demonstrations of 1963, driven by a sense of divine mission, Shuttlesworth pressured Jim Crow restrictions in Birmingham with radically confrontational acts of courage. His intensive campaign pitted him against the staunchly segregationist police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and ultimately brought him to the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and to the inner chambers of the Kennedy White House.

First published in 1999, Andrew Manis’s award-winning biography of “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters” demonstrates compellingly that Shuttleworth’s brand of fiery, outspoken confrontation derived from his prophetic understanding of the pastoral role. Civil rights activism was tantamount to salvation in his understanding of the role of Christian minister.

McGuire, Danielle.  At the Dark End of the Street.

Groundbreaking, controversial, and courageous, here is the story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America’s civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against black women by white men.

Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.

 In this important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

McKerley, John.  Foot Soldiers for Democracy.

The Men, Women, and Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement: Firsthand Accounts From the Civil Rights Movement’s Frontlines, University of Illinois Press, 2009. Drawn from the rich archives of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this collection brings together twenty-nine oral histories from people of varying ages and occupations who participated in civil rights activism at the grassroots level. These highly personal narratives convey the real sense of fear and the risk of bodily danger people had to overcome in order to become the movement’s foot soldiers. The stories offer testimony as to how policing was carried out when there were no cameras, how economic terrorism was used against activists, how experiences of the movement differed depending on gender, and how youth participation was fundamental to the cause. Participants in the struggle ranged from teachers, students of all ages, and domestic workers to elderly women and men, war veterans, and a Black Panther leader. This volume demonstrates the complexity and diversity of the spirit of resistance at a formative moment in American history.

McKinstry, Carolyn Maull and Denise George. While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement.  Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2011.

On September 15, 1963, the Klan-planted bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn Maull was just a few feet away when the bomb exploded, killing four of her friends in the girl’s restroom she had just exited. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights Movement, a sad day in American history . . . and the turning point in a young girl’s life.

While the World Watched is a poignant and gripping eyewitness account of life in the Jim Crow South: from the bombings, riots, and assassinations to the historic marches and triumphs that characterized the Civil Rights movement.  A uniquely moving exploration of how racial relations have evolved over the past 5 decades, While the World Watched is an incredible testament to how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

Theoharis, Jeanne.  The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.

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.

This revised edition includes a new introduction by the author, who reflects on materials in the Rosa Parks estate, purchased by Howard Buffett in 2014 and opened to the public at the Library of Congress in February 2015. Theoharis contextualizes this rich material—made available to the public for the very first time and including more than seven thousand documents—and deepens our understanding of Parks’ personal, financial, and political struggles.

White, Marjorie Longenecker.  A Walk to Freedom: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, 1956-1964. Birmingham, Ala.:  Birmingham Historical Society, 1998.

The book contains 225 photographs from the Civil Rights era in Birmingham, original news accounts, and recollections from those who conceived and lived the era. Also included are Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth’s speeches and Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights annual reports. Leading off with a preface from Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the book intentionally tells the story from the Movement perspective, through the eyes of the strong network of Christian churches which banded together throughout the city of Birmingham to stage a God-filled, nonviolent confrontation to banish segregation. The book examines the role of African-American churches in the history of the civil rights movement, focusing on the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Bethel Baptist Church.  Birmingham Historical Society; Birmingham, AL 1999.

Foot Soldiers

In addition to scholars, Foot Soldiers of the Movement will be invited to share their experiences and the personal resolve that inspired them to “. . . march on ‘til victory was won.”

Some of the other Institute presenters include:  

Mrs. JoAnne Bland, a youth participant of the Selma March for the Right to Vote. Mrs. Bland, a co-founder of the National Voting Rights Museum and director of Journey’s for the Soul, has been featured in several documentaries on the events that led to the passage of the 1965, Voting Rights Act. She is a very engaging and dynamic speaker and shares her stories of triumph across the nation.

Mrs. Ruby Shuttlesworth-Bester will tell her remarkable story of overcoming injustice as the daughter of a man who was loved and hated. Mrs. Janice Kelsey, Mrs. Myrna Jackson, and Bishop Calvin Woods will also join us. They are all featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Children’s March.” Also joining our cast of “History Makers” will be Mrs. Katherine Burks-Brooks, a Freedom Rider. Each will share their history making stories as they describe life under segregation and how the actions of committed and focused children inspired our nation and ultimately broke the back of segregation in the Deep South.