eBooks and Books
Sundown Towns by
Bestselling author ofLies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen, exposes the secret communities and hotbeds of racial injustice that sprung up throughout the twentieth century unnoticed, forcing us to reexamine race relations in the United States. In this groundbreaking work, bestselling sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"--almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there--that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities--and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations. Sundown Towns combines personal narrative, history, and analysis to create a readable picture of this previously unknown American institution all written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness.
Overground Railroad by
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020​ The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the "black travel guide to America." At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.
The Warmth of Other Suns by
NATIONAL BEST SELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE "A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth."--John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times *USA Today * O: The Oprah Magazine * Publishers Weekly * Salon * Newsday *The Daily Beast In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * The Washington Post * The Economist * Boston Globe * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * Entertainment Weekly * Philadelphia Inquirer * The Guardian * The Seattle Times * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * The Christian Science Monitor
Driving While Black by
The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression. Enlivened by Sorin's personal history, Driving While Black opens an entirely new view onto the African American experience, and shows why travel was so central to the Civil Rights movement.
Jim Crow by
This one-volume reference work examines a broad range of topics related to the establishment, maintenance, and eventual dismantling of the discriminatory system known as Jim Crow. Many Americans imagine that African Americans' struggle to achieve equal rights has advanced in a linear fashion from the end of slavery until the present. In reality, for more than six decades, African Americans had their civil rights and basic human rights systematically denied in much of the nation. Jim Crow: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic sheds new light on how the systematic denigration of African Americans after slavery--known collectively as "Jim Crow"--was established, maintained, and eventually dismantled. Written in a manner appropriate for high school and junior high students as well as undergraduate readers, this book examines the period of Jim Crow after slavery that is often overlooked in American history curricula. An introductory essay frames the work and explains the significance and scope of this regrettable period in American history. Written by experts in their fields, the accessible entries will enable readers to understand the long hard road before the inception of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century while also gaining a better understanding of the experiences of minorities in the United States--African Americans, in particular. Provides a one-stop source of information for students researching the period of American history dominated by the discriminatory system of Jim Crow laws Puts phenomena such as "Sundown towns" within a larger framework of official discrimination Documents the methods used to create, maintain, and dismantle Jim Crow
Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South by
Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States. In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights. Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood
Articles: Racism and travel restrictions
Victor Hugo Green & The Green Book
- Driving the Green Book: An audio journey through the segregated South (A Macmillan Podcast) A Macmillan podcast featuring, journalist Alvin Hall and social justice trainer, Janae Wood Weber who uncover powerful personal narratives of those who relied on The Green Book during the Jim Crow era.
Historical lecture presentation
You Will Find It Handy: Documenting Green Book Sites in Md. (Anne Bruder) A historical expert on architecture and transportation gives an online presentation about the sites in Maryland that were part of the safe haven stops listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book. This presentation is part of a larger, collective historical tribute to The Green Book. The lecture was made available through the public educational programming of the AIA Baltimore & Baltimore Architecture Foundation.
Research Guides
- BlackPast.org
A site dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world.
- CCBC Research Guide on African American History
This guide contains significant resources that are highly relevant to the topic of African Americans, Jim Crow and evolving social changes for African Americans from the past to the present.
Documentaries
- Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America
This acclaimed documentary is now streaming on the official PBS web portal for program specials. Driving While Black allows viewers to discover how the advent of the automobile brought new mobility and freedom for African Americans but also exposed them to discrimination and deadly violence, and how that history resonates today.
Driving While Black may also be accessed in two parts through Academic Videos Online (see CCBC film and video databases)
Click here for Part One - This segment discusses the root of racism in America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, the birth of the automobile, the myth of mobility in America and the dangers of road travel during segregation. Click here for Part Two - This segment celebrates Black entrepreneurship, introduces The Green Book, highway construction and its impact, the cruel reality of ‘driving while Black’ in contemporary society and the ongoing struggle for Civil Rights in America.
Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940), is a full episode from the multi-part, documentary series called The African Americans—Many Rivers to Cross (hosted for PBS by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) This 56-minute episode portrays the Jim Crow era, when African Americans struggled to buil
d their own worlds within the harsh, narrow confines of segregation. At the turn of the 20th century, a steady stream of African Americans left the South, fleeing the threat of racial violence and searching for opportunities in the North and West. The era of The Green Book is covered in this episode. Other episodes from the series are found in the CCBC Library Films on Demand database by clicking here.
More brief videos on The Green Book
Interactive Mapping of Sundown Towns
- Historical Database and Geographic Mapping of Sundown Towns
Based on the extensive work of historian James Lowen, Tougaloo University of Mississippi hosts a History & Social Justice website that features an interactive database and mapping tools for sundown towns and historically restrictive covenant communities across the U.S. Click the linked image above to begin viewing data by state.