The "Life and Times of a Black Man from Georgia" provides profound stimulating and fun reading for people in all walks of life: high school, college students, teachers, housewives, employers, employees and retirees. It is a book that can make you feel better about yourself. It provides an opportunity for in dept soul searching and the chance to look at various aspects of your life.

Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) was one of the most significant and controversial black leaders of the twentieth century. His followers called him the Messenger of Allah, while his critics labeled him a teacher of hate. Southern by birth, Muhammad moved north, eventually serving as the influential head of the Nation of Islam for over forty years. Claude Clegg III not only chronicles Muhammad's life, but also examines the history of American black nationalists and the relationship between Islam and the African American experience. In this authoritative biography, which also covers half a century of the evolution of the Nation of Islam, Clegg charts Muhammad's early life, his brush with Jim Crow in the South, his rise to leadership of the Nation of Islam, and his tumultuous relationship with Malcolm X. Clegg is the first biographer to weave together speeches and published works by Muhammad, as well as delving into declassified government documents, insider accounts, audio and video records, and interviews, producing the definitive account of an extraordinary man and his legacy.

Syndicated television and radio host. Serial liar. Pioneering journalist. Convicted criminal. Close ally of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Publicity-seeking provocateur. Louis Lomax's life was a study in contradiction. In this biography, Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating arc of Lomax's life and career, showing how the contradictions, tumult, and inconsistencies that marked his life reflected those of 1960s America. Aiello takes readers from Lomax's childhood in the Deep South to his early confidence schemes to his emergence as one of the loudest and most influential voices of the civil rights movement. Regardless of what political position he happened to take at any given moment, Lomax preached “the art of deliberate disunity,” in which the path to democracy could only be achieved through a diversity of opinions. Engaging and broad in scope, The Life and Times of Louis Lomax is the definitive study of one of the civil rights era's most complicated, important, and overlooked figures.

One of America's most prominent historians and a noted feminist bring together the most important political writings and testimonials from African-Americans over three centuries.

This book examines the slave narratives of key members of the abolitionist movement – Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs – revealing how these highly visible proponents of the antislavery cause were able to engage and at times overcome the cultural biases of their listening and reading audiences.

Rape has never had a universally accepted definition, and the uproar over "legitimate rape" during the 2012 U.S. elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. Redefining Rape tells the story of the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the United States, through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change. In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege. The long-dominant view of rape in America envisioned a brutal attack on a chaste white woman by a male stranger, usually an African American. From the early nineteenth century, advocates for women's rights and racial justice challenged this narrow definition and the sexual and political power of white men that it sustained. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, at the height of racial segregation and lynching, and amid the campaign for woman suffrage, women's rights supporters and African American activists tried to expand understandings of rape in order to gain legal protection from coercive sexual relations, assaults by white men on black women, street harassment, and the sexual abuse of children. By redefining rape, they sought to redraw the very boundaries of citizenship. Freedman narrates the victories, defeats, and limitations of these and other reform efforts. The modern civil rights and feminist movements, she points out, continue to grapple with both the insights and the dilemmas of these first campaigns to redefine rape in American law and culture.

In the state of Georgia, 1025 men and women are known to have been hanged or electrocuted for capital crimes in the century after the Civil War. Based on more than twenty years of investigative research, this chronological record of these legal executions was pieced together from diverse sources in and outside of the state, with many details never before made public. The author documents the facts as they occurred without delving into the politics of capital punishment.

They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America. The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House--where the Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle--to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison, where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or "outside agitators." But indelible images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation. Freedom Riders is a stunning achievement, a masterpiece of storytelling that will stand alongside the finest works on the history of civil rights.

Explores different examples of unpunished homicides and what these tell us about the interaction of law and society.