The Civil Rights Movement

Designed for secondary school and college student research, The Civil Rights Movement is a one-stop guide that includes clear analysis and ready reference components. Combining narrative description, analytical essays, chronology, biographical profiles, and the text of key primary documents, this work fills a gap in the existing literature. Drawing on the most recent research, Levy, author of the acclaimed Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, provides an outstanding introduction to the Civil Rights movement, its development, issues, and leaders. Six essays analyze the crucial aspects of the movement, including a concluding essay that assesses its legacy. Ready reference features include: a chronology of events; lengthy biographical profiles of 20 key civil rights activists; the text of 15 seminal documents valuable for student research; a glossary of selected terms; and an annotated bibliography of recommended further reading and audiovisual materials.

The essays are designed to be clear and engaging; they capture the conflict and drama of the Civil Rights movement as they present an analysis of its main features. Following a narrative overview of the movement, five analytical essays address these topics: the origins of the movement; the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi; the fight for legal equality, with a discussion aimed at fostering a better understanding of the current debate over affirmative action; the role played by women in the movement; and an analysis of the legacy of the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s. These essays are followed by biographical profiles of 20 civil rights activists, from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X to Ella Jo Baker and Bayard Rustin. The guide includes 15 primary documents, ranging from addresses by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokley Carmichael, Malcolm X, and George Wallace. A selection of photos complements the text. This one-stop reference source offers not only a starting point for students research but analysis that raises issues still being debated today.

PETER B. LEVY is Associate Professor of History and Political Science at York College, Pennsylvania. He is author of Encyclopedia of the Reagan-Bush Years (1996), A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement (1992), The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (1994), and editor of 100 Key Documents in American Democracy (1994), all from Greenwood. He is currently working on a documentary history of America in the 1960s and a case study of the Civil Rights movement in Cambridge, Maryland.