Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

In volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, Parting the Waters is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War. Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

This book contains substantial information about Lawson, as he was the leader of Community on the Move for Equality (COME), which was formed by 150 local ministers to organize non-violent protest in support of the sanitation workers. See article in the King Encyclopedia

On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world."Lawson's first nonviolent direct action campaign was in Nashville, where he led the series of lunch-counter sit-ins that successfully challenged segregation. The workshops that Lawson held in the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence trained a new generation of activists who subsequently organized path-breaking campaigns throughout the South, including the Freedom Rides. In California, Lawson has worked with hotel workers, janitors, home care workers, and undocumented immigrant youth to embrace nonviolence in historic organizing victories.This is the first book that captures Lawson's teachings. Five powerful case studies explore how individual acts of conscience can lead to collective action and how the practice of nonviolence can build a powerful movement for social change. This publication emerged from a class taught by James Lawson, Kent Wong, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, and Ana Luz González at UCLA, and it was written by students who were inspired by the class.