Guide to Anti-Racist Books and Resources

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As the last survivor of that inner circle, Gray speaks about the strategic reasons Parks was presented as a demure, random victim of Jim Crow policies when in reality she was a committed, strong-willed activist who was willing to be arrested so there could be a test case to challenge segregation laws. Gray's remarkable career also includes landmark civil rights cases in voting rights, education, housing, employment, law enforcement, jury selection, and more. He is widely considered one of the most successful civil rights attorneys of the twentieth century and his cases are studied in law schools around the world.

At the National Council of Churches, Robert Spike had organized American churches to support the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, to march in Selma and to organize in Mississippi. An important white leader in the black civil rights struggle, he helped the LBJ White House pass legislation and write crucial civil rights speeches. In the midst of what he described as "the dirtiest fight of my life" struggling to save a federal Mississippi education program,he was viciously murdered in Columbus, Ohio. The murder was never solved. This book is a memoir by Spike's son Paul Spike, concerning his life in the 1960s and the ways in which his father's brutal murder reshaped his life.

In 1970, C. T. Vivian, a close colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a member of his executive staff, sat down to take stock of the civil rights movement and the progress it had made. His assessment was that it failed, and that the blame lay in the existence of myths about America. The Black struggle for independence is more of an uphill climb than ever. Why? C. T. Vivian asserts that the civil rights movement failed because it was built on certain myths about America: - the myth that Americans will do what is right as soon as they know what is right. - the myth that legislation leads to justice. - the myth that America is an open society where any minority group can advance. - the myth that an ethic of love forms the core of the American conscience. We had assumed that America held the answers. But more than that, we assumed that America would implement those answers once we presented our case clearly to the nation. And again we were wrong. - C. T. Vivian