Eric Etheridge: Breach of Peace

Breach of Peace is a book about the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, a photo-history told in images old and new. The book features new portraits of 80 Riders and the mug shots of all 328 Riders arrested in Jackson that year, along with excerpts of interviews with the featured Riders.

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans -- blacks and whites, men and women -- entered Southern bus and train stations to challenge the segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters and bathrooms. The Supreme Court had ruled that such segregation was illegal, and the Riders were trying to force the federal government to enforce that decision.

Though there were Freedom Rides across the South, Jackson soon became the campaign's primary focus. More than 300 Riders were arrested there and quickly convicted of breach of peace--a law many Southern states and cities had put on the books for just such an occasion. The Riders then compounded their protest by refusing bail. "Flll the jails!" was their cry, and they soon did. Mississippi responded by transferring them to Parchman, the state's infamous Delta prison farm, for the remainder of their time behind bars, usually about six weeks.

A few days after the last group of Riders were arrested in Jackson, on September 13, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations, mandating an end to segregation in all bus and train stations.

Here's more about this book .

'Ruled by Race' published by Arkansas Press

A book described as the first comprehensive history of race relations in the Natural State has been published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Titled "Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present", the book was written by long-time Arkansas writer Grif Stockley. It describes the ways that race has been at the center of much of the states formation and image since its founding.

The subject of race is a passionate interest for Stockley, who was raised in Marianna. My family owned slaves and my father owned plantations in eastern Arkansas and Mississippi, so I am a direct beneficiary of white supremacy, Stockley said.

Influenced by the idealism of the Kennedy era but not substantially involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, Stockley began to question the status quo in earnest only after a stint overseas. I joined the Peace Corps after college and became radicalized by the poverty in Colombia, Stockley said.
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Fannie Lou Hamer: New Civil Rights Book Reveals Fear of Murder

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony [Democratic National Convention, 1964] wasn't the whole truth. A recent biography of Hamer, "For Freedom's Sake," by University of Georgia professor Chana Kai Lee, reveals that she omitted a key fact: She had also been sexually abused by the law enforcement officers.

Lee implies that Hamer did not tell the Credentials Committee that she was sexually abused because she was a "modest and dignified" woman, but I think it also must have been in her mind that if she testified on national television that the Mississippi police had also sexually abused her that day, she probably would have been murdered when she returned from the convention.

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Bettye Collier-Thomas:Women Crucial to Civil Rights Movement

ASU hosted Bettye Collier-Thomas, a nationally recognized civil rights scholar and researcher, for its fifth event of the Lecture-Concert Series on Tuesday.

Her lecture, titled "The Nexus: Women, Religion, Race and Civil Rights," examined the often overlooked role of black women in the struggle for civil rights and equality throughout American history.

"Historians now define the period from 1954 (the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision) to 1965 as the Modern Civil Rights Movement," Collier-Thomas said. "The African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights began long before Brown and is a central part of U.S. history."

Collier-Thomas said many men, both black and white, have been recognized and honored for their contributions in the civil rights struggle, but black women and their organizations have been largely ignored in the chronicles of history.

She said early religious coalitions such as the National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, were instrumental in the struggle for civil rights.

Groups like these allowed black women to work together toward women's rights and allowed them to speak as one and address the issues facing both women and black people. The web they created also allowed communications between various black communities to spread from one end of country in a very short period of time.

"Sweet Land of Liberty"

This new book by Thomas J. Sugrue is titled: “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.”



Publishers Weekly states:

“Sugrue highlights seminal people, books and organizations in his tightly focused study that restores many largely forgotten Northern activists as integral participants in the civil rights movement—such as Philadelphia pastor Leon Sullivan; Roxanne Jones of the welfare rights movement and first black woman elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate; and James Forman, advocate for reparations. The National Negro Congress, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the National Black Political Convention share history with the NAACP and the Urban League, as Sugrue traces the phoenixlike risings from the ashes of old organizations into new. Dense with boycotts, pickets, agitation, riots, lobbying, litigation, and legislation, the
book is heavily detailed but consistently readable with unparalleled scope and fresh focus.”

The NYT notes that the author:

“…spends a disproportionate amount of time writing about Marxist extremists and crackpot demagogues, devoting a dozen pages, for example, to the Revolutionary Action Movement, a violence-spouting Maoist sect. Yet he manages only two paragraphs for the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy in Brooklyn, which did so much to fracture the alliance between blacks and Jews. Sugrue’s book all too often focuses on the positions that black organizations took with respect to global issues rather than on the domestic conditions that produced urban poverty and segregated schools.”

The NYT has provided a first chapter excerpt which can be found here.