he US civil rights movement is a perennially popular topic that has spawned a massive body of literature.
Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (Seminar Studies In History)
by John A. Kirk
What interests me about its history is how it engages with questions of race relations that are at the heart of US history: how a nation that became the world's model for democracy was born in the shadow of slavery; how that issue tore apart the nation in a bloody civil war; and how, despite that war, a new system of racial discrimination based on segregation, disenfranchisement and economic exploitation persisted well into the latter half of the 20th century.
I'm also interested in how the civil rights and black power movements emerged from grassroots activism, transforming some aspects of racial discrimination but leaving many other elements intact. The issues the civil rights movement raised are still relevant today – and not only in the US.
Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.
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