Community Activism and Civil Rights

For the two generations who have grown up since Lyndon Johnson was president, the events as well as the thinking behind the revolutionary and romantic pretensions of the 1960s are almost equally unclear. This was the era of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Summer of Love; it was also at the heart of the civil rights and anti-War movements. The year 1968 saw the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the ascendance of the hippies and Yippies, Black Power, Neo-Marxism and the beginnings of Postmodernism. When student radicals occupied Columbia University in 1968, they were showing solidarity with student uprisings in Paris and in Frankfurt. This unique novel explores the tensions that were manifest in the student riots in West Germany following the shooting of the student leader Rudi Dutschke, the student revolt at Columbia University, and the tumultuous French May uprising, all of which took place in the spring of 1968. At the heart of the book lie timely concerns regarding the impotence of liberalism within a self-perpetuating system that is fluid enough to contain the forces that would bring about real change. Technically a novel, 1968 walks a fine line between fiction and nonfiction. Through its historically faithful storyline, its biographical portrayals of historical figures, and its authentic and accurate intellectual grounding, 1968 follows an entirely documentary agenda.

The complex friendship between a black housekeeper and her Jewish employer is at the heart of Hoffman's prize-winning novel about life in the civil rights era South. Nebraska Waters is black. Vivian Gold is Jewish. In an Alabama kitchen where, for nearly thirty years, they share cups of coffee, fret over their children, and watch the civil rights movement unfold out their window, and into their homes, they are like family--almost. As Nebraska makes her way, day in and out, to Vivian's house to cook and help tend the Gold children, the "almost" threatens to widen into a great divide. The two women's husbands affect their relationship, as do their children, Viv Waters and Benjamin Gold, born the same year and coming of age in a changing South. The bond between the women both strengthens and frays.

Huck Finn and Jim float on their raft across a continuum of shifting seasons, feasting on a limitless supply of fish and stolen provisions, propelled by the currents of the mighty Mississippi from one adventure to the next. Launched into existence by Mark Twain, they have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river's banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction's promises to the freed slaves, the crushing of Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. While Jim enters real time when he disembarks the raft in the Jim Crow South, Huck finally comes of age when he's washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina. An old man in 2077, Huck takes stock of his life and narrates his own story, revealing our nation's past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it. The first stand-alone book in The American Novels series,The Boy in His Winter is a tour-de-force work of imagination, beauty, and courage that re-envisions a great American literary classic for our time. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

Every adult wants to give DeQuin advice. His father, who's serving a life sentence, thinks DeQuin needs to toughen up. His uncle wants DeQuin to work hard and keep his head down. Then there's his grandfather, lecturing DeQuin at every turn when he's not rambling about his glory days in the 1960s civil rights movement. DeQuin is doing fine without their help until a fun night with friends gets out of control. Now he has to deal with the fallout. Should he fight, as his dad suggests? Should he run and hide, as his uncle would do? Or should he follow his grandfather's example of peaceful resistance? Whatever he chooses, he's still just one confrontation away from losing everything.

Artist and activist John O'Neal is best known for his Junebug Jabbo Jones cycle of plays, a remarkable collection of tales and anecdotes drawn from African American oral literature, which he has performed all over the globe. Four of these plays are included in this volume, along with four of O'Neal's other works: large-scale ensemble productions, first performed by his ensemble company Junebug Productions, as well as in collaboration with A Travelling Jewish Theater (San Francisco, California), Roadside Theater (Kentucky), and Pregones Theater (Bronx, New York).

During a Chicano Civil Rights march, Gloria Damasco, a feisty political activist, finds a murdered child and begins an investigation that will lead her on a trail of international conspiracy and bloody vengeance.

This gripping bestseller, first published in 1966, has continued to captivate readers with its wide-ranging yet intimate portrait of an America sundered by racial conflict. David Champlin is a black man born into poverty in Depression-era New Orleans who makes his way up the ladder of success, only to sacrifice everything to lead his people in the civil rights movement. Sara Kent is the white girl who loves David from the moment she first sees him, and who struggles against his belief that a marriage for them would be wrong in the violent world he has to confront. And the "five smooth stones" are those the biblical David carried against Goliath. By the time this novel comes to its climax of horror, bloodshed, and hope, readers will be convinced that its enduring popularity is fully justified.

Experience historic events through the eyes of Maximilian P. Mouse, Time Traveler! Maximilian P. Mouse has become quite the time traveler. He is happy to learn he is getting closer to the right time period - he has landed in 1963! Maximilian and his new friend Marian Moleana witness the famous "I have a dream" speech of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The new civil rights mouse leader is ready to save his home. Maximilian decides he must try again. Luckily, his final attempt is a success! Now Maximilian uses all of the lessons he learned during his journey to devise a plan. Can he save Tanner's Glen and his family's home? Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.

It was the Freedom Summer of 1964. Civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were driving through rural Mississippi. When a police cruiser flashed its lights behind them, they hesitated. Were these law-abiding officers or members of the Ku Klux Klan? Should they pull over or try to outrun their pursuers? The last day in the lives of these courageous young men is relived in this gripping story.

Both heroic and tragic, this novel captures the spirit, energy, and imagination of the 1960s' Chicano movement--a massive and intense struggle across a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues--through the passionate story of the King of the Chicanos, Ram Hidalgo. From his very humble beginnings through the tumultuous decades of being a migrant farm worker, door-to-door salesman, prison inmate, political hack, and radical activist, the novel relates Hidalgo's personal failures and self-destructive personality amid the political turmoil of the times. With a gradual acceptance of his destiny as a leader and hero of the people, this impassioned novel relates the maturation of one man while encapsulating the fever of the Chicano movement.

Written by an intimate participant in the turbulent civil rights movement in Mississippi, Nobody Said Amen tells the stories of two families' lives, one white, one black, as they navigate the challenging, tilting landscape created by the coming of "outside agitators" and social change to the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s. Owner of a great plantation, Luke Claybourne is a product of Southern attitudes, a decent man who feels responsible for the black families who make his plantation run, but who is loathe to accept the changes necessary for its survival. When he loses his plantation, his entire world is shattered. Led by his wife, Willy, and their friendship with a Northern journalist, Luke is forced to come to terms with a new way of life in the post--Civil Rights era South. Meanwhile, Jimmy Mack, a young black Mississippian leading a group of students who have come to Shiloh to help blacks gain the right to vote, has become a target of the Klan--savagely beaten while in jail and threatened with a burning cross. His love affair with Eula, a Claybourne employee, highlights the tensions and hazards of trying to love in the shadow of a racist world. Rich with a colorful roster of the people in Shiloh, Nobody Said Amen tells a triumphant American tale.

Whenever we imagine a world without war or injustice, we are engaging in speculative fiction. Radicals and activists devote their lives to envisioning such worlds, and then go about trying to create them. This collection brings together 20 such stories, as well as essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Named for the great Octavia Butler, giant of science fiction and a rare woman of colour in her field, this engaging and enlightening collection is the first book to explore the connections between radical science fiction and movements for social change.

When John Nelson abandoned his government job to join a scrappy band of activists, he didn't realize trying to save the world would be so hard. His ideals remain strong, but his optimism is wearing thin. His fellow activists--computer hacker Jen Owens and Vietnam vet Irving Fetzer--still think he's a square. And their radio show can't compete with the corporate media. Julia Stoops's socially conscious, fast-paced debut novel, is set in Portland, Oregon, in 2002.

An important new collection of original essays that examine how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain's writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal." Ellison believed it was the contradiction between America's "noble ideals and the actualities of our conduct" that inspired the most profound literature -- "the American novel at its best." Drawing from the fields of literature, politics, law, and history, the contributors make visible the political and ethical terms of Invisible Man, while also illuminating Ellison's understanding of democracy and art. Ellison hoped that his novel, by providing a tragicomic look at American ideals and mores, would make better citizens of his readers. The contributors also explain Ellison's distinctive views on the political tasks and responsibilities of the novelist, an especially relevant topic as contemporary writers continue to confront the American incongruity between democratic faith and practice. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope uniquely demonstrates why Invisible Man stands as a premier literary meditation on American democracy.