History Happy Hour

Our guest is Charles Person, author of The Busses are A Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider. Here are some other books worth taking a look at.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Raymond Arsenault Widely regarded as the definitive account of six months in 1961 when 450 courageous black and white Americans boarded buses in Washington D.C. and travelled throughout the deep south to challenge the Jim Crow conventions of the time. This book came out in conjunction with the American Experience documentary on the freedom riders. Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Riders, Derek Charles Catsam. This is a very detailed account of the freedom rides that covers much of the same ground as Arsenault. Where this book excels, however, is taking a detailed look at how the civil rights movement developed a strategy of using transportation networks to spread the civil rights movement. Perhaps a bit more high-level/strategic than Arsenault. While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement, Carolyn Maull McKinstry McKinstry was just 15 years old when she was nearly killed in the blast at Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Terrific eyewitness account of growing up in the Jim Crow South and a young person’s life in the Civil Rights movement. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom, William Chafe Chafe’s book has been called “the best-case study of the civil rights movement.” It looks at methods employed by southern whites in North Carolina to halt the spread of the civil rights movement and the efforts made by the movement's leaders to fight back. The New York Times said this book is, “social history at its best.”