High School Nonfiction | High School Fiction | Teachers

Here are some of the titles we recommend for teaching about the Civil Rights Movement. More books and resources on related social movements and the long history of struggles for civil rights in the U.S. can be found at the Zinn Education Project and the Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching sites.

Booklists also available for Elementary and Middle School.

Bayard Rustin Behind Scenes Of Civil Rights Movement

By James Haskins

Because They Marched: The People's Campaign for Voting Rights That Changed America

By Russell Freedman

The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution

By Bryan Shih, Yohuru Williams, Peniel E. Joseph (Introduction by)

Coming of Age in Mississippi

By Anne Moody

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

By Lila Quintero Weaver

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Vision (Second Edition)

By Barbara Ransby

Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs & Pictures

By Pete Seeger

Getting Away with Murder

By Chris Crowe

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

By Faith S. Holsaert (Editor), Martha Prescod Norman Noonan (Editor), Judy Richardson (Editor)

John Carlos Story *

By Dave Zirin, John Wesley Carlos, Cornel West

March, Book One

By John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell (Artist)

More books in the series: March, Book Two and March, Book Three

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

By Jeanne Theoharis

Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters

By Michael G. Long (Editor), Bayard Rustin, Julian Bond (Foreword by)

On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail

By Charles E. Cobb Jr

A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

By Dave Zirin

The Radical King

By Martin Luther King, Jr., Cornel West (Editor)

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks *

By Jeanne Theoharis

The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

By Robyn C. Spencer

SNCC: The New Abolitionists

By Howard Zinn

So the Heffners Left McComb *

By Hodding Carter, Oliver Emmerich (Preface by), Trent Brown (Introduction by)

Silver Rights

By Constance Curry

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible *

By Charles E. Cobb

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement *

By Leslie G. Kelen (Editor), Julian Bond (Contribution by), Clayborne Carson (Contribution by)

A Time to Break Silence: The Essential Works of Martin Luther King, Jr., for Students

By Martin Luther King Jr

To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools

Edited by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale

Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980 *

By Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer

Voices of a People's History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition *

By Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove

The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation

By Amy Schmidt, Julie Armstrong (Editor), Booker T. Washington (Contribution by)

Freshwater Road

By Denise Nicholas

The Fog Machine

By Susan Follett

Meridian

By Alice Walker

Mississippi Trial, 1955 *

By Chris Crowe

Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement: An Anthology

By Margaret Earley Whitt (Editor)

Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark

By Katherine Mellen Charron

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

By Charles M. Payne

Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching: A Resource Guide for Classrooms and Communities *

Edited by Deborah Menkart, Alana Murray, and Jenice View

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