Elementary / Middle | High School | Adult

Here are titles for the classroom and teacher background reading on the Selma freedom struggle. Learn more about the history of Selma in "The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Key Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today" by Emilye Crosby. Additional teaching resources are available at CivilRightsTeaching.org and the ZinnEducationProject.org.

Child of the Civil Rights Movement*

By Paula Young Shelton, Raul Colon (Illustrator)

Freedom's Children

By Ellen S. Levine

Marching for Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don't You Grow Weary

By Elizabeth Partridge

Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days

By Sheyann Webb-Christburg, Rachel West Nelson Milhouse, Frank Sikora

Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March

By Lynda Blackmon Lowery
Teaching Story from a D.C. Educator: Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom

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

By Russell Freedman

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

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

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

By Charles E. Cobb Jr

SNCC: The New Abolitionists

By Howard Zinn

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

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

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

By Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer

An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America

By Andrew Young Foreword by Quincy Jones

Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt

By Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968

By Steven F. Lawson and Charles M. Payne

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

By Barbara Ransby

The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement

By Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson

In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma

By Bernard Lafayette, Kathryn Lee Johnson

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

By Charles M. Payne

The Making of Black Revolutionaries

By James Forman

Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America

By Wesley C. Hogan

Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

By David J. Garrow

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

Edited by Deborah Menkart, Alana Murray, and Jenice View

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael

By Stokely Carmichael, with Michael Ekwueme Thelwell, and Introduction by John Edgar Wideman

The Selma Voting Rights Struggle & the March to Montgomery

By Bruce Hartford

The Shadow of Selma

Edited by Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano

Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma

By Karlyn Forner

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

By Howard Zinn

---

If you value this book list, please help us promote it and create more book lists.

Donate Today