This mesmerizing companion book to the award-winning film The Butler traces the Civil Rights Movement and explores crucial moments of twentieth century American history through the eyes of Eugene Allen-a White House butler who served eight presidents over the course of thirty-four years. During the presidencies of Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, Eugene Allen was a butler in the most famous of residences: the White House. An African American who came...

In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this important new work, distinguished race...

"The CNN analyst and youngest state representative in South Carolina's history illuminates the lives of America's forgotten rural, Black working-class men and women"--

In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle...

""The time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise." John F. Kennedy was born one hundred years ago. As America's thirty-fifth president, he often took bold actions: establishing a peace corps and challenging Americans to land on the moon. But on civil rights, it took the urging and the example of other courageous people--leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, and even students and children--to help him realize that the...

"In April 1967, Robert F. Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi trying to coax a response from a listless child. The toddler sat picking at dried rice and beans spilled over the dirt floor as Kennedy touched the boy's distended stomach and stroked his face. After several minutes with little response, the senator walked out the back door, wiping away tears. In Delta Epiphany, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit, while also...

A Pulitzer Prize winner's up-close account of how a white president and a black minister ultimately came together to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Opposites in almost every way, mortally suspicious of each other at first, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., were thrust together in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Both men sensed a historic opportunity and began a delicate dance of accommodation that moved them,...

"This is the story of two men, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, an immigrant from Nazi Germany, with a shared belief that remaining silent in the face of injustice was wrong"--