Author | David J. Garrow |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Biography |
Publisher | William Morrow & Company |
Publication date | 1986 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Robert F. Kennedy Book Award |
ISBN | 9780688047948 |
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is a 1986 book by David J. Garrow about Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Freedom Rides, The March on Washington and the American Civil Rights Movement. The content of this book is derived from more than 700 recorded conversations – with such close associates of King as Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, and Ralph D. Abernathy, as well as with political opponents – and thousands of previously unreleased FBI documents. [1]
The book won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. [2]
Bearing the Cross was first published in hardback by William Morrow and Company, with a HarperCollins paperback in 2004. [3]
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the Montgomery bus boycott and co-created and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968; he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
The March Against Fear was a major 1966 demonstration in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Activist James Meredith launched the event on June 5, 1966, intending to make a solitary walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi via the Mississippi Delta, starting at Memphis's Peabody Hotel and proceeding to the Mississippi state line, then continuing through, respectively, the Mississippi cities of Hernando, Grenada, Greenwood, Indianola, Belzoni, Yazoo City, and Canton before arriving at Jackson's City Hall. The total distance marched was approximately 270 miles over a period of 21 days. The goal was to counter the continuing racism in the Mississippi Delta after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the previous two years and to encourage African Americans in the state to register to vote. He invited only individual black men to join him and did not want it to be a large media event dominated by major civil rights organizations.
Theodore D. "Ted" Pappas is executive editor and chief development officer of Encyclopædia Britannica. He has been with the company since 1998.
Wyatt Tee Walker was an African-American pastor, national civil rights leader, theologian, and cultural historian. He was a chief of staff for Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1958 became an early board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He helped found a Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in 1958. As executive director of the SCLC from 1960 to 1964, Walker helped to bring the group to national prominence. Walker sat at the feet of his mentor, BG Crawley, who was a Baptist Minister in Brooklyn, NY and New York State Judge.
Cecil Bassett Moore was an American lawyer, politician and civil rights activist who served as president of the Philadelphia NAACP chapter and as a member of Philadelphia's city council. He led protests to desegregate Girard College.
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WERD was the first radio station owned and programmed by African Americans. The station was established in Atlanta, Georgia on October 3, 1949, broadcasting on 860 AM. The National Black Radio Hall of Fame Atlanta Chapter is reopening WERD which still exists at its birth location and will also include a historical museum with it after renovations of the facility are completed.
The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was an organization formed on December 5, 1955 by black ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, Alabama. Under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Edgar Nixon, the MIA was instrumental in guiding the Montgomery bus boycott by setting up the car pool system that would sustain the boycott, negotiating settlements with Montgomery city officials, and teaching nonviolence classes to prepare the African American community to integrate the buses. Thus, though the organization and the boycott itself almost disbanded due to internal divisions and both legal and violent backlash from the white public, it caused the boycott, a campaign that focused national attention on racial segregation in the South, to be successful and catapulted King into the national spotlight.
James Luther Bevel was an American minister, leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and convicted child molester. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then as its director of direct action and nonviolent education, Bevel initiated, strategized, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, and the 1966 Chicago open housing movement. He suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963 and strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches which contributed to Congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1987.
David Jeffries Garrow is an American author and historian. He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality (1994), a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017), and other works.
Why We Can't Wait is a 1964 book by Martin Luther King Jr. about the nonviolent movement against racial segregation in the United States, and specifically the 1963 Birmingham campaign. The book describes 1963 as a landmark year in the civil rights movement, and as the beginning of America's "Negro Revolution".
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The St. Augustine movement was a part of the wider Civil Rights Movement, taking place in St. Augustine, Florida from 1963 to 1964. It was a major event in the city's long history and had a role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Adam Fairclough is a British historian of the United States. He is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Between 2008 and 2014, he served as the chair of the Netherlands American Studies Association. He has written on a number of subjects, and specializes in the Civil Rights Movement and the period of Reconstruction. His best known work is To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Fairclough is a qualified expert in the field of American History, but specializes in the Civil Rights Movement.
Council for United Civil Rights Leadership (CUCRL) was an umbrella group formed in June 1963 to organize and regulate the Civil Rights Movement. The Council brought leaders of Black civil rights organizations together with white donors in business and philanthropy. It successfully arranged the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with the Kennedy administration.
The FBI–King suicide letter or blackmail package was an anonymous 1964 letter and package by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which was allegedly meant to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide.