Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963, Vol. 1 »

The advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights includes Clayborne Carson, senior editor, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.; David J. Garrow, Presidential Distinguished Professor, Emory University; William Kovach, chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Carol Polsgrove, professor of journalism, Indiana University.

From A. Philip Randolph's defiant call in 1941 for African Americans to march on Washington to Alice Walker in 1973, Reporting Civil Rights presents firsthand accounts of the revolutionary events that overthrew segregation in the United States. This two-volume anthology brings together for the first time nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports and book excerpts, and features 151 writers, including James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, David Halberstam, Lillian Smith, Gordon Parks, Murray Kempton, Ted Poston, Claude Sitton, and Anne Moody. A newly researched chronology of the movement, a 32-page insert of rare journalist photographs, and original biographical profiles are included in each volume

Roi Ottley and Sterling Brown record African American anger during World War II; Carl Rowan examines school segregation; Dan Wakefield and William Bradford Huie describe Emmett Till's savage murder; and Ted Poston provides a fascinating early portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1960s, John Steinbeck witnesses the intense hatred of anti-integration protesters in New Orleans; Charlayne Hunter recounts the hostility she faced at the University of Georgia; Raymond Coffey records the determination of jailed children in Birmingham; Russell Baker and Michael Thelwell cover the March on Washington; John Hersey and Alice Lake witness fear and bravery in Mississippi, while James Baldwin and Norman Podhoretz explore northern race relations.

Singly or together, Reporting Civil Rights captures firsthand the impassioned struggle for freedom and equality that transformed America.

The New York Times

This is a massive, two-volume collection of nearly 200 essays, manifestoes, news stories, speeches and, above all, eyewitness accounts by 151 writers, arranged chronologically, from 1941 to 1973. Given their grab-bag texture, the books make unexpectedly gripping reading. On the one hand, you already know what's going to happen, at least with the major events — Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts, the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. At the same time, the datelined immediacy of these dispatches makes clear, in a way that even the best historical writing cannot, the shocks and disjunctions, the uncertainty that surrounded each moment of since-consecrated struggle and even some of the other ways that things might have turned out. — William Finnegan