The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (American Century Series)

The Struggle for Black Equality is an arresting history of the civil-rights movement--from the pathbreaking Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, through the growth of strife and conflict in the 1960s to the major issues of the 1990s. Harvard Sitkoff offers not only a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of the civil rights organization--SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC, and others--but a superb study of the continuing problems plaguing the African-American population: the future that in 1980 seemed to hold much promise for a better way of life has by the early1990s hardly lived up to expectations. Jim Crow has gone, but, forty years after Brown, poverty, big-city slums, white backlash, politically and socially conservative policies, and prolonged recession have made economic progress for the vast majority of blacks an elusive, perhaps ever more distant goal.

All Americans who strove and suffered to make democracy real come vividly to life in these compelling pages.