Deschutes Public Library

James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962 as the first African American student at Ole Miss. The violent riot that followed would be one of the most deadly clashes of the civil rights era, seriously wounding scores of U.S. Marshals and killing two civilians, and forcing the federal government to send thousands of soldiers to restore the peace. In The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States' Rights, Frank Lambert--who was a student at Ole Miss at the time and witnessed many of these events--provides an engaging narrative of the tumultuous period surrounding Meredith's arrival at the University of Mississippi.

Delivers a solidly researched examination of the NAACP's growth and influence, from its inception in 1909 to the present.

Gilmore (history, Yale) is a native of South Carolina who specializes in Southern history. In this book she traces the roots of the Civil Rights movement in the South. She begins just after World War I as the communist movement encouraged black Southerners and their allies to fight for legal and social equality. She chronicles both the joy and disappointment felt by many of those who traveled to Russia to experience this equality.

Photojournalist Lyon recalls in words and photographs his experiences as the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the early 1960s demonstrations. His visual work powerfully conveys the spirit of the civil rights movement, and his anecdotes and chronology document the events.

Sons of Mississippi recounts the story of seven white Mississippi lawmen depicted in a horrifically telling 1962 Life magazine photograph—and of the racial intolerance that is their legacy. In that photograph, which appears on the front of this jacket, the lawmen (six sheriffs and a deputy sheriff) admire a billy club with obvious pleasure, preparing for the unrest they anticipate—and to which they clearly intend to contribute—in the wake of James Meredith’s planned attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi.

Attorney MacLean narrates the course of the 2007 trial of James Ford Seale for the 1964 murder of two young Black men, Charles Moore and Henry Dee. This is the core theme of a book that is really about MacLean's discovery of Mississippi.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record.

"Hard-working humorist Roy Blount Jr. lives in the North but he's from the South, a delicious tension that has always informed and shaped his work. In this new collection, he directs his acerbic wit and finely-tuned insight toward the persistent and colorful differences between the two. His essays treat every conceivable topic on which North and South misunderstand each other, from music to sports, eating, education, politics, child-rearing, religion, race, and language ("remember when there was lots of discussion of 'ebonics'?"). In this eminently quotable collection, Blount does justice to the charming, funny, infuriating facets of Southern tradition and their equally odd Northern counterpoints" -- from publisher's web-site.

In classic Dixie storytelling fashion, with a rare blend of literary elegance and plainspoken humor, the inimitably charming, staunchly Southern Julia Reed wends her way below the Mason-Dixon line and observes many phenomena– from politics, religion, and women to weather, guns, and what she calls “drinking and other Southern pursuits.”

Chicago-born Amrstrong Tood is fifteen, black, and unused to the ways of the segregated Deep South, when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in rural Mississippi. For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong is killed. And the precariously balanced world and its determined people--white and black--are changed, then and forever, by the horror of poverty, the legacy of justice, and the singular gift of love's power to heal.

In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm: Twenty-six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case. Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison: Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now facing the death penalty for a fatal bombing in 1967. He has run out of chances -- except for one: the young, liberal Chicago lawyer who just happens to be his grandson.

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s.

From the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Ahab's Wife comes an inspiring, brilliantly rendered new novel of the awakening conscience of the South and of an entire nation.

Remembering Minette Swift, the talented, assertive, 19-year-old African-American girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive, mostly white liberal arts college near Philadelphia who died under mysterious circumstances fifteen years earlier, Genna, her former roommate, begins an unofficial inquiry into her death. As she reconstructs their tumultuous freshman year at the college in race-torn 1960s Philadelphia, Genna is led also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous "radical-hippie-lawyer" of the 1960s.