First Civil Right

Most people have heard about Rosa Parks’s brave actions that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. But there were other Black women who challenged segregation in transportation. Three years earlier, Sarah Keys Evans—a veteran—refused to give up her seat on a bus traveling through the South.

An important book of epic scope on America’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for change The civil war brought to a climax the country’s bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery’s denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and...

The first Black mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, shares his story of making his way in a world that wasn’t built for him, drawing on his rich heritage as the son of a civil rights leader. As a proud son of a civil rights leader, Steven L. Reed grew up hearing stories about how his father...

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

On February 22, 1855, the Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Rail Road case was settled: The jury stunned the courtroom with a $250 verdict in Lizzie’s favor. Future president Chester A. Arthur was Jennings’ attorney, and their lives would be forever intertwined. This is the story of what happened that day. It’s also the story of Jennings and Arthur’s families, the struggle for equality, and race relations. It’s the history of America at its most despicable and exhilarating. Yet few historians know of Elizabeth Jennings or her impact on desegregating public transit.

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn.