Martin Luther King Jr. Day & Civil Rights

The first in a graphic novel trilogy based on the life of civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. (Description from catalog.)

We Are Power brings to light the incredible individuals who have used nonviolent activism to change the world. The book explores questions such as what is nonviolent resistance and how does it work? In an age when armies are stronger than ever before, when guns seem to be everywhere, how can people confront their adversaries without resorting to violence themselves? (Description from catalog)

Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Virginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s. (Description from catalog.)

Writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., seventeen-year-old college-bound Justyce McAllister struggles to face the reality of race relations today and how they are shaping him. (description from LBPL catalog)

Award-winning broadcast journalist Karen Gray Houston tells the story of the key roles played by her father, Thomas Gray, and her uncle, Fred D. Gray, in the historic Montgomery bus boycott, the action that kick-started the civil rights movement. (Description from catalog.)

The Sword and the Shield is a dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that transforms our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders. Peniel E. Joseph reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. (Description from catalog.)

Collects twenty-three selections of Dr. King's speeches that illustrate his revolutionary vision, highlighting his identification with the poor, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism. (Description from NoveList)

Over the course of many years, Coretta Scott King's close friend, the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, recorded interviews with King about her experiences. In My Life, My Love, My Legacy, Reynolds assembles these accounts into an authorized biography. (Description from NoveList)

Jonathan Rieder delves deeper than anyone before into the King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" --illuminating both its timeless message and its crucial position in the history of civil rights. (Description from catalog)

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. At the time of his murder, King was a polarizing figure--scorned by many white Americans, worshipped by some African Americans and liberal whites, and deemed irrelevant by many black youth. In The Heavens Might Crack, historian Jason Sokol traces the diverse responses, both in America and throughout the world, to King's death. (Description from NoveList)

Draws from previously unknown FBI sources and new forensics to argue that King was assassinated by a long-simmering conspiracy orchestrated by the racial terrorists who were responsible for the Mississippi Burning murders. (Description from catalog)

The true story behind the award-winning film of the same name explores the role of travel in civil rights, the specific impact of the automobile on African-American life and the cultural importance of Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book. (Description from NoveList.)

Sharing stories, life lessons, and reflections on moments that challenged his commitment to his virtues, a civil rights icon presents his philosophy on living courageously and with purpose to create a new America. (Description from NoveList.)

John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." (Description from NoveList.)

An account of the contentious relationship between the thirty-fifth president and Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the tumultuous early years of the civil rights movement explores their influence on one another and the important decisions that were inspired by their rivalry. (Description from catalog)

Follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. (Description from NoveList.)