Today, Penn State Dickinson Law hosted Derrick Johnson President and CEO of the NAACP as the keynote speaker in recognition of Black History Month. In his remarks titled “Make Black History Month All Year Long,” President Johnson spoke about advocacy as the purpose of the organization, the early and current activities of the organization, as well as how organizations can foster the changes needed to break down racial barriers to benefit society as a whole. Below are books that highlight several attorneys, judges, and cases handled by the NAACP as well as books recommended by President Johnson. Members of the Penn State community can request the books via the library catalog using the embedded links.

Crusaders in the Courts by Jack Greenberg

“Jack Greenberg, a key figure at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for 35 years, offers a personal memoir and behind the scenes view of the legal battles of the civil rights movement culminating in the landmark trial and decision, Brown v. Board of Education; the defense of Martin Luther King Jr., the origin of major employment discrimination cases.”

 The March for Civil Rights: The Benjamin Hooks Story by Benjamin L. Hooks with Jerry Guess

“As leader of the NAACP for 15 years, Benjamin Hooks oversaw the organization’s position on affirmative action and federal aid to the poorer neighborhoods of American cities. He participated in dialogues with the governments of South Africa and in hundreds of domestic issues affecting minorities in the United States.”

 Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power by Glenn Mitoma

“The American attitude toward human rights is deemed inconsistent, even hypocritical: while the United States is characterized (or self-characterized) as a global leader in promoting human rights, the nation has consistently restrained broader interpretations of human rights and held international enforcement mechanisms at arm’s length. Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power examines the causes, consequences, and tensions of America’s growth as the leading world power after World War II alongside the flowering of the human rights movement. Through careful archival research, Glenn Mitoma reveals how the U.S. government, key civil society groups, Cold War politics, and specific individuals contributed to America’s emergence as an ambivalent yet central player in establishing an international rights ethic. Mitoma focuses on the work of three American civil society organizations: the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Bar Association—and their influence on U.S. human rights policy from the late 1930s through the 1950s.”

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State by Megan Ming Francis

“There has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP’s battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, and secured the support of Congress. In the NAACP’s most far-reaching victory, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional rights of black defendants were violated by a white mob in the landmark criminal procedure decision Moore v. Dempsey. This book demonstrates the importance of citizen agency in the making of new constitutional law in a period unexplored by previous scholarship.”

Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin by Jacqueline A. McLeod

“This long overdue biography elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement. When Bolin was appointed to New York City’s domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms, she became the nation’s first African American woman judge. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York. Beginning with Bolin’s childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin’s relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. McLeod links Bolin’s activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP and details her work as a critic and reformer of domestic relations courts and juvenile placement facilities.”

Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

“In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as ‘the Groveland Boys.’

And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” and the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight–not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

“’As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not.’

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people – including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others – she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Beautifully original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.”

Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench – by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark

“A biography of the first African-American Supreme Court justice describes Marshall’s early life in a segregated Baltimore, his work as a civil rights attorney, his record on the bench, and his retirement in 1991.”

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War – by Nicholas Lemann

“A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away.

Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years, white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aimed at overturning the 14th and 15th Amendments and challenging President Grant’s support for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed “White Line” organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting, out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.

Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi’s governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was “redeemed”, that is, returned to white control.

Redemption makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction and of the rights encoded in the 14th and 15th Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.”

The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 – by Charles C. Bolton

“Race has shaped public education in the Magnolia State from Reconstruction through the Carter Administration. Charles C. Bolton mines newspaper accounts, interviews, journals, archival records, legal and financial documents, and other sources to uncover the complex story of one of Mississippi’s most significant and vexing issues. He also uses the state’s desegregation history to illuminate similar struggles throughout the South.

This history closely examines specific events in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the state, the 1966 protests and counter-demonstrations in Grenada, and the efforts of particular organizations and carefully considers the broader picture. The state’s white and black public schools are given equal attention, as are the range of attitudes about integration amongst white and black Mississippians. The book also details the effects of desegregation on black communities and white private school attendance.”

 Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi – by John Dittmer

“For decades the most racially repressive state in the nation fought bitterly and violently to maintain white supremacy. John Dittmer traces the monumental battle waged by civil rights organizations and by local people, particularly courageous members of the black communities who were willing to put their lives on the line to establish basic human rights for all citizens of the state.”

The Conscience of a Liberal – by Paul Krugman

In this “clear, provocative” (Boston Globe) New York Times bestseller, Paul Krugman, today’s most widely read economist, examines the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age and the 1920s to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a “new New Deal,” Krugman has created his finest book to date, a “stimulating manifesto” offering “a compelling historical defense of liberalism and a clarion call for Americans to retake control of their economic destiny” (Publishers Weekly).