1. Includes bibliographical references and index.
   
2. Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The preconditions for racial change -- The New Deal and race relations -- The Detroit race riot of 1943 -- Racial militancy and interracial violence in the Second World War -- African American militancy in the World War II South : another perspective -- Willkie as liberal : civil liberties and civil rights -- African Americans, American Jews, and the Holocaust -- Harry Truman and the election of 1948 : the coming of age of civil rights in American politics -- Martin Luther King Jr. : seeing Lazarus, 1967-1968 -- The second reconstruction.
   

In this exciting revisionist history, Stephen Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to President Obamarsquo;s inauguration. As it moves from popular culture to high politics, from the Deep South to New England, the West Coast, and abroad, Tuck weaves gripping stories of ordinary black people-as well as celebrated figures-into the sweep of racial protest and social change. The drama unfolds from an armed march of longshoremen in postndash;Civil War Baltimore to Booker T. Washingtonrsquo;s founding of Tuskegee Institute; from the race riots following Jack Johnsonrsquo;s ldquo;fight of the centuryrdquo; to Rosa Parksrsquo; refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus; and from the rise of hip hop to the journey of a black Louisiana grandmother to plead with the Tokyo directors of a multinational company to stop the dumping of toxic waste near her home.We Ainrsquo;t What We Ought To Be rejects the traditional narrative that identifies the Southern non-violent civil rights movement as the focal point of the black freedom struggle. Instead, it explores the dynamic relationships between those seeking new freedoms and those looking to preserve racial hierarchies, and between grassroots activists and national leaders. As Tuck shows, strategies were ultimately contingent on the power of activists to protest amidst shifting economic and political circumstances in the U.S. and abroad. This book captures an extraordinary journey that speaks to all Americans-both past and future.

Complaining that academic booklists overemphasize the role of left-wing liberals and radicals in the history of civil rights struggles in the United States, Bean (history, Southern Illinois U.) presents a documentary anthology intended to demonstrate the contribution of classical liberalism to the American struggle for racial freedom through the themes of individual freedom, Christianity and Judaism, the Constitution, colorblindness, and capitalism. Covering 1776 to the present, the anthology contains some 90 documents, penned by such figures as Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Lysander Spooner, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Calvin Coolidge, H. L. Mencken, Hamilton Fish, Zora Neale Hurston, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, Stanley Crouch, Shelby Steele, Linda Chavez, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. Bean is a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute. Co-published with the University Press of Kentucky. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Memphis native D'Army Bailey was the freshman class president at Southern University when four black college students refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's on February 1, 1960. Their action set off a wave of similar protests among black college students across the South, including D'Army Bailey and his classmates at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Education of a Black Radical details Bailey's experiences on the front lines of the black student movement of the early 1960s, providing a rare firsthand account of the early days of America's civil rights struggle and a shining example of one man's struggle to uphold the courageous principles of liberty, justice, and equality. ¶ After being expelled from Southern for leading a class boycott to protest the administration's efforts to quell the lingering unrest on campus, Bailey continued his academic journey north to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He sustained and expanded his activism in the North and he provides invaluable eyewitness accounts of many major events from the civil rights era, including the 1963 March on Washington. Labeled "subversive" and a "black nationalist militant" by the FBI, Bailey crossed paths with many visionary activists, including Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, Reverend Will D. Campbell, Anne Braden, James Meredith, Tom Hayden and future Congressmen Barney Frank, John Lewis, and Allard Lowenstein.