The Centralia tragedy of 1919

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Jack Greenberg

This book is both a powerful personal memoir and the definitive history of an organization that helped change American society. Jack Greenberg was a key figure at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) for some thirty-five years. Most of the cases we associate from that period - school integration, equal employment, fair housing, voter registration - were LDF cases, either argued by Greenberg himself or litigated under his direction. Greenberg represented Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham and won for him the right to march from Selma to Montgomery. Under Greenberg's leadership, the LDF forced the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith and integrated the University of Alabama when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Greenberg won the cases in which the Supreme Court repudiated the "all deliberate speed" doctrine, which had made school desegregation intolerably slow. Through the 1970s and 1980s, LDF tackled most of the important cases that enforced the new civil rights legislation of the 1960s involving public accommodations, employment, education, and health care, and started the campaigns for prisoners' rights and against capital punishment. More than a history of the litigation that made the LDF so important, the book offers unique insights into its strategies, courtroom techniques, values, and personal relationships. Filled with stories only Greenberg could tell of his experiences with Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Lani Guinier, Roy Wilkins, Vernon Jordan, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lyndon Johnson, and scores of others, Crusaders in the Courts is an epic saga of a critical period in American history as well as the poignant personal story of the evolution of a white Jewish lawyer into a major civil rights advocate.

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Tony Russell

"In this sparkling collection, "roots" music authority Tony Russell offers vivid portraits of the men and women who created country music, the artists whose lives and songs formed the rich tradition from which Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Dixie Chicks, and so many others have drawn their inspiration. Included here are not only such major figures as Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, and Gene Autry, who put country music on America's cultural map in the 1920s and '30s, but many fascinating lesser-known figures as well, such as Carson Robison, Otto Gray, Chris Bouchillon, Emry Arthur and dozens more, many of whose stories are told here for the first time. To map some of the winding, untraveled roads that connect today's music to its ancestors, Russell draws upon new research and rare source material, such as contemporary newspaper reports and magazine articles, internet genealogy sites, and his own interviews with the musicians or their families" -- publisher website (February 2008).

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Israel Getzler

"Sukhanov stood at the centre of the Russian revolution as an active participant, keen observer and lively chronicler. He recorded the revolution's most stirring events in a vivid and remarkably honest seven-volume memoir where he took the measure of such leading figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Tsereteli, Miliukov and many others. He played a major role in the early days of the Petrograd Soviet as founding member and ideologist; and, as editor and political columnist of the leading opposition newspaper, he was a pivotal figure in the political-intellectual ferment of the revolution. During the crucial agrarian debates of the 1920s, Sukhanov fearlessly championed the Russian village commune, the obshchina, against those Communist economists who prepared the party for Stalin's brutal collectivization policy. A defendant at the farcical Menshevik show-trial of March 1931, and subsequently the victim of a trumped-up charge of spying for Germany, Sukhanov was shot in June 1940 and only rehabilitated in 1992. His fate epitomizes the tragedy of those members of Russia's radical intelligentsia who sought a place for themselves in the Soviet system and were destroyed by it."--BOOK JACKET.

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Patricia Sullivan

"Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, D.C., she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. In her struggle to understand the South and battle isolation, she wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp, and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black, and C. Vann Woodward." "Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a window onto a society in turmoil, chronicling the events that transformed the South and the nation. Her writing adds a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history."--Jacket.