Background
I love electives. They kept me in teaching. For many years in a community college, I taught books like Parallel Time, Walking with the Wind-A Memoir of the Movement, A Hope in the Unseen-An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, Dead Man Walking, etc. as part of ENG 101 classes. In some ways, the community college was a horrible place to teach. Most of us were adjuncts, part-timers year after year, and they forgot to pay us much. The union for the fulltime faculty in the City University of New York was too small to matter much in a city of mega-unions each with tens of thousands of members in New York City, and the fulltimers pretended that the adjuncts did not exist at contract time. But the English Department did treat adjuncts like professionals. We were allowed to select the reading materials for our classes.
If the department had forced me to use the boring anthologies in wide use in the English Department, I would have left teaching. How can instructors expect students to read about 15 or more topics in an anthology? The opportunity to connect to a topic is so limited. But enough about me.
By now we know that electives are much more likely to allow a teacher to choose reading materials that he or she cares about. With enthusiasm and energy from a teacher about the reading assignment, a class is much more likely to be engaged in the readings. But where is the evidence?
Students Chose to Be in the Elective
If you need to convince an administrator that electives engage students far more than core courses demanded by states, Jal Mehta and Sarah Price have much to say about electives in their excellent book In Search of Deeper Learning. They observed required classes and electives in a variety of high schools across the country and found that when students chose a course that they were much more involved in the content:
“In different ways, these electives were able to open up alternative possibilities for schooling, and so unleash an energy and level of student interest that was often absent from core classes. They were able to do so in part because they were buffered from many of the demands and expectations that controlled the rest of the school’s curricula. Because many of the students in electives were seniors, the college pressure was lessened, and there were more opportunities to engage in a learning rather than a performance orientation.” (p.237)
“One of the schools’ prized gems was an elective called “Philosophy as Literature.”… Much of what Mr. Fields did in his Philosophy of Literature class he could and did do in his regular disciplinary classes. Yet the fact that this was an elective made the learning environment more powerful here than in his English I classes, which we also witnessed. That students had chosen to be here was key— there was a kind of rapt, shared attention in this class that we did not see to the same degree in his regular classes…” (p. 237)
Can Electives Replace Core Survey Courses?
The electives that they describe were additions to the standard prescribed content in the high schools they visited. In Maryland where I live, the state requires 3 credits of history: US History, a National, State, and Local Government requirement–which is a civics course, and World History. And there are the AP electives. The textbook in Local, State, and National Government is horrible. A more boring book could not be written. (See McGruder’s American Government.)
People are missing in the book. There are no portraits of legislators, or judges or activists, just page after page about the structure of government. Not a word about the people who build governments but local of details about regulatory agencies. It also did not bother to write even a paragraph about Thurgood Marshall who more than did his bit to improve our world . In fact, his name does not appear even once in the book. This is so because experts in the Maryland State Education Department decided that NSL is to be about the structure of government, the branches etc. rather that people who supported or challenged the status quo.
Students have told me that this course is boring. This boring course is taught year after year to every 10th grader in Maryland. Every five years or so, Montgomery County in Maryland fires its superintendent for his or her failure to close the achievement gap in the county. But of course, the curriculum never changes. If textbooks are boring or written at a reading level beyond that of some students, it’s OK. The curriculum never even gets examined. Local principals, and school board members at the Montgomery County Board of Education lack the courage to challenge and replace the state’s horrible choices in reading materials.
It’s Time for Replacements
What would happen locally if a high school started offering the Civil Rights movement either within the NSL course or replacing the NSL course. Would bureaucrats from the state capitol in Annapolis arrive at high schools and arrest local principals for skipping the state’s requirements?
Actual Ebooks for Electives
The titles I suggest below are not a replacement for the titles teachers themselves would choose, but in each topic, I think these ebooks provide much better narratives than what is available in textbooks. Of course, it is hard to find a lower bar for narratives than the language which appears in textbooks.
The Civil Rights Movement in a Civics Course.
Mary McLeod Bethune by Emma Gelders Sterne. While Bethune is usually thought of as an educator rather than a civil rights activist, education is a fundamental civil right, of course. And readers of this book will see Bethune’s courage as she fights with the K.K.K. The book also offers many opportunities for students to compare obstacles in education then and now in writing.
Freedom Ride, Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance by James Peck. This book actually speaks to the conflict between federal laws and local customs that could be part of a civics course. The Supreme Court outlawed segregation in interstate travel in Boynton v. Virginia in 1960, but when activists tested this federal regulation in a bus trip through the South 1961, violence occurred. They were almost beaten to death in an Alabama bus station. The writer received 53 stitches in a hospital after the attack by a mob. What was the response of the federal government to these attacks?
Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark. In this book, readers will see how Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues in the N.A.A.C.P. spent years nudging the Supreme Court toward the Brown decision by bringing a series of earlier court cases. Readers will also learn much about Marshall’s youth in Jim Crow Baltimore. This is only one of the three books in this elective that I have taught, and my students–most of whom were immigrants–said the book helped them learn about race in America. The second biography of Marshall describes the Brown case, and the aftermath to Brown, and Marshall’s work on the Supreme Court. See Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court.
Study World War II in US History
Serenade to the Big Bird with Maps and a Study Guide by Bert Stiles. “A book of terrific impact. Perhaps the best to come out of World War II.” Philadelphia Inquirer. And this book is easy reading at a 6.2 grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale.
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific by Robert Leckie. This book is a page turner. A young Marine fights with bravery on island after island in the Pacific War. It is one of our most popular free downloads, and it sells very well on Amazon. It is one of the two books used to tell the story in the HBO series “War in the Pacific.” One caution. There is a brief reference to a sexual connection with an Australian woman while he is on leave in Australia which may or may not offend your students and their parents. Easy reading at 7.2 grade level.
An Army of Amateurs and Escape from Corregidor are also exciting books at the 7th grade reading level.
Study Revolutions in Europe in World History
Two witnesses to the Russian revolution brought back quite different opinions about the value of the revolution to the Russians and the world. Both accounts are highly readable. See Runaway Russia on this site with a grade level of 6.4, and Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed on Project Gutenberg. Reed’s book has a reading level of 8.1.
In The Mad Dog of Europe, readers will see the strategies Hitler used to take power in Germany. The back story to this novel is fascinating but in a sad way. Why did Hollywood suppress this story in its original version as a film script in the early 30s? The introduction explains. Easy reading at 6.3.
More about John Brown
in UncategorizedMore from the Washington Post:
His Truth Goes Marching On
By Jonathan Yardley
January 28, 1973
“HERE IS A book of surprising breadth, insight, compassion and historical vision—the first of what is to be a two-volume study of John Brown and his times. It recreates the whole fabric of our period of greatest national crisis, and it persuasively argues that the much maligned and misunderstood John Brown was the “central figure” of his age—the man who is “transformed and shaped by the experiences of his generation and in turn transforms it.”
“That is a considerable assertion, and Richard O. Boyer has written a considerable book to investigate it. The Legend of John Brown is not merely the story of the first 55 years of its subject’s life—though merely as that it is excellent—but a panoramic view of the nation as it plunged toward civil war, and a series of incisive sketches of men and women on both sides of the conflict who at one time or another touched the life of John Brown.
Up to now, Boyer contends, Brown’s biographers have found it “enough to tell of Kansas and Harper’s Ferry.” Boyer’s purpose is to locate the “genesis” of those traumatic events, the tangled process by which Brown resolved the conflict between his business ambitions and his opposition to slavery, and be- came the fiery-eyed zealot who lives now in American legend.
“John Brown—the very name was made for legend—has usually been portrayed in stark, absolute terms: he is seen either as a devil, a psychotic whose mad vision led himself, his sons and other men to death in the bizarre folly of Harper’s Ferry; or as a saint, an angel of God whose divinely ordained mission touched the conscience of the nation. Boyer sees him differently: as a human being. In Boyer’s masterly portrait, Brown emerges as a troubled, indecisive man who was at last touched by the greatest moral issue in our history.
“As we see him through Boyer’s eyes, he is in many respects an archetypal American, a man of the land:
“This land, to the discerning, accounts for much of John Brown, his urge for wealth, his hymn-singing, and his praying, his homely understated attitude with its echoes of defiance and boasting, his restlessness, the covered wagon that he knew, the posture which combined distinction with rusticity and both with an everlasting search for something perhaps finally found. But so complete was his identification with the large and violent land, so thoroughly was he its product, that the Ohio farmer who was John Brown found no difficulty in communicating with Parker or Higginson, Emerson, Thoreau, or the black man fighting slavery, all of whom were as American and perhaps as permanent, while there is an American consciousness, as the land itself.”
“….We encounter other men—Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frederick Douglass, among the abolitionists; William Walker, Henry Wise, Edmund Ruffin, among the Southerners—who were likewise seized and transformed by the historical moment, and the story of their metamorphosis makes Brown’s more understandable. We encounter, too, the great events that built inexorably toward the shuddering climax of national cataclysm: the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Underground Railroad, the harsh debates on the floors of Congress, the murderous violence that accompanied the settlement of Kansas. In Boyer’s words, written with a brilliant blend of passion and objectivity, a vanished America comes alive again, the passions of the day boil anew, and we are made to understand how it was that a failed tanner, sheep raiser and wool dealer named John Brown became a man possessed.
“Legend, Boyer reminds us as the book begins, is “often defined as the popular if unverifiable story of a hero coming down from the past.” In this book, however, we are given legend as it was envisioned by John Jay Chapman, the estimable 19th-century journalist who wrote with much feeling and perception about John Brown’s life. Brown’s life, Chapman said, is an example of “an immortal legend—perhaps the only one in our history.”
“Richard O. Boyer has taken Chapman’s words and built an extraordinary book around them, one that affirms and enlarges them…”
Using Free Ebooks Efficiently-Part 1
in BlogCan all of your students read the history textbook which you are about to hand out?
When I taught in the Cleveland Public Schools fifty years or so ago, this was a major problem. The only advice I received about students and reading was “Don’t call on anyone to read out loud. You don’t want to embarrass anyone.” I totally agree with this strategy, but the question of how to encourage readers who can’t handle the textbook remains a challenge today. Read more
Founding Fathers by Kenneth Umbreit
in Biographies, Biography, For Young Adults, Founders, Free EbooksThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size. Download mobi file here.
Clever Character Sketches
I found this book delightful. Kenneth Umbreit is a storyteller. Here is the lead sentence from the chapter on George Washington. “The deeper one delves into the record the more evident it becomes that if it had not been for George Washington there would never have been a United States.” This pulled me into the chapter; I needed to know how Washington helped launch the United States.
He respects the Founders but is not worshipful. He writes of their beliefs and courage and tenacity in accounts that are both readable and instructive. A reviewer wrote that Umbreit wrote “clever character sketches.” And even though the book was written over a generation ago, Umbreit’s point of view is modern. He notes defects. He did not ignore Jefferson’s backward views on slavery and wrote that he stayed “safe” on slavery in order not to offend fellow plantation owners.
The first chapter on Thomas Jefferson is a little complicated. Umbreit explains the influences of common law and natural law and the beliefs of the Anglo-Saxons in England on Jefferson’s thinking. Easier starting points are the chapters on Sam Adams, Patrick Henry and John Hancock. The reading level of Sam Adams is 9.7, Patrick Henry 10.1. and John Hancock, 9.2. The first chapter on Thomas Jefferson is 10.9.
Reviews at the time the original publication were positive. “Umbreit’s book is the work of a historical scholar with a flair for popularizing biography and drawing clever character sketches,” wrote Roy F. Nichols in The New England Quarterly. “Skillful strokes make intriguing portraits of Jefferson, John Adams, Hancock, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and George Washington. …One gets the impression that somehow Jefferson is the villain of the piece. Hancock is displayed as an astute self-serving politician whose vanity made it possible for clever men to use him. John Adams appears as usual. Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry are master politicians with the latter treated more gently than usual of late because the author thinks him the victim of Jefferson’s talent for “the assassination of reputation.” The hero is Washington, without whom Umbreit thinks “there would never be a United States.” Umbreit thinks of him as one of the “fierce men” in history,” like William the Conqueror with a talent for organization and money-making. Thus these six men are portrayed with a wealth of detail illuminating the complexities of their characters.”
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
in African-American History, Biographies, For Young Adults, Free EbooksEpub or Mobi?
The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices and in one case for Amazon devices. As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send to Kindle program. A great feature of the Send to Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send to Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
So if you are using this ebook on Apple, or Android devices, or in the Send to Kindle program, you can download this epub file below.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
Writer, Orator, Agitator and Champion of Human Rights.
Born in slavery, largely self-educated and self-liberated, Frederick Douglass rose against formidable odds to become a great American leader, not only in the fight for the abolition of slavery, but in the general cause of human rights. After the Civil War, Douglass utilizing his unique gifts as writer and orator, fought for equal rights for Negroes as zealously as he had fought for emancipation. He was actively associated with the campaign for equal rights for women. He was a champion of free education for “every poor man from Maine to Texas.” He played an important role in the early Negro labor movement. He was involved in the temperance crusade.
Having attained the distinguished position as advisor to President Lincoln, Douglass reached the apex of his astonishing career with his appointment a Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti. His autobiography, presented here as he finally completed and revised it in 1892, is a unique chronicle of seventy-eight crucial years in American history, and a provocative and impressive self-portrait of an uncommon man.
*******
The first section of the book, the often assigned Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, is much easier reading than the political work he describes in Part 2 and 3. But a reader who sticks with Parts 2 and 3 will learn much about the Abolitionist movement in Part 2 and about the failures of Reconstruction in Part 3.
Promote Summer Reading with Free Ebooks
in BlogWhat are the best strategies to encourage summer reading? A gold star for each book read beside my name on the library wall worked for me one summer a long time ago. But mailing out gold stars this summer could get expensive, and the thrill of seeing your name on the wall in the library would be missing.
What would work today? A web page with students’ names and titles of the books they read might work if privacy regulations would allow this.
U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal
“Serenade to the Big Bird” is almost as dramatic. In another first person, easy to read account, the war in the air over Europe doesn’t look too horrible to start. The narrator who went to the Air Force out of a journalism program in college is optimistic as his bombing runs over occupied France and over Germany start. But he soon sees the effects of war. This book is at a 6th grade reading level according to the Flesch-Kincaid analysis in Microsoft Word.
Moving away from military history, are titles such as “Sea and Earth: The Life of Rachel Carson” and “Benito Juarez: Builder of a Nation.” In the Carson book, young readers will see the intensity of the scientist and her drive to make the world a better place for all of us. Juarez, the only indigenous president in the history of Mexico modernized his country as he successfully freed it from a foreign invader. His life is inspiring and his story in the Emma Gelders Sterne biography is well-told at an easy to read 6.2 grade level.
Our web site has many other easy to read titles about Black history. The story of how Mary McLeod Bethune devoted her life to education and founded a college is inspiring. “The Long Black Schooner” tells the story of the successful revolt on the Amistad. These books written by Emma Gelders Sterne are at a 7th grade reading level.
Feel free to take our ebooks and post them on your school’s web sites if you prefer to have control of content on your servers. But please write us at support@ebooksforstudents.org or call at (202) 464-9126 if this is your plan so we can track the use of our free ebooks this summer.
And of course, recommendations from your teachers about individual titles might encourage young readers.
Can Electives Build Readers?
in Blog, ElectivesBackground
I love electives. They kept me in teaching. For many years in a community college, I taught books like Parallel Time, Walking with the Wind-A Memoir of the Movement, A Hope in the Unseen-An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, Dead Man Walking, etc. as part of ENG 101 classes. In some ways, the community college was a horrible place to teach. Most of us were adjuncts, part-timers year after year, and they forgot to pay us much. The union for the fulltime faculty in the City University of New York was too small to matter much in a city of mega-unions each with tens of thousands of members in New York City, and the fulltimers pretended that the adjuncts did not exist at contract time. But the English Department did treat adjuncts like professionals. We were allowed to select the reading materials for our classes.
If the department had forced me to use the boring anthologies in wide use in the English Department, I would have left teaching. How can instructors expect students to read about 15 or more topics in an anthology? The opportunity to connect to a topic is so limited. But enough about me.
By now we know that electives are much more likely to allow a teacher to choose reading materials that he or she cares about. With enthusiasm and energy from a teacher about the reading assignment, a class is much more likely to be engaged in the readings. But where is the evidence?
Students Chose to Be in the Elective
If you need to convince an administrator that electives engage students far more than core courses demanded by states, Jal Mehta and Sarah Price have much to say about electives in their excellent book In Search of Deeper Learning. They observed required classes and electives in a variety of high schools across the country and found that when students chose a course that they were much more involved in the content:
“In different ways, these electives were able to open up alternative possibilities for schooling, and so unleash an energy and level of student interest that was often absent from core classes. They were able to do so in part because they were buffered from many of the demands and expectations that controlled the rest of the school’s curricula. Because many of the students in electives were seniors, the college pressure was lessened, and there were more opportunities to engage in a learning rather than a performance orientation.” (p.237)
“One of the schools’ prized gems was an elective called “Philosophy as Literature.”… Much of what Mr. Fields did in his Philosophy of Literature class he could and did do in his regular disciplinary classes. Yet the fact that this was an elective made the learning environment more powerful here than in his English I classes, which we also witnessed. That students had chosen to be here was key— there was a kind of rapt, shared attention in this class that we did not see to the same degree in his regular classes…” (p. 237)
Can Electives Replace Core Survey Courses?
The electives that they describe were additions to the standard prescribed content in the high schools they visited. In Maryland where I live, the state requires 3 credits of history: US History, a National, State, and Local Government requirement–which is a civics course, and World History. And there are the AP electives. The textbook in Local, State, and National Government is horrible. A more boring book could not be written. (See McGruder’s American Government.)
People are missing in the book. There are no portraits of legislators, or judges or activists, just page after page about the structure of government. Not a word about the people who build governments but local of details about regulatory agencies. It also did not bother to write even a paragraph about Thurgood Marshall who more than did his bit to improve our world . In fact, his name does not appear even once in the book. This is so because experts in the Maryland State Education Department decided that NSL is to be about the structure of government, the branches etc. rather that people who supported or challenged the status quo.
Students have told me that this course is boring. This boring course is taught year after year to every 10th grader in Maryland. Every five years or so, Montgomery County in Maryland fires its superintendent for his or her failure to close the achievement gap in the county. But of course, the curriculum never changes. If textbooks are boring or written at a reading level beyond that of some students, it’s OK. The curriculum never even gets examined. Local principals, and school board members at the Montgomery County Board of Education lack the courage to challenge and replace the state’s horrible choices in reading materials.
It’s Time for Replacements
What would happen locally if a high school started offering the Civil Rights movement either within the NSL course or replacing the NSL course. Would bureaucrats from the state capitol in Annapolis arrive at high schools and arrest local principals for skipping the state’s requirements?
Actual Ebooks for Electives
The titles I suggest below are not a replacement for the titles teachers themselves would choose, but in each topic, I think these ebooks provide much better narratives than what is available in textbooks. Of course, it is hard to find a lower bar for narratives than the language which appears in textbooks.
The Civil Rights Movement in a Civics Course.
Mary McLeod Bethune by Emma Gelders Sterne. While Bethune is usually thought of as an educator rather than a civil rights activist, education is a fundamental civil right, of course. And readers of this book will see Bethune’s courage as she fights with the K.K.K. The book also offers many opportunities for students to compare obstacles in education then and now in writing.
Freedom Ride, Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance by James Peck. This book actually speaks to the conflict between federal laws and local customs that could be part of a civics course. The Supreme Court outlawed segregation in interstate travel in Boynton v. Virginia in 1960, but when activists tested this federal regulation in a bus trip through the South 1961, violence occurred. They were almost beaten to death in an Alabama bus station. The writer received 53 stitches in a hospital after the attack by a mob. What was the response of the federal government to these attacks?
Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark. In this book, readers will see how Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues in the N.A.A.C.P. spent years nudging the Supreme Court toward the Brown decision by bringing a series of earlier court cases. Readers will also learn much about Marshall’s youth in Jim Crow Baltimore. This is only one of the three books in this elective that I have taught, and my students–most of whom were immigrants–said the book helped them learn about race in America. The second biography of Marshall describes the Brown case, and the aftermath to Brown, and Marshall’s work on the Supreme Court. See Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court.
Study World War II in US History
Serenade to the Big Bird with Maps and a Study Guide by Bert Stiles. “A book of terrific impact. Perhaps the best to come out of World War II.” Philadelphia Inquirer. And this book is easy reading at a 6.2 grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale.
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific by Robert Leckie. This book is a page turner. A young Marine fights with bravery on island after island in the Pacific War. It is one of our most popular free downloads, and it sells very well on Amazon. It is one of the two books used to tell the story in the HBO series “War in the Pacific.” One caution. There is a brief reference to a sexual connection with an Australian woman while he is on leave in Australia which may or may not offend your students and their parents. Easy reading at 7.2 grade level.
An Army of Amateurs and Escape from Corregidor are also exciting books at the 7th grade reading level.
Study Revolutions in Europe in World History
Two witnesses to the Russian revolution brought back quite different opinions about the value of the revolution to the Russians and the world. Both accounts are highly readable. See Runaway Russia on this site with a grade level of 6.4, and Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed on Project Gutenberg. Reed’s book has a reading level of 8.1.
In The Mad Dog of Europe, readers will see the strategies Hitler used to take power in Germany. The back story to this novel is fascinating but in a sad way. Why did Hollywood suppress this story in its original version as a film script in the early 30s? The introduction explains. Easy reading at 6.3.
Mr. Black Labor: The Story of A. Philip Randolph by Daniel S. Davis
in African-American History, Biographies, Biography, Free Ebooks, Labor HistoryThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
Download mobi file here.
The Politics and the Leadership of A. Philip Randolph
If your students need inspiration to participate in politics, they can consider the life of A. Philip Randolph. His strategies succeeded in confrontations with two presidents and with the management of the anti-union Pullman Company.
He forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open jobs in the defense industry to African Americans in 1941. He persuaded President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed forces in 1948. Read more about Philip Randolph and President Truman here. He later organized the March on Washington for jobs and civil rights in 1963.
A. Philip Randolph brought the gospel of trade unionism to millions of African American households. Randolph led a 10-year drive to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and served as the organization’s first president. Randolph directed the March on Washington movement to end employment discrimination in the defense industry and a national civil disobedience campaign to ban segregation in the armed forces. The nonviolent protest and mass action effort inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Randolph became the most widely known spokesperson for black working-class interests in the country. In December 1940, with President Franklin Roosevelt refusing to issue an executive order banning discrimination against black workers in the defense industry, Randolph called for “10,000 loyal Negro American citizens” to march on Washington, D.C. Support grew so quickly that soon he was calling for 100,000 marchers to converge on the capital. Pressed to take action, President Roosevelt issued an executive order on June 25, 1941, six days before the march was to occur, declaring “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Roosevelt also set up the Fair Employment Practices Commission to oversee the order.
In 1963, when A. Philip Randolph introduced Martin Luther King, Jr., from the speaker’s platform at the now famous March on Washington, he declared him the moral leader of our nation. But it was Randolph himself who earlier established the tactics for civil rights action that King employed with such outstanding results.
Philip Randolph brought African Americans en masse into the labor movement in the twenties and thirties, conceived the dramatic strategy of a massive march on the government, and calmly and confidently guided several generations of Black leaders.
This account of Randolph’s life work by an official at the National Urban League is a tribute long overdue, and it marks the beginning of a new, broader look at the civil rights movement in the twentieth century.
Freedom Ride, Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance by James Peck
in African-American History, Free Ebooks, Primary SourceFrom the Forward by James Baldwin:
“The moral of [the Freedom Ride story is that, however painful it may be for us to change, not to change will be fatal.”
From the Introduction by Lillian Smith:
“This is the vivid, detailed account of how a few people, accidentally or spontaneously, found the symbols that speak to everybody: the need to eat, the need to move—how they went at it, what they endured, how they changed within themselves. I am glad Jim Peck, who is a courageous and thoughtful participant in ideas and acts, wrote it down.”
After reading this work in manuscript. Lillian Smith wrote to James Peck: “I like your book very much. I was moved by it on certain pages, very deeply; and relived much of what I already knew about it.”
This vivid, deeply moving story, Freedom Ride, tells for the first time in book form of the nonviolent action to end segregation that was penetrating the South in the early 60s. Before its on-the-scene report of the 1961 Freedom Rides, it tells of the author’s experience with Jim Crow Bibles used in Southern courts, of segregated benches, shoe-shine stands, buses, churches, prisons, restaurants, rest rooms and waiting rooms.
It tells of a swimming pool in a New Jersey amusement park where white people could enter simply with the purchase of a ticket, but where blacks had to apply for membership to the “Sun & Surf Club” and wait forever. It tells of the student jail-ins, where decent citizens preferred to submit themselves to imprisonment rather than give up their “fightless fight” for humanity. And finally it tells of the now historic first Freedom Ride.
The author, James Peck, is a man whose quiet but passionate concern for human rights earned him fifty-three stitches in his head when, in Birmingham, Alabama, he and the other Freedom Riders tried to show that blacks and whites had the right to eat together in a bus terminal lunchroom. Here is his personal report.
To read this ebook using Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.
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Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Henrietta Buckmaster
in African-American History, Free EbooksThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
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“There are some good people who are always preaching patience. They would have us wait a few months, years, or generations until the whites voluntarily give us our rights, but we do not intend to wait one day longer than we are absolutely compelled to…” —From a proclamation by the Negroes of Alabama, circa 1867.
This story of Reconstruction is a tremendous inspiration as well as a remarkable blueprint for today. And with passion and searing truth, Henrietta Buckmaster tells here the story of those seven short years—1868 to 1875—in which liberty blazed brightly in our southern states.
Reconstruction: American After the Civil War does not boast, it documents; it does not preach, it shows; it does not hint, it proves. Here the Black freedmen and their leaders—resume their proper stature as men of knowledge, men of wisdom and vision. Here Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner rise and speak again in the halls of Congress. Here carpetbaggers and scalawags emerge from a century of mockery. Reading Reconstruction, one understands as never before the true greatness of the First Reconstruction—and why burning crosses, hooded night riders, and the still, muddy waters of the Mississippi have been unable to obliterate Reconstruction from the free hearts of men.
Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly by Margaret Bourke-White
in Biographies, For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Military History, Primary Source, World War IIDownload an epub file for Apple, and Android devices and the Send to Kindle feature on Amazon devices:Download Now!
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An excerpt from The New York Times review, December 4, 1946 by Orville Prescott.
“Miss Bourke-White is one of the most distinguished of American photographers. Before the war she was a specialist in pictures of industry. During the war as a photographer for Life she took many of the best frontline pictures which appeared in that magazine, in Russia, in Italy and in France and Germany. She traveled by jeep, by plane and on foot wherever reporters were allowed to go, which often meant where shells were exploding and bullets flying. But she did not just take pictures. Miss Bourke-White is a good reporter as well as a photographer. She talked with all manner of men and with resourceful enterprise sought out representative and significant men. The present volume includes 128 of her excellent pictures of Germany in defeat, in addition to Miss Bourke-White’s report on her investigations….
Few Uninfected With Nazism
“….Miss Bourke-White talked with hundreds of Germans. Among them she found a few, a pitiful few, who had not succumbed to the Nazi infection. Most of therm, did not admit or realize that there was any infection. They did not admit that Hitler was evil, that Germany had started the war, that they were aware of the torture and death camps, that they in any way shared responsibility for their government’s and their nation’s crimes. Many of them expected the Allies to finance Germany’s recovery, to be responsible for German employment.
“In Bremen Miss Bourke-White found an old friend, a German girl who had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. “Here will be somebody I can talk to,” she thought. But the intelligent, American-educated girl turned out to be an ardent defender of Nazism and all its works. “We have believed in the party principles for centuries,” she said. “Adolf Hitler never knowingly told a lie.”
More disturbing, because of their greater power and influence and because of the respectful deference with which the Allies treated some of them, were the great industrial lords of the Ruhr. Miss Bourke-White talked with many of them, the men who had made Hitler’s war machine possible and who had profited mightily in the process. And they were all just innocent business men uninterested in politics, worthy citizens who expected to continue to run their peaceable enterprises! If they are allowed to, and if the Allies do not foster a genuine democracy in Germany, the third World War will come sooner than we expect it. That is the underlying theme of ‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly.’ “