Photo from Orleans Parish School Board Collection, University of New Orleans, Louisiana Digital Library
A.L. Davis (1914 - 1978)
The Rev. Abraham Lincoln “A. L.” Davis, was a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the early days of SCLC, Davis served as vice president of the leadership conference when Dr. King was president. Davis organized sit‐ins and other nonviolent protests. During the 1960s, when SCLC was in the forefront of the civil rights movement in the South, Davis was pastor of the New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans, a post he held until his death.
In 1961 Mayor de Lesseps S. Morrison of New Orleans appointed Mr. Davis as the city's first director of race relations. He was later named to Louisiana's first Commission on Race Relations, Rights, and Responsibilities. He was the Chairman of several city agencies and political groups. Davis was also the first black member of the New Orleans City Council.
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by 
If Your Back's Not Bent by
The only female in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle of leadership, for the first time, offers her account of the Civil Rights Movement and what it means to us now. “Nobody can ride your back if your back’s not bent,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said at the end of a Citizenship Education Program (CEP), an adult grassroots training program directed by Dorothy Cotton. This program, called the best-kept secret of the twentieth century’s civil rights movement, was critical in preparing legions of disenfranchised people across the South to work with existing systems of local government to gain access to services and resources they were entitled to as citizens. They learned to demonstrate peacefully against injustice, even when they were met with violence and hatred. The CEP was born out of the work of the Tennessee Highlander Folk School and was fully developed and expanded by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King until that fateful day in Memphis in April 1968. Cotton was checked into the Lorraine Motel at that time as well, but she’d left to do the work of the CEP before the assassin’s bullet was fired. If Your Back’s Not Bent recounts the accomplishments and the drama of this training that was largely ignored by the media, which had focused its attention on marches and demonstrations. This book describes who participated and how they were transformed—men and women alike—from victims to active citizens, and how they transformed their communities and ultimately the country into a place of greater freedom and justice for all. Cotton, the only woman in Dr. King’s inner circle of leadership, for the first time offers her account of the movement, correcting the historical impression that “we only marched and sang.” She shows how the CEP was key to the movement’s success, and how the lessons of the program can serve our democracy now. People, and therefore systems, can indeed change “if your back’s not bent.”
In a Single Garment of Destiny by
An unprecedented and timely collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King--in his own words Too many people continue to think of Dr. King only as "a southern civil rights leader" or "an American Gandhi," thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people around the world. "In a Single Garment of Destiny" is the first book to treat King's positions on global liberation struggles through the prism of his own words and activities. From the pages of this extraordinary collection, King emerges not only as an advocate for global human rights but also as a towering figure who collaborated with Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert J. Luthuli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other national and international figures in addressing a multitude of issues we still struggle with today--from racism, poverty, and war to religious bigotry and intolerance. Introduced and edited by distinguished King scholar Lewis Baldwin, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of King.
Life upon These Shores by
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "black experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.
Martin Luther King Jr by
Combining the latest insights from KIng biographies and movement histories, this book provides an up-to-date critical analysis of the relationship between King and the wider civil rights movement. Delivering a fresh perspective on the relationship between 'the man and the movement', Kirk argues that it is the interactionbetween national and local movement concerns that is essential to understanding King's leadership and black activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk examines King's strengths and his limitations, and weighs the role that king played in then movement alongside the contributions of other civil rights organizations and leaders, and local civil rights activists. Suitable for undergraduate courses in 20th century US history.
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954–1985 Series by
Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today. Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is the most critically acclaimed documentary on civil rights in America. The 14-part series recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people— young and old, male and female, northern and southern—who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality—in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans. Through contemporary interviews and historical footage, Eyes on the Prize traces the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act; from early acts of individual courage through the flowering of a mass movement and its eventual split into factions. Julian Bond, political leader and civil rights activist, narrates.