CLAUDETTE COLVIN: TWICE TOWARD JUSTICE by Phillip Hoose

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Colvin, shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a child.

AT CANAAN’S EDGE: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS, 1965-68  by Taylor Branch               

The last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. Read NY Times Book Review.

LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN by John D’Emilio                    

Published on the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin is the first detailed examination of the man responsible for that seminal event. Bayard Rustin exhibited charismatic leadership and courage in the early days of the civil rights movement, inspired tens of thousands, and mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., in the principles of nonviolent protest. Yet his name is not accorded the same honor as others in part because, author John D'Emilio argues, he was the victim of American attitudes toward homosexuality during his lifetime.