A new episode of Moyers & Company focuses on the political battles in North Carolina that have culminated in a series of “Moral Mondays” protests; among those protestors is civil rights activist Bob Zellner (The Wrong Side of Murder Creek). Zellner spoke with Moyers & Company …
A new video and a podcast interview with attorney Fred Gray complement the release of the newly revised edition of Gray’s memoir, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System. During the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement, Gray served as the lawyer for Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks; he also argued in cases involving school desegregations, and helped bring about a presidential apology for victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study …
TIME Magazine has included author and civil rights activist Bob Zellner as part of their “One Dream” multimedia project, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The son and grandson of Klansmen, Zellner turned away from his heritage while at Huntington College in Alabama, joining the civil rights movement and later becoming the first white secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Zellner chronicled his growing social awareness and his experiences in the movement, including numerous marches and sit-ins, as well as his encounter with many key figures of the Civil Rights era, in his memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, available in hardcover and ebook …
Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General of the United States, died on May 8 at age 90 and was widely memorialized as an important figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “The nation has lost a faithful and forceful advocate for civil and constitutional rights with the passing of Nicholas Katzenbach,” said civil rights lawyer Fred Gray, author of Bus Ride to Justice …
Dr. Ellen Weiss’s new lushly-illustrated biography of African American architect Robert Taylor is helping bring this figure the recognition he deserves. The January 12 New York Times “Antiques” column called Taylor a “pioneering architect,” and the Mobile Times-Register called Weiss’s book on Taylor, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington, “long overdue” …
Two NewSouth Books authors, Fred Gray and Constance Curry, will be added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame during the 2012 Trumpet Awards on Friday, January 6, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. Attorney Fred D. Gray served as the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s lawyer in 1950 at the age of only 24; he has worked on numerous civil rights cases since that time. Constance Curry’s most recent publication from NewSouth Books was co-authoring Bob Zellner’s autobiography, the award-winning The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, currently in production as a movie with executive producer Spike Lee …
That breeze you feel this morning must be one of two things: either it is caused by Bull Connor spinning in his grave over the international expressions of sympathy for the passing and admiration for the life of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, or it is caused by a lot of angel wings flapping as Shuttlesworth has arrived in heaven. Where he will begin organizing and demonstrating shortly …
Former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice and US Senator Howell Thomas Heflin will be inducted into the Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, and a plaque will be inscribed with his name in the Samford University library. Heflin died in 2005. In 2001, NewSouth Books published his authorized biography, A Judge in the Senate, by John Hayman with Clara Ruth Hayman. Senator Edward Kennedy called A Judge in the Senate “required reading for all citizens who believe that one person can make a difference” …
In a glowing article, The Montgomery Advertiser’s Al Benn praises NewSouth Books’ new title The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 as “the best of the batch” of books on the Airmen “because it takes a different approach” to the story of this famed military unit. Benn enthusiastically describes the book as “an encyclopedia crammed with everything you ever wanted to know about the organization” …
NewSouth Books would like to congratulate Jock Smith, author of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: A Trial Lawyer’s Journey on Behalf of “the Least of These” for being profiled by this year’s annual Ford Freedom Award Program. Smith will be profiled along with other African American legal figures in a sixteen-page student supplement that will be disseminated to requesting schools …