In The Road to Margaret, Birmingham native Lyn Stafford confronts two mysteries: Who murdered her great grandfather, a civil engineer, in an Alabama mine? And, how did Gertrude Bradford, the beloved, Black cook and housekeeper from her childhood, lose one of her hands as a girl? Stafford searches for answers by tracing her father’s English immigrant roots, as well as Gertrude’s Black and Native American background. In telling their stories, and her own, Stafford gives readers a window into Alabama’s history, from the Trail of Tears and the bloody Civil War to the racial violence of the civil rights movement, the rise of labor unions, and the brutal and murderous schemes to suppress workers’ rights in the mining town of Margaret, Alabama and beyond. (Eastern Lake Books)

On December 4, 1947, white men shot Elmore Bolling to death in Lowndes County, Alabama, because he was a successful farmer and businessman, and Black. At the time of the murder, the 39-year-old married father of seven owned a farm and several other enterprises. But in the segregated Jim Crow South, Blacks who achieved business success could become the targets of whites determined to maintain racial supremacy. His “lynching” is the subject of the 2015 book The Penalty for Success, written by his daughter Josephine Bolling McCall. Through interviews with relatives and Lowndes County residents and historical research, McCall traces her family tree, recounts her father’s brutal murder, and describes the efforts made by her family to obtain justice and keep his memory alive. (Self published)

Demopolis native A. G. Gaston was born in 1892, the son of a cook and grandson of former slaves. He rose up from poverty and, with only a 10th grade education, became a multi-millionaire. Gaston launched his first business venture when he sold meals to his fellow coal miners. From there, he built an empire in Birmingham, which included the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co., Citizens Federal Savings Bank, Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, A.G. Gaston Construction Co., and a media company that owned WENN and WAGG. In 1954, he opened the A.G. Gaston Motel, which gave Black travelers, including civil rights leaders, a place to stay when white-owned hotels refused to accommodate Black patrons. At the time of his death in 1996, Gaston’s fortune had reached more than $130 million, making him one of the richest Black men in the United States. In Black Titan, Gaston’s niece, journalist Carol Jenkins, and her daughter, Elizabeth Gardner Hines, tell the story of this extraordinary Alabama entrepreneur and philanthropist. (One World)

As a former Birmingham police officer and long-time resident of Birmingham, T.K. Thorne has a unique perspective on Alabama's largest city, which is still known by many for its central role in the Civil Rights campaign against segregation in the 1960s. In Behind the Magic Curtain - a reference to Birmingham’s nickname of “The Magic City,” which was earned during a period of remarkable growth in the early 20th century - Thorne peels back the veil of history to show the nuances of how the city shook off the stranglehold of segregationists led in part by Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor not just because of mostly-black civil rights marchers, but also by the progressive action of many white allies working behind the scenes in ways never fully explored. She also sheds light on how law enforcement monitored the Movement, and how journalists covered - or didn’t cover - the significant news story that would make Birmingham notorious.

Shelley Stewart’s long and arduous climb to success began at age five. That is the year he witnessed his mother’s murder at the hands of his alcoholic father. Family members shuffled young Shelley from house to house, but when he could no longer stand living with an abusive relative, he ran away at age six. Stewart endured homelessness, racial discrimination and depression, but he overcame those early hardships years later when he found his calling in radio. While working in Birmingham, the popular DJ became known as “Shelley the Playboy.” He also earned the unofficial title as “the voice of the civil rights movement” in the 1960s. During those years he made a practice of playing certain songs and repeating phrases on the air as secret codes that told teen activists where to meet up for protest demonstrations and rallies. In his memoir, The Road South, Stewart recounts his remarkable life, from child abuse survivor to celebrity radio host, entrepreneur and community leader.

 (Grand Central Publishing)

In Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South, Charles Fager details one of the most consequential events in the American civil rights movement: the 54-mile, nonviolent protest march, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, from Selma to Alabama’s state capitol in Montgomery. Their aim: To push for equal voting rights for Black Americans. Those joining King included other civil rights leaders, clergy, celebrities, and ordinary citizens of various races. The triumphant march eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on August 6 of that year. Fager, a former staff member of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, gives readers a comprehensive overview of what happened on that historic, five-day trek for freedom and justice. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)

The book A Walk to Freedom: the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, 1956-1964 tells the story of the civil rights movement in Birmingham led by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Founded by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the ACMHR came into existence after Alabama banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from operating in the state. Through speeches, news stories, more than 200 photographs and personal remembrances from those who participated in the demonstrations to end segregation, A Walk to Freedom gives readers insight into the history of the movement as it unfolded in the Magic City in the 1950s and 1960s.  

In 1963, as tensions in Birmingham between white segregationists and Black civil rights supporters boiled, a bomb exploded at the Sixteen Street Baptist Church on September 15.  The blast killed four innocent Black girls and injured other congregants. Soon after the tragedy, Charles Morgan Jr., a young, white attorney stood before members of the all-white Young Men’s Business Club and said that every white person who failed to condemn racism was as guilty as the bombers. He said, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’” His speech drew the ire of whites, and Morgan and his family eventually left Birmingham for Atlanta where he became a well-respected civil rights attorney. Morgan recalls that turbulent period in his memoir, A Time to Speak, published in 1964. (Harper & Row)

In The Newspaper Boy, attorney and writer Chervis Isom reminisces about his days growing up in Birmingham’s Norwood community, where he delivered newspapers as a boy. Isom grew up believing in the notion that whites like him were superior to Blacks— that is, until he met the new customers on his route, Helen and Vern Miller. The Millers were a young couple from the North and had viewpoints contrary to Isom’s opinions. The three of them began to engage in friendly debates over events in the news, and, over time, Isom started to question the belief system of his upbringing. The Newspaper Boy is a fascinating look at how Isom’s views on race evolved while he lived through some of the most consequential events in modern American history, from the civil rights demonstrations and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Chervis Isom)

In March 1965, civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights. Hours later, while she was giving a ride to another activist, a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled alongside Liuzzo’s vehicle and someone in the car shot and killed her. Liuzzo’s murder made national headlines and law enforcement quickly identified and captured the perpetrators. That is because one of the men in car was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant. But in The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, author and historian Gary May gives details from formally undisclosed FBI records and Department of Justice documents to uncover a far more complicated partnership between Rowe, the FBI and the Klan. In addition, May sheds light on the how the FBI was complicit in other attacks on civil rights activists in an effort to keep Rowe’s undercover work a secret. (Yale University Press)

Few books have delved into the role Unitarian and Universalist (UU) members played in the move to end racial discrimination like Southern Witness: Unitarians and Universalists in the Civil Rights Era. Written by author and UU minister Gordon Gibson, the book tells the story of the many UU ministers and laypeople who took extraordinary risks in the fight against Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and 60s. Those individuals include the Rev. Donald Thompson in Jackson, Miss., who was shot and forced out of town by segregationists. In another case, the Ku Klux Klan harassed and firebombed the New Orleans church building and parsonage of the Rev. Albert D’Orlando. Gibson also describes the courage of members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham who helped facilitate the Selma voting rights marches in 1965. Southern Witness is a moving and powerful account of the UU members who dared to speak out against racial intolerance and injustice. (Skinner House Books)

Randall Jimerson and his four siblings moved with their parents from the North to Birmingham in 1961. Their father, the Rev. Norman C. “Jim” Jimerson, was on a mission from the Council on Human Relations to open up lines of communications between blacks and whites in Alabama. He carried out his duties as executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations by traversing the state to develop relationships with black and white ministers and key members of the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Andrew Young, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. Randall Jimerson writes about his father’s career in Shattered Glass in Birmingham. The book details the risks his father took, the many death threats he received, and the day when white clergymen rejected his plea to speak out publically against racism. (LSU Press)

During his lifetime, the Rev. W. Edward Harris was an activist and Unitarian minister who founded the Alabama Civil Liberties Union. He also led voter registration campaigns in Birmingham after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Harris, who was white, examines the contributions other white liberals made to the civil rights movement in his book, Miracle in Birmingham: A Civil Rights Memoir 1954-1965. In it, the author looks back at the tensions in the racially segregated city in the 1950s through 1965 and the bravery of liberal whites who fought alongside Black activists for equal voting rights and the abolishment of racial segregation.  (Stonework Press)

Born Black in the segregated South in 1934, Birmingham native Shelley Stewart endured many setbacks in his life. He was five years old when he watched his alcoholic father attack and kill his mother with an axe. Afterward, Stewart and his younger brothers were left to fend for themselves until relatives took them into their homes. But the relatives turned out to be cruel themselves, subjecting the children to both physical abuse and psychological trauma. Stewart, however, survived and overcame the racism around him to eventually launch a successful career in radio. He became a popular radio talk show host and DJ, and, eventually, a station owner. He also founded a public relations firm and earned many awards and accolades. In Mattie C.’s Boy, biographer Don Keith tells the story of Stewart’s inspiring journey and amazing rise from a life of poverty and tragedy to one of triumph and hope. (New South Books)

Paul Hemphill left his hometown of Birmingham as a young man to become a newspaper reporter. He returned almost three decades later in 1992 to live and to reflect on what happened in the city in 1963, one of the most pivotal years in the history of the civil rights movement. In Leaving Birmingham, Hemphill, a former columnist for the Atlanta Journal, delivers a poignant memoir that highlights major historical events in the city such as the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four Black girls, the demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr., and law enforcement’s attacks on nonviolent demonstrators protesting segregation. Hemphill also writes about coming to terms with his past and his own father’s racism while capturing the stories of other longtime Birmingham residents, both black and white. (University of Alabama Press)

The bombing of a Black church in Birmingham that left four young girls dead in 1963 is arguably one of the most pivotal and tragic events in civil rights history. For decades, the perpetrators of that heinous crime remained free. Then in 1995, the FBI reopened the investigation. In Last Chance for Justice, author and retired Birmingham Police Precinct Captain T.K. Thorne gives readers an eye-opening look into the case. The book includes interviews with police detective Ben Herren and FBI Special Agent Bill Fleming. In addition, Thorne pulled together FBI summary reports and internal memos, transcripts from clandestine recordings, and trial transcripts to tell the story of how investigators brought Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry and his cohorts to justice. (Lawrence Hill Books)

In 1965, Detroit resident Viola Liuzzo, a white, married mother of five, traveled to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. She never returned home alive. After arriving in Alabama, Liuzzo volunteered to drive demonstrators back and forth between Selma and Montgomery, the state’s capital. On the night of March 25, Liuzzo had dropped off demonstrators in Selma and was driving Leroy Moton, a black civil rights worker, back to Montgomery when a car carrying four Klansmen pulled up alongside her vehicle. Someone in the car fatally shot Liuzzo, making her the first white woman killed in the civil rights movement. In From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, author Mary Stanton tells the story of Liuzzo’s life, her murder, and why the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, spread false stories about Liuzzo to divert attention away from an FBI informant who was one of the Klansmen in the car that fateful night. (University of Georgia Press) 

As a boy growing up in Alabama, Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist and Birmingham News journalist John Archibald admired his Methodist minister father. The Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., was the son and grandson of Methodist preachers. He was a good man, a good father and a good and well-liked minister, admired by many. He preached Biblical principles and offered words of inspiration to his flock. But during the civil rights era in the 1960s, as blacks protested racial segregation, fought for the right to vote, and endured violent attacks from white supremacists, the Rev. Archibald was silent. Others had warned Rev. Archibald against preaching about Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement. Doing so would have angered his congregation and led to ostracism, threats or even worse. And with a family to support, much was at stake. In Shaking the Gates of Hell, John Archibald comes to grips with his father’s silence and the complicity many Christian churches had in the systemic racism that civil rights activists fought to end. (Knopf)

Whenever the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., visited Selma, Alabama, he often dropped by the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson. Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, provided succor to the civil rights movement and opened their home to King, where he could strategize with other civil rights leaders such as Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Ralph David Abernathy. In The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement, Richie Jean recalls the meetings that occurred in the months leading up to Bloody Sunday, the fateful March 7, 1965, Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in which state troopers attacked the marchers. In addition to being a secret meeting place, the Jackson home occasionally served as a respite for MLK, whenever the weary civil rights leader needed rest, sleep, or to get away from it all. (University of Alabama Press)

On a Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a blast rips through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killing four young black girls. The real-life bombing serves as the backdrop for Birmingham native Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Four Spirits. The central character is white college student Stella Silver, who after the deaths of the four church girls and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, leaves her world of relative privilege behind to teach a high school equivalency course at Miles College, an HBCU in Fairfield, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham. There she meets colleague Christine Taylor whose impatience with segregation compels her to participate in civil rights work despite being a single mother. Christine’s friend, Gloria Callahan, a young, black musician, manages to overcome her fears to teach at a Freedom School. Four Spirits blends fictional characters of both races with real-life events and civil rights icons for a compelling look at a movement that transformed a nation.  (Harper Collins)

Foot Soldiers for Democracy is a collection of the oral histories of 29 ordinary men and women – from teachers and college students to domestic workers, war veterans and a leader with the Black Panthers – who risked their lives to fight for racial equality. While their stories and perspectives are diverse, every narrative illustrates the passion of individuals determined to end segregation, the risks they took, and the fear they overcame in the face of threats of violence from white supremacists, the police, politicians and others bent on maintaining the white power structure. The oral histories are taken from the archives of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Through these stories, historians Horace Huntley and John W. McKerley bring to life the people who helped transform American society. (University of Illinois Press)

In Carry Me Home, investigative journalist and Alabama native Diane McWhorter examines Birmingham’s racial history, the activists who pushed for desegregation and the events leading up to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young Black girls. But McWhorter also gives readers an inside look the role the city’s privileged class played during the civil rights era. Specifically, she paints for readers a picture of her life growing up in Mountain Brook, a wealthy Birmingham suburb on what she calls “the wrong side of the revolution.” Her father came from a well-to-do family and joined forces with those opposed to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent demonstrations to end racial segregation. In telling her father’s story, McWhorter gives readers insight into the alliances between the city’s Big Mule elites and the lower-class Klansmen who carried out their wishes, with violent and sometimes deadly results. Carry Me Home won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (Simon & Schuster)

On March 7, 1965 state troopers in Selma, Ala., brutalized nonviolent protesters bound for Montgomery to advocate for voting rights. Following the horrific attack, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 9 issued a call to clergy around the country to come to Alabama and join demonstrators on a second attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. In his book, Call to Selma: Eighteen Days of Witness, author Richard Leonard recalls what happened when he, a 37-year-old Unitarian minister from New York City, answered the call. Leonard takes readers on a journey as he and other ministers joined King and the civil rights demonstrators on what would become a historic 54-mile march to Alabama’s capital city. (Skinner House Books)

Outside of the city of Birmingham, remarkably few people know the story of Fred Shuttlesworth, the fiery minister who was at the forefront of efforts to desegregate public accommodations from schools to bus terminals and more. Before Martin Luther King came to Birmingham -- at Shuttlesworth’s invitation - to lead a campaign for freedom now well known as key to the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was a thorn in the side of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, and a frequent target of white supremacist violence, from beatings to bombings. And beyond Shuttlesworth, there were more, many more Birmingham revolutionaries striving to dismantle a system of racial oppression which made Birmingham what King called “the most segregated” city in the country. The book features incisive research by scholars and veterans of the movement brought together to help make the case for the critical importance of the work by the ACMHR - the organization Shuttlesworth formed when Alabama outlawed the NAACP.

Alabama was a battleground state in the struggle for human rights, and in 1963 Birmingham was the beachhead where Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth and an army of freedom fighters made their nonviolent stand against legalized racial segregation. The foot soldiers in that struggle were often women and Birmingham school children who not only risked expulsion but the same punitive action Bull Connor brought on the adults, snarling police dogs, the brutality of powerful water cannons which blasted them down Birmingham’s streets, jailing in inhumane conditions, and systematic injustice at the hands of local officials and white supremacists who acted largely with impunity. While the tragic culmination of that dramatic summer was the terror bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of four little girls, many of the foot soldiers stories leading up to that day had not been told. Birmingham Foot Soldiers features the accounts of people who were there - unsung civil rights heroes who in their youth had marched in the Children’s Crusade, slept on hard iron cots in jail and been packed like animals in makeshift cages at Birmingham’s fairgrounds.

Dramatic footage, photographs and news accounts have burned the brutal story of Bloody Sunday into the consciousness of anyone engaged in the human rights struggle. Dramatized in movies that focus on the day Alabama State Troopers and their club-wielding associates mercilessly attacked peaceful Civil Rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, there are still stories to be told by those who were there. Lynda Blackmon (Lowery) and her sister were teenagers among the thousands menaced, tear gassed, beaten but determined to fight for the right to vote in Alabama. Lynda’s perspective - as the youngest person to complete the march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King, John Lewis and others - gives a rare and raw look at what it was like during the march that took freedom activists from tragedy to triumph. This memoir has earned commendation in literary circles, winning A Sibert Informational Book Medal Honor Book, Kirkus Best Books of 2015, Booklist Editors’ Choice 2015, BCCB Blue Ribbon 2015.

Sarah Collins was the only child who was wounded but survived the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama in September 1963. The tragic loss of her sister Addie and three other friends led to lifelong injury and trauma that impacted her life even as it shocked the world into the reality of white supremacist hatred in America. In her new book, she takes stock of her life, her survival and puts the Civil Rights Era bombing into context with today’s ongoing racial struggles. Rudolph continues to use her unique vantage point on one of America’s defining moments to seek justice and to make clear in stark terms that there has always been a cost to be paid by those who would fight for freedom. 

In 1963, Alabama’s largest newspaper was The Birmingham News, and its reporters and photographers had a ringside seat to the powerfully impactful events unfolding before, during and since the Birmingham Campaign for civil rights. During that year, when the eyes of the nation and beyond were on Birmingham, a huge archive of documentation was collected, and remained in the morgue of the News for decades. In 2012, a year away from the 50th anniversary of the ‘63 struggles, writer Barnett Wright - then a reporter for the News - chronicled the day-to-day stories that captured what had been happening in the city surrounding the protests, demonstrations, arrests, and bombings that would eventually draw national media, federal intervention, international condemnation against the ongoing oppression of black citizens, and eventually, change in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wright’s book offers an unprecedented look into the deep archives of the News, and another important insight into Birmingham’s reality in a year that helped shape the era.