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The Topic
Civil Rights refers to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, and to the laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, creed, gender, age, sexual orientation, and many other criteria.
The Context
New York is the most diverse city on the planet, home to people of every race, nationality, language group, religion, sex, and sexual orientation, and to some of the world's premiere human rights groups. There have been intense intergroup conflicts throughout the city's history, from the Draft Riots of 1863 to the Crown Heights riots of 1991. But more amazing is how well such varied peoples have gotten along for hundreds of years. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia created a Committee on Unity after some race riots in 1943, in order "to make New York City a place where people of all races and religions may work and live side by side in harmony and have mutual respect for each other, and where democracy is a living reality." Eventually, the city and state governments passed laws against discrimination and established agencies to enforce them.

Best Books About Civil Rights

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RADICAL WALKING TOURS OF NEW YORK CITY
Bruce Kayton and Pete Seeger
(Seven Stories Press, January 2003.)

Bruce Kayton leads actual tours of radical New York. In this book he takes readers through the sites of many of the city's historic movements from Emma Goldman's home to the old headquarters of the Black Panthers. more info...

 

Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right
by Richard Goldstein (Verso, 200206.)

June 2002, 144 pages. This analysis of the current state of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement by the executive editor of the Village Voice looks at the rise of what he calls "gayocons" who he says are shifting the movement to the right. He examines the conflict between what he calls "liberationists" and "assimilationist." more info...

Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law
by Martin Garbus (Times Books, 2002.)

Veteran liberal New York trial attorney Martin Garbus offers his appraisal of the increasingly conservative United States Supreme Court, particularly its attacks on federalism, civil rights, and First Amendment rights. more info...

Police Brutality: An Anthology
by Jill Nelson (W.W. Norton & Company, 200104.)

Civil rights activist Dick Gregory wrote, "In the wake of such extreme incidents of police brutality in the cases of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima in New York City, and general heightened awareness of police misconduct nationwide, it is an understatement to simply say that this book is timely." The anthology includes contributions by academics, fiction writers, and professionals from Stanley Crouch to Arthur Doyle, a veteran African American cop, to Columbia Law professor Patricia Williams. more info...

 

Why They Couldn't Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (1967-71)
by Jane Anna Gordon (Taylor & Francis, 200108.)

As we enter an era when local control of public schools in the city has been virtually ended, here is a look back at one of the most divisive battles over school control in the city's history. more info...

» Suggest a Civil Rights book.

Interested in other books about NYC? Visit our NYC Books section.

[Suggest a Civil Rights book]