[Gilbert Jonas] Freedom's Sword The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969(pdf){Zzzzz}[BЯ]

Freedom's Sword is the first history to detail the remarkable, lasting achievements of the NAACP's first sixty years. From its pivotal role in overturning the Jim Crow laws in the South to its twenty-year court campaign that culminated with Brown v. the Board of Education, the NAACP has been at the forefront of the struggle against American racism. Gilbert Jonas, a fifty-year veteran of the organization, tracks America's political and social landscape period by period, as the NAACP grows to 400,000 members and is recognized by both blacks and whites as the leading force for social justice.

Jonas recounts the historic combined efforts of ordinary citizens and black leaders such as W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and Thurgood Marshall to root out white-only political primaries, separate schools, and segregated city buses. Freedom's Sword is a vivid and passionately written account of the single most influential secular organization in black America.

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Review

‘For many Barrack Obama represents the fulfilment of the ideal we call the American Dream and indeed the embodiment of the work of the NAACP … This first hand insider view gives a comprehensive account of the personalities and politics of the movement and the relationship between organisation and the leadership … Freedom’s Sword is an important book and deserves a place in our libraries both for its detail on the NAACP and for our understanding of the civil rights movement.’ – SATH History Teaching Review
From the Publisher
This long overdue account of the NAACP’s first sixty years offers both an insider’s view of the movement and a comprehensive history of it. Scholars of twentieth-century America will be in Jonas’s debt for bringing it together in one worth volume." –Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "Gilbert Jonas’s Freedom’s Sword is invaluable as the most comprehensive account we have of the first six decades of the NAACP’s historic struggle to overcome racism—‘the one huge wrong of the American people.’ It is equally valuable as a history lesson in the essential role that organizing will play if ‘God’s despised poor,’ our sisters and brothers with beautiful darker skin, are to fully and equally share in a greater society. Our celebrity-crazed culture can learn from Freedom’s Sword that not even the inspired genius and commitment of W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Mitchell, and Roy Wilkins could have brought us anti-lynching laws, Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act and the many other milestones toward equal rights for every race without the organized people-power of African Americans united in the NAACP."

—Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General "Perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed account of the NAACP’s eminent history, Freedom’s Sword promises that the organization’s legendary leadership and visionary activism is crisply remembered for generations to come."

—Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., former president of the National Urban League

Publisher: Routledge (18 November 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415949858
ISBN-13: 978-0415949859