Memphis 68

Download or read book Memphis 68 written by Stuart Cosgrove and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2018 In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city's most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the final days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding's label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

Download or read book Detroit 67 written by Stuart Cosgrove and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First in the award-winning soul music trilogy—featuring Motown artists Diana Ross & the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and others. Detroit 67 is “a dramatic account of twelve remarkable months in the Motor City” during the year that changed everything (Sunday Mail). It takes you on a turbulent journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political, and interracial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the breakup of the Supremes, and the damaging clashes at the heart of the most successful African American music label ever. Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam, and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power, and local guitar band MC5—self-styled holy barbarians of rock—went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability, and self-lacerating crime rates. The year 1967 ended in social meltdown, rancor, and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unraveled. “A whole-hearted evocation of people and places,” Detroit 67 is “a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history” (Independent).

Download or read book 16n68 written by Hester Johnson Moore and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NO THIS IS NOT WHAT DR. KING WANTED As a 16-year-old girl, Hester Johnson, found herself participating in Civil Rights marches in Memphis in support of the Sanitation workers that she knew personally. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support their efforts her life and the world changed forever. Afraid of what was to happen next. "God Help Me!" Glass breaking all around me. Screams and then sirens blaring...policemen swinging sticks. I heard a man yell..."RUN, RUN! GO BACK TO THE CHURCH!" I searched for the Pastor and saw him covering his nose and his mouth with a handkerchief, pointing in the direction of Clayborn Temple. "Oh God help me!" Fearing for our lives we gathered inside the walls of Clayborn Temple. Then the police blasted over a bullhorn..."YOU'VE GOT 15 MINUTES TO COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!" We looked out the balcony window and saw hundreds of policemen lined up across the street. The minister pleaded with us "Do what the police say!"

Download or read book The Road to Memphis written by Mildred D. Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cassie recounts harrowing events during late 1941. An engrossing picture of fine young people endeavoring to find the right way in a world that persistently wrongs them." --Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign written by Michael K. Honey and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the epic struggle for economic justice that became Martin Luther King Jr.'s last crusade. Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black ministers; volatile, young, black-power advocates; idealistic organizers and tough-talking unionists; the first black members of the Memphis city council; the white upper crust who sought to prevent change or conflagration; and, finally, the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr., undertaking a Poor People's Campaign at the crossroads of his life, vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI, and seeing in the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.

Download or read book A Massacre in Memphis written by Stephen V. Ash and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed slaves had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks-and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War, slavery, and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis, Tennessee to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War-era history like no other.

Download or read book The Men and the Moment written by Aram Goudsouzian and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presidential election of 1968 forever changed American politics. In this character-driven narrative history, Aram Goudsouzian portrays the key transformations that played out over that dramatic year. It was the last "Old Politics" campaign, where political machines and party bosses determined the major nominees, even as the "New Politics" of grassroots participation powered primary elections. It was an election that showed how candidates from both the Left and Right could seize on "hot-button" issues to alter the larger political dynamic. It showcased the power of television to "package" politicians and political ideas, and it played out against an extraordinary dramatic global tableau of chaos and conflict. More than anything else, it was a moment decided by a contest of political personalities, as a group of men battled for the presidency, with momentous implications for the nation's future. Well-paced, accessible, and engagingly written, Goudsouzian's book chronicles anew the characters and events of the 1968 campaign as an essential moment in American history, one with clear resonance in our contemporary political moment.