Monday, November 21, 2022

Daughter of the Boycott: carrying on a Montgomery family's civil rights legacy by Karen Gray Houston

In 1950, before Montgomery, Alabama, knew Martin Luther King Jr., before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger, before the city’s famous bus boycott, a Negro man named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by a white police officer in a confrontation after he tried to board a city bus. Thomas Gray, who had played football with Hilliard when they were kids, was outraged by the unjustifiable shooting. Gray protested, eventually staging a major downtown march to register voters, and standing up to police brutality.

Five years later, he led another protest, this time against unjust treatment on the city’s segregated buses. On the front lines of what became the Montgomery bus boycott, Gray withstood threats and bombings alongside his brother, Fred D. Gray, the young lawyer who represented Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the rarely mentioned Claudette Colvin, a plaintiff in the case that forced Alabama to desegregate its buses.

An incredible story of family in the pivotal years of the civil rights movement, Daughter of the Boycott is the reflection of Thomas Gray’s daughter, award-winning broadcast journalist Karen Gray Houston, on how her father’s and uncle’s selfless actions changed the nation’s racial climate and opened doors for her and countless other African Americans.


241 pages (May 2020)

  

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

Stories from the Daughter of the Boycott | Karen Gray Houston | TEDxPearlStreet (from TEDx Talks) :


Title Read-alikes: Buses Are A Comin': memoir of a freedom rider by Charles Person;  The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow by Donnie Williams & Wayne Greenhaw; The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis; The Dead Are Arising: the live of Malcolm X by Les Payne; Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the criminal trial that launched the Civil Rights Movement by Dan Abrams; Ida B. the Queen: the extraordinary life and legacy of Ida B. Wells by Michelle Duster; Julian Bond's Time to Teach: a history of the southern civil rights movement by Julian Bond; The Lost Education of Horace Tate: uncovering the hidden heroes who fought for justice in schools by Vannessa Siddle Walker; Mighty Justice: my life in civil rights by Dovey Johnson Roundtree;  Black in Selma: the uncommon life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.: politics and power in a small American city by J.L. Chestnut Jr. & Julia Cass; Ready for Revolution: the life and struggles of Stokely Carmichael by Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture, & John Edgar Wideman; Turn Me Loose: the unghosting of Medgar Evers by Frank X Walker; and The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: a white southerner in thefreedom movement by Bob Zellner & Constance Curry.

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