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)
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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.
