Lift Every Voice

<b>An epic narrative of the struggle against injustice hailed as the definitive history of the NAACP by Henry Louis Gates Jr.</b><br><p>A civil rights Hall of Fame (<em>Kirkus</em>) that was published to remarkable praise in conjunction with the NAACP's Centennial Celebration <em>Lift Every Voice</em> is a momentous history of the struggle for civil rights told through the stories of men and women who fought inescapable racial barriers in the North as well as the South-keeping the promise of democracy alive from the earliest days of the twentieth century to the triumphs of the 1950s and 1960s.</p><p>Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP's activism telling startling stories of personal bravery legal brilliance and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois Mary White Ovington Walter White Charles Houston Ella Baker Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins. In the critical postwar era following a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow.</p><p>A sweeping and dramatic story woven deep into the fabric of American history-history that helped shape America's consciousness if not its soul (<em>Booklist</em>)-<em>Lift Every Voice</em> offers a timeless lesson on how people without access to the traditional levers of power can create change under seemingly impossible odds.</p>