13 Books to Inspire Your Civil Rights Trail Road Trip
A Civil Rights Trail road trip belongs on everyone’s list. Not only does it take you on a journey to all the monuments, museums, and unforgettable moments of the movement, but it offers a vivid glimpse into the story of Black Americans’ fight for freedom and equality. It gives you the opportunity to walk in Dr. King’s footsteps, take a seat at a lunch counter where historic sit-ins took place, and ride in the spirit of the Freedom Riders. Plus, you get to support local Black businesses, restaurants, and organizations at every turn.
Whether you plan to hit the Civil Rights Trail this year or are still in the daydreaming phase, here are a few of our recommended reads to inspire your trip—or to pack in your suitcase and read along the way.
Start with the one-of-a-kind guide to the trail:
- Flexible Itineraries: Travel the entire trail through the South, or take a weekend getaway to Charleston, Birmingham, Jackson, Memphis, Washington DC, and more places significant to the Civil Rights Movement
- Historic Civil Rights Sites: Learn about Dr. King’s legacy at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, be transformed at the small but mighty Emmett Till Intrepid Center, and stand tall with Little Rock Nine at their memorial in Arkansas
- The Culture of the Movement: Get to know the voices, stories, music, and flavors that shape and celebrate Black America both then and now. Take a seat at a lunch counter where sit-ins took place or dig in to heaping plates of soul food and barbecue. Spend the day at museums that connect our present to the past or spend the night in the birthplace of the blues
- Expert Insight: Award-winning journalist Deborah Douglas offers her valuable perspective and knowledge, including suggestions for engaging with local communities by supporting Black-owned businesses and seeking out activist groups
- Travel Tools: Find driving directions for exploring the sites on a road trip, tips on where to stay
- Detailed coverage of: Charleston, Atlanta, Selma to Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson, the Mississippi Delta, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Raleigh, Durham, Virginia, and Washington DC
- Foreword by Bree Newsome Bass: activist, filmmaker, and artist
About Moon Travel Guides: Moon was founded in 1973 to empower independent, active, and conscious travel. We prioritize local businesses, outdoor recreation, and traveling strategically and sustainably. Moon Travel Guides are written by local, expert authors with great stories to tell—and they can’t wait to share their favorite places with you.
For more inspiration, follow @moonguides on social media.
Add a few books to your reading list:
A brilliant and empowering collection of final reflections and words of wisdom from venerable civil rights champion, the late Congressman John Lewis at the end of his remarkable life.
For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers through the ninety-three-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Antonia Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America — it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.
As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist policies and the nation’s racial inequities.
In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.
In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.
In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.
Get the whole family involved:
From imaginative child to visionary storyteller, Toni Morrison was a fiercely inspiring writer that helped change the world. This poetic picture book is part love letter and part biography, praising the power of this Nobel Prize winner. With its tender refrain, readers will know how much Morrison’s stories — and their own — mean to the world. She was loved — and so are they!
Take a journey through Black history and find your greatness in this stunning book from the award-winning team behind the New York Times bestsellers Crowned and Glory.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Meet the little leaders. They’re brave. They’re bold. They changed the world.
Featuring 40 trailblazing black women in history, this book educates and inspires as it relates true stories of women who broke boundaries and exceeded all expectations, including:
Nurse Mary Seacole
Politician Diane Abbott
Mathematician Katherine Johnson
Singer Shirley Bassey
Bestselling author and artist Vashti Harrison pairs captivating text and beautiful illustrations as she tells the stories of both iconic and lesser-known female figures. Among these biographies, readers will find heroes, role models, and everyday women who did extraordinary things.
Don’t miss this “fresh and conversational” (TIME Magazine), “potent and provocative” (The San Francisco Chronicle), #1 New York Times bestselling exploration of racism—and antiracism—in America.
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