From the port where African slaves entered America to the home where Medgar Evers was murdered, a new guide helps readers explore for themselves the history, milestones and decisive moments of the American black struggle for equality and justice.
In “Moon US Civil Rights Trail: a traveler’s guide to the people, places and events that made the movement,” author Deborah D. Douglas explores destinations like Selma, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee – with historical backgrounds, itineraries and maps for help the traveler to trace the steps of the civil rights movement’s heroes – and to understand the agonies that have befallen them and the triumphs they have achieved.
“Exploring the civil rights trail is a way of linking our lived experience to a time when black Americans became united, committed and stronger,” says Douglas in the book’s preface.
Its launch comes at a time when the United States is undergoing a racial injustice trial following the murder of George Floyd by the police last May in Minneapolis.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Douglas said that when the opportunity to make the trail presented itself, she took advantage of it.
The US Civil Rights Trail is a collection of churches, schools, museums and other landmarks in the South, where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to promote social justice, according to its website. The trail, announced in 2018, covers more than 100 surviving milestones where the main civil rights movement events took place in 15 states.
Douglas’ book mainly details sites in South – North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, DC
“The trail is vast,” said Douglas. “It goes east to Wilmington, Delaware, west to Kansas and south to Louisiana and Florida.”
“We are literally surrounded by greatness and we don’t even know it,” she continued. “Many of the places I visited when writing this book are part of our daily lives, but we miss opportunities to get involved with them from the point of view of the greatness they represent.”
She said that her book, released in January, is not just a “basic guide … it is also a history book, a book on civics, a roadmap for activism and engagement with the Democratic experience”.
There are fragments of information about some of the people who made the movement in each city it touches. In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, Douglas mentions Denmark Vesey, who bought his freedom using the Charleston lottery winnings and in 1816 helped found Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal, the church where nine black parishioners were shot and killed by a white supremacist almost 200 years later. And in Atlanta, she highlights Rev. Martin Luther King and US Representative John Lewis.
Douglas said the trail helps people understand what “just people” are fighting for.
“When essential workers raised issues of living wages as a result of the pandemic, it goes back to the same issues that Dr. King was focusing on before,” she said. “We are very involved in the things that were happening 50, 60 years ago,” she said.
Douglas said he hopes readers will adopt the guide incorporating some of the itineraries created for each city and physically visit the listed historic sites – such as the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma and Atlanta’s historic Sweet Auburn district. She hopes they will also learn about the voices, stories and culture that shape and celebrate the experience of black Americans in each city.
The book includes restaurant suggestions and music playlists that include modern classics like “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone, who laments the racially motivated deaths of Emmett Till – a black teenager lynched by a white crowd in 1955 – and the activist of civil rights Medgar Evers, killed in the garage of his home in Jackson.
An award-winning journalist, Douglas also served as an illustrious visiting professor of journalism at Eugene S. Pulliam’s DePauw University. She was editor in chief of MLK50: Justice Trough Journalism and is currently a senior leader of the OpEd Project, a global initiative to amplify underrepresented voices.
“I tell you when to go, where to shop, where to go for a walk and, most importantly, where to eat,” she said, laughing, referring to her guide. “In the later chapters, I created timelines to talk about the civil rights movement in 2020. It is a book about the past, but it is also about now.”
Kabria Baumgartner, associate professor of American and English studies at the University of New Hampshire, said the book is very timely.
“Amid the wave of protests from Black Lives Matter, more people seem to be visiting historic areas and sites that tell the story of racial justice movements in the United States,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “As soon as the pandemic subsides, we will need to deal with our collective trauma in order to heal. In a way, the U.S. Civil Rights Trail can help guide us, literally and figuratively, and drive us forward. “