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We haven’t yet reached the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and a number of important players in the civil rights movement are still active in public life, yet the struggle against segregation has condensed in the national imagination to a handful of iconic moments. The “I Have a Dream” speech, Bull Connor’s brutal tactics and the image of King dying on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel are just part of American lore now, as remote and mythic as the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock. In On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, Charles Cobb Jr. injects some much needed immediacy into the myth by compiling a detailed, city-by-city guide to its lesser known people, places and events. Even readers who think they’ve got a pretty good grasp of civil rights history are likely to find stories and personalities in the book they haven’t encountered before.
On the Road to Freedom is structured as a travel guide, beginning in Cobb’s hometown of Washington, D.C., proceeding down the Atlantic coast, through the Deep South, and finally turning north again into Tennessee. It touches on sites from all of African American history, though it focuses primarily on events in the key years from the end of World War II until King’s assassination. Cobb doesn’t give short shrift to the iconic moments, but he’s clearly most interested in exploring the grassroots aspects of the movement, and giving unknown activists the credit due them.
The chapter on Washington, D.C., for example, includes the familiar story of Marian Anderson’s recital at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after she had been turned away from Constitution Hall because of her race, but it also offers an account of the armed black resistance to white mob attacks across the city in the summer of 1919, an early instance of organized African American defiance that is rarely mentioned in history books. Cobb discusses the 20th century resegregation of the federal civil service under Woodrow Wilson, another bit of history that may come as a surprise to those who think American race relations have been a slow-but-sure forward march toward equality.
Cobb takes pains to recognize the contributions of women and seems to have a special regard for feisty personalities who defied the gender expectations of their day. He highlights the story of Irene Morgan, who refused to give up her seat on a Virginia bus in 1944—more than a decade before Rosa Parks’ famous refusal—and took things a step further by kicking a sheriff’s deputy in, as she said, “a very bad place.” The incident led to a legal decision that prompted the earliest freedom rides to desegregate interstate buses. Several pages are devoted to Gloria Richardson, an activist from Cambridge, Maryland, who led a fierce local battle against discrimination. Responding to pressure from King and others to soften her position, she said, “A first class citizen does not beg for freedom. A first class citizen does not plead to the white power structure to give him something that the whites have no power to give or take away.”
Nashvillians who aren’t familiar with the city’s key role in eradicating Jim Crow will find the Tennessee chapter lively reading. Cobb calls Nashville “one of the high points of the civil rights movement” and describes the student activism here as perhaps “the most admired in the South.” The workshops on nonviolence led by James Lawson and attended by movement notables such as John Lewis and Diane Nash took place at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church, which still stands at its original site on 14th Avenue North. (Cobb incorrectly identifies its location as Fourth Avenue North, though it’s not clear whether this is an authorial error or one created by a typesetter.) He describes the intense spiritual idealism that motivated Nashville’s young activists, noting that Lawson taught them “they were going to be not simply protesters but teachers as well, showing that love was the greatest power; that, like Jesus or like Gandhi, they were obligated to try to change the hearts and minds of their tormentors.”
Cobb worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s in Mississippi. He’s a highly regarded journalist today, and On the Road to Freedom benefits from both his intimate knowledge of the movement and his investigative skills. He fleshes out the chronology of events with numerous first person accounts from activists, many of whom he knew. The book contains fascinating documentary history, including stirring texts from figures such as Frederick Douglass and Mary Church Terrell. Cobb has a reporter’s knack for noting the detail that brings a scene to life, as when he mentions the scars on a movement martyr’s headstone left by shotgun-wielding vandals.Unfortunately his skills can’t overcome one overwhelming handicap, which is that precious few of the places he cites remain in anything like their original state. Too often, Cobb the tour guide has nothing to point to but a marker or a sanitized museum display. In Nashville, for instance, the downtown lunch counters where students challenged segregation are long gone. They are commemorated in an excellent exhibit in the Nashville Public Library, which is a valuable asset to this community but not necessarily worth driving across the country to see. It may make more sense to think of Cobb’s “civil rights trail” as less a travel guide than a writer’s device, one that literally grounds the story of the fight for equality and gives it a renewed relevance, especially for younger readers. Seen in that light, this book is first-rate popular history, and deserves a place in any freedom-lover’s library.
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