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Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Robert A. Pratt
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Description for Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Hardback. Drawing on archival materials, secondary sources, and eyewitness accounts of the brave men and women who marched, this gripping account offers a brief and nuanced narrative of this critical phase of the black freedom struggle. Series: Witness to History. Num Pages: 160 pages, 10, 10 black & white halftones. BIC Classification: 1KBBSB; 3JJPK; HBJK; JFFJ; JFSL3; JPVH1. Category: (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 229 x 152 x 16. Weight in Grams: 340.
On Sunday afternoon, March 7, 1965, roughly six hundred peaceful demonstrators set out from Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in a double-file column to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Leading the march were Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Upon reaching Broad Street, the marchers turned left to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge that spanned the Alabama River. "When we reached the crest of the bridge," recalls John Lewis, "I stopped dead still. So did Hosea. There, facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen stretched from one side of U.S. Highway 80 to the other. Behind them were several dozen more armed men-Sheriff Clark's posse-some on horseback, all wearing khaki clothing, many carrying clubs the size of baseball bats." The violence and horror that was about to unfold at the foot of the bridge would forever mark the day as "Bloody Sunday," one of the pivotal moments of the civil rights movement. Alabama state troopers fell on the unarmed protestors as they crossed the bridge, beating and tear gassing them. In Selma's Bloody Sunday, Robert A. Pratt offers a vivid account of that infamous day and the indelible triumph of black and white protest over white resistance. He explores how the march itself-and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that followed-represented a reaffirmation of the nation's centuries-old declaration of universal equality and the fulfillment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Selma's Bloody Sunday offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing struggle by African Americans to participate freely in America's electoral democracy. Jumping forward to the present day, Pratt uses the march as a lens through which to examine disturbing recent debates concerning who should, and who should not, be allowed to vote. Drawing on archival materials, secondary sources, and eyewitness accounts of the brave men and women who marched, this gripping account offers a brief and nuanced narrative of this critical phase of the black freedom struggle.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2017
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press United States
Number of pages
160
Condition
New
Series
Witness to History
Number of Pages
160
Place of Publication
Baltimore, MD, United States
ISBN
9781421421599
SKU
V9781421421599
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-50
About Robert A. Pratt
Robert A. Pratt is a professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 and We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia.
Reviews for Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Pratt has provided readers with a compelling narrative that is a welcome addition to civil rights studies for both classrooms and a general audience... Pratt has woven together a very readable chronology of dramatic events with attention to both the larger historical context and ongoing scholarly debates, a task many authors struggle to do effectively in much longer monographs. —Caroline S. Emmons, Hampden-Sydney College, Journal of Southern History