Contents Overview
Traveling Freedom’s Road: A Guide to Exploring Our Civil Rights History
PART ONE: Getting Started - The opening chapters discuss the book’s organization, address the controversy around civil rights tourism, and provide detailed advice and trip-planning templates to make for a meaningful and efficient trip. An entire chapter is devoted to preparing children and teens for civil rights travel.
PART TWO: Traveling Freedom’s Road on the Civil Rights Loop - These ten chapters provide detailed travel and history on a dozen specific destinations where some of the most high-profile events in our civil rights history of the 1950’s and 1960’s occurred. The chapters focus on Atlanta, Montgomery and Tuskegee, Selma and Marion, Philadelphia, Mississippi, Jackson, the Mississippi Delta, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, and Anniston. These recommended stops are laid out in a travel loop which can be started at any destination on the loop.
PART THREE: Traveling Freedom’s Road Elsewhere within the Loop States - The destinations in Part Two fall into five states; this part explores other relevant sites within Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. This facilitates experiencing important sites as one travels to and around the main destinations on the recommended loop.
PART FOUR: Traveling Freedom’s Road Elsewhere in the South - Important events in civil rights and African American history were not confined to places in the five states covered in Parts Two and Three. Part Four shares relevant sites in these nine states that border the loop states: Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia. Louisiana, Kentucky. Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
PART FIVE: Traveling Freedom’s Road Elsewhere in the United States - Events in Civil rights and African American history certainly were not confined to the South. Thus, the final part of the book selectively covers museums, National Park Service sites, and other locations in 24 of the remaining 36 states plus Washington DC.
Throughout the book, the stories of the people and events that shaped this history are woven into the narrative as well as covered in dedicated sidebars. Since the key role played by women during and prior to the civil rights era seldom make it into the history books, there is a special emphasis placed on shining a spotlight on the often-overlooked contributions of women including Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson Robertson, Irene Morgan, Sarah Mae Flemming, Unita Blackwell, Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Alice Allison Dunnigan, Edna Mae Griffin…..and many more.
Not only is the book heavy on history but it is also heavy on images and useful maps. A professionally-produced index makes finding things in the 500+ pages easy,
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Contents Overview
Traveling Freedom’s Road: Frederick Douglass in Maryland
This book begins with this question: How we do Americans know Frederick Douglass?
Arguing that the answer is “Not well enough,” the book sets off to help readers know Douglass better. This is accomplished by combining the power of places that felt his presence with the power of his writing and oratory. The 271-pages focus on Douglass on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and on Baltimore.
Curated two-day tours in both locations are laid out in a time-efficient fashion with each recommended stop accompanied by a relevant selection from Douglass’s writing or his oratory. These Douglass Speaks selections help readers know Douglass more deeply.
On the Eastern Shore, those who choose to personally experience places touched by this great American can visits sites like:
The field in Talbot County on which he was born enslaved
The former Lloyd Plantation where he was taken at age six
Sites in St. Michaels where he lived and worshipped
Locations in Easton where he was jailed after masterminding a botched attempt to escape and where his manumission papers were filed, freeing him from his enslaved condition
Similarly, the two-day recommended tour of Baltimore takes both armchair travelers and road warriors to Douglass-related sites across the city.
One day is designed as a walking tour of the Fell’s Point area, where Douglass lived with the brother of his enslaver, close enough to the docks to hear the chains of his fellow enslaved individuals being taken to ships for transport to the Deep South.
The second day of the recommended tour transports readers to places outside ofFell’s Point to places where Douglass spoke in celebration at the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and in sadness as he eulogized a beloved bishop at the Laurel Cemetery, which itself experienced a form of racial intolerance when it was paved over to create a strip mall by a developer.
The book’s bountiful number of images and maps plus a lengthy chronology of Douglass’s life, from his ancestral roots in colonial Maryland to his death in 1895, all combine to create a unique way for readers to know Douglass better. The book is also professionally indexed.
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Contents Overview
Traveling Freedom’s Road: Frederick Douglass in Massachusetts
Similar in pursuing the goal of helping readers know Douglass better, the book picks up where the Maryland book ended. Douglass has self-emancipated and, after a brief but eventful time in New York City, he and his wife Anna settle in the major whaling port of New Bedford. Douglass stays in New Bedford for roughly three years, working at many jobs and preaching the evils of slavery. His sermon at a small schoolhouse church in New Bedford earns him an invitation to attend an antislavery meeting on Nantucket Island. There, he is moved to speak and the assembled abolitionists realize what he can do that they cannot: energize audiences with his personal experiences as an enslaved person. They hire him for a trial period on the abolition lecture circuit, launching him on a lifelong commitment as an advocate for social change.
The 341-page book contains dedicated chapters on:
New Bedford, Nantucket, Lynn, and Boston
And every county he visited … from Boston to the Berkshires, from Cape Cod to Cape Ann
Like the Maryland-focused book, this work also contains Douglass’s writing and oratory in dozens of Douglass Speaks selections. Given the intense, selfless travel of Douglass across the Commonwealth, over 120 Douglass-related sites are presented in the book with additional mentions of many other historical locations nearby. Images are plentiful and maps grace every destination-focused chapter. A slightly different 21-page chronology, one with more focus on Massachusetts, is in the back of the book to provide readers a timeline of the great orator’s life. Also in the back matter are 24 short bios of key figures in Douglass life in the period immediately following his self-emancipation plus an 18-page detailed index.