The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist's Journey, 1959-1964

by D'Army Bailey, Nikki Giovanni (Foreword by)

Overview

D'Army Bailey was the freshman class president at Southern University when four black college students refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's on February 1, 1960. Their action set off a wave of similar protests among black college students across the South, including D'Army Bailey and his classmates at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Education of a Black Radical details Bailey's experiences on the front lines of the black student movement of the early 1960s, providing a rare firsthand account of the early days of America's civil rights struggle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807146118
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

D'Army Bailey is a circuit court judge in Memphis, Tennessee. After graduating from Clark University, he graduated from Yale University Law School and served as a radical city councilman in Berkeley, California. In 1991, he founded the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, assassination. He is also the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Journey.

Editorial Reviews

Bailey offers a personal story of his life as a cog in what we have come to know as the civil rights movement. His book isn't a tour of the familiar triumphs and tragedies in places like Greensboro, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham and Little Rock. Instead, it is the tale of lesser-known battles that made the movement a movement. It is also a revealing story of one man's awakening to the call of his times.
—The Washington Post

Michael A. Fletcher

Bailey, now a Tennessee circuit court judge, was one of “hundreds of student leaders” expelled from black Southern colleges in the 1960s for political activities. A scholarship for expelled Southern students led him north to Clark University, where his education and activism continued as he realized that “the North wasn't miraculously more rational or egalitarian than the South.” By his senior year, he was on the front lines at the demonstrations at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore (July 1963), participating in the March on Washington a month later, but with reservations (“the original idea for the march so dissipated that the final gathering seemed more like a picnic than protest”). In focusing tightly on those “foot soldier” years that shaped his adult convictions, “the story of my life as a college student caught up in the movement,” Bailey takes the reader inside the student debates and deliberations, the organizing and strategizing activities of the early '60s, adding a valuable dimension to the history of the civil rights movement. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly