HOW BRIGHT THE PATH GROWS

A corrective to the over-rendered, male-oriented portrayal of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

In the public imagination, the August 28, 1963, march and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech have become singularly defining within civil rights history. In fact, that day was something more like a comma, a visible, eloquent pause amid decades of actions, often led by women. With a strong narrative voice, an academic’s conscientiousness, and an activist’s sensibility, Chatelain (Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, 2020) reintroduces the women meant to be honored by the day’s “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.” This cohort included not only icons like Rosa Parks and Josephine Baker, to which the author adds new complexity, but also lesser-known figures like Gloria Richardson and Eva Jessye. The “Tribute” offered that day amounted to little more than awkward lip service, “embarrassing, insulting…haphazard,” with several of its intended honorees missing from the march. Chatelain grants these heroines their due, as individuals drawn to the movement for their own reasons, with their own realizations of the impact of the color of their skin, their own ambitions and agendas. In providing fullness for multiple characters, timelines and sequencing can become confusing, and the insidious, systemic nature of sexism within the Civil Rights Movement fades behind personal slights. Nevertheless, the author’s text issues a challenge to a clean and easy arc toward justice, while highlighting the strategic efforts of women at the helm of everything from the Freedom Rides to Black cultural milestones. These efforts, the work of the women she writes about—and thus subject to infighting, judgment, embellishment, and diverging priorities—sit just as firmly at the root of “sustained political action” as those remembered in mainstream history books. Reviving the stories of these women, Chatelain infuses tired ideas of resistance and revolution with the spirit necessary for new iterations of moral appeals to power.

A potent, emboldening expansion of what it looks like to fight for justice.