Book Review: On The Road To Freedom

Michael Taylor - Richmond Times - Dispatch

America's road to civil rights -- and a guide to historic sites

NONFICTION

The book: "On The Road To Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. (388 pages, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $18.95).

The author: Cobb is a senior writer for AllAfrica.com. During the early 1960s, he worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta. He originated the Freedom School proposal that became a key part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.

What's it about? The book explains the significance of more than 400 sites, mostly in the South, that played a role in the civil rights struggle and, in some cases, earlier black history.

But "On the Road To Freedom" is not just a historical travelogue. Cobb was personally involved in the struggle, and he excels at providing context and detail. In nine chapters, starting with Washington and moving through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, he takes the reader "to the places where pioneers of the [civil rights] movement marched over bridges, sat at lunch counters, gathered in churches, where they spoke, where they taught, where they were arrested and where they lost their lives."

Well-known events and people such as the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are naturally discussed, but even more important is Cobb's bringing to light lesser-known events and people that deserve more attention. There were leaders, such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark, who deserve to be just as heralded as King.

The section on Virginia covers Arlington County and Alexandria, Richmond, Hampton, Farmville and Danville. Richmond was not at the epicenter of the struggle, and this is reflected in Cobb's discussion of Virginia's capital city, which mainly concerns landmarks and people that predate the civil rights era.

Although Cobb gives a concise summary of the early 1960's battle to end segregation at such establishments as Woolworth's and Thalhimers, most of the section on Richmond focuses on the 1800 Gabriel Prosser slave conspiracy, Jackson Ward, Maggie L. Walker and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank that Walker founded.

Cobb closes the Richmond section with a brief profile of tennis star Arthur Ashe and the monument that honors him. I believe Oliver W. Hill Sr. would have been a better choice for such a profile, and I was disappointed that the only mention of Hill was in a picture in the section on Farmville and the Moton School desegregation case.

A valuable work: "On the Road to Freedom" is a valuable work that should be shared with young people needing a crash course on the civil rights movement. At a time when a black man is making a credible run for the presidency, this book offers another satisfying affirmation of how far black Americans have come.

But it also offers a sobering reminder of how difficult the struggle for equal rights was.

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