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

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.)