About this item
In the American South, the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the struggle to abolish racial segregation erupted in dramatic scenes at lunch counters, in schools, and in churches. The admission of James Meredith as the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama; and the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis -- where Martin Luther King was assassinated -- rank as cardinal events in black Americans' fight for their civil rights. The photographs featured in I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 bear witness to the courage of protesters who faced unimaginable violence and brutality as well as the quiet determination of the elderly and the angry commitment of the young.
About the Author
William Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris coedited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and is the author of Blues from the Delta. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named him among the top ten professors in the United States.
