“A quietly inspiring civil rights memoir by a white southerner.” – Kirkus

In early 2002, while cleaning our dusty attic in our home in Washington, D.C., my wife suddenly turned to me holding an old black notebook. “You will never believe what I found,” she exclaimed, smiling. “This is the diary you kept when we were working in the civil rights movement in southwest Georgia in 1966.”

I started thumbing through the worn pages, and the experience all started coming back. Neither of us read the whole diary, thinking we would get back to it later. Instead we promptly forgot about it for several years, until Embry went to spend a summer evaluating a health care initiative in Tanzania. Since she was going to have a lot of time alone, she took the diary with her. In a labor of love, she typed up the whole thing, along with her own comments. When she got back, I read it all, most of it for the first time. I could not believe what we lived through that summer—the excitement, fear, frustration, hope and, most of all, the ambivalence as to what we were doing there and what we were accomplishing. The diary is both an account of one young couple’s experience in the civil rights movement and a coming of age story, at times naive and “politically incorrect” but honest and genuine.

I added some history to the diary and the result is what you are about to read. I relate pertinent information about  growing up in Nashville to my civil rights journey, showing what was happening in the civil rights movement at each stage of my own life. The result is part memoir, part diary and part history.

Get a copy of Civil Rights Journey.