ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Jim Crow laws. The lynching of Emmett Till. The Montgomery bus boycott. Lunch-counter sit-ins. The Ku Klux Klan. Soldiers escorting young black children to school. Gov. George Wallace standing on the steps of the University of Alabama barring black students from entering. Bombed churches. Riots in Northern cities. All of these are events that changed America profoundly and forever. Since the modern civil-rights movement began less than four decades ago, African-Americans, joined by committed whites and others, have traveled a long, frequently interrupted, and painful road toward freedom and justice. The images on this page, in rememberance of Black History Month, recall the powerful struggle of that era. Author Claude Brown, whose critically acclaimed book about growing up in Harlem, “Manchild in the Promised Land,” is frequently compared with the works of the late James Baldwin, provides us with his own view of the events of the last 3 1/2 decades through the photo captions on this page.