Customer Reviews

Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement

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Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement An invaluable resource for anyone planning a trip to see sites relating to the Civil Rights Movement. However the trip planner should double check addresses with reliable local sources as I discovered a few frustrating errors on a trip through Alabama. I found that many locals don't have a clue about the history in their cities.

This is a fabulous book to guide you on a "civil rights history tour." If you don't believe me, stop by my web site, Bluejeans' Place, to see all the places I visited by following along in the book. There is even one picture that shows this book in it! I could not have documented all the civil rights sites off the beaten path as I did with this book.

The directions given generally get you right to the door or site you are looking for, even if that site has disappeared over the years and only rubble or an empty lot remains.

There is a lot of detailed information in the book that doesn't seem important until you pull up in front of whereever they are talking about. For example, when you swing around the corner to the location of the funeral home where Emmett Till's body was taken too, you could actually see the same clock above the garage that was shown in a 35 year old picture. In another place, the book pointed out the Neshoba County murder victims worked in an upstairs office on a certain corner in Meridian and the sign shown in the picture is on display in a state museum in Jackson. If you visited both locations, those details were right there plain as day in front of you! This is better than one of the old Fodor's tour books!

I say that because, at the end of Amistad, John Quincy Adams says something about how the Civil War would be the last battle of the American Revolution. But in fact, you could make the case that the civil rights movement was the conclusion of the Revolution. And this book really beautifully takes you back to the places and people of the Movement. It's still possible to visit many of the places, and many of the participants are still alive. But you don't hear as much about these people and places as you might expect, and this book captures them before they are lost to history. It would be a great book to buy to take the children on a tour of the civil rights movement.