On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail
by Charles E. Cobb Jr. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill. $18.95
SNCC veteran Charley Cobb has written a comprehensive guide to travel in the South if you wish to learn about how people have challenged and changed racial discrimination beginning long before the 1960s. Highlander is prominent in the story — both in its Tennessee location and in South Carolina where the Citizenship School program began. Well written and loaded with individual stories and historic photographs, this book is a real treasure.
Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs
by Guy and Candie Carawan. NewSouth Books, Montgomery and Louisville. $21.95
This is a new edition of a historic collection of freedom songs that has been out of print for a number of years. Sing for Freedom contains sheet music for over one hundred freedom songs — including “We Shall Overcome” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” — but this volume is more than just a song book. It contains numerous firsthand reports from participants in the freedom rides, protests, and sit-ins, many of them young students, as well as photographs of movement events. Longtime staff members Guy and Candie Carawan collected many of the songs at Highlander cultural workshops between 1960 and 1965.
Sing for Freedom is available through the Highlander bookstore.