On August 28, 1963, upwards of half a million people gathered on the National Mall to issue a “living petition” to grant blacks their basic rights as American citizens.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom came at the end of the busiest year of the civil rights movement. After Martin Luther King’s pivotal Birmingham campaign, more than 2,000 demonstrations broke out all over. The movement touched all four corners of the land—not just in southern cities and towns like Albany and Gadsden, Nashville and Raleigh, Danville and Selma, but also in northern cities like New York and Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and San Francisco.
All the factions of the civil rights movement, for the first time, massed together to show America its true dignity, courage, and urgency. With all-day live TV coverage, ordinary Americans could witness the true character of the movement. And for the first time, Martin Luther King’s powerful message got a live and complete airing on all three networks.
Now, in Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, August 2010), Charles Euchner tells the dramatic story of how the march happened, who went, and how it changed America forever.
Nobody Turn Me Around is becoming an instant classic. Historian Roger Wilkins says the book “brings it all back in vivid detail.” Kirkus Reviews calls NTMA “a wholly satisfying, comprehensive view … sharp, riveting.” The Christian Science Monitor says “Charles Euchner does an excellent job of telling the lesser-known story of the internal contradictions that nearly destroyed the historic event.” The Boston Globe says that “Euchner’s dignified book reflects [the civil rights movement’s] power.” Says John Egerton, the dean of Southern historians: “The pages crackle and vibrate with the voices of unsung heroes who drove, flew, rode buses and trains, hitchhiked, even walked long distances to be there in the Great Emancipator’s stone shadow as Dr. King spun out his immortal ‘Dream.’”
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