Reissued in Paperback and e-Book After Hardbound Success
This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider’s view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights.
Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965. More about This Bright Light of Ours.
Julian Bond
This is a must-read account of a less publicized aspect of the Southern civil rights movement - white volunteers risking life and limb to challenge white supremacy at its most brutal.
Clayborne Carson
Maria Gitin's lively and candid memoir-history answers the call for a grassroots rather than leader-centered account of the southern struggle against the Jim Crow system.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Maria Gitin provides one of the most nuanced treatments of white involvement in the movement that I have read. She avoids many of the pitfalls that typically mar works treating the subject...
Dorothy F. Cotton
Maria Gitin shares important details of experiences of working - of giving oneself to the country-changing work of the civil rights movement in America which ultimately impacted other countries around the world.
Robert Michael Franklin
An important work about a neglected period of the Civil Rights Movement. ...a wonderful new insight and texture to the story of how courageous Americans transformed their community and the country.
Lewis V. Baldwin
The wide and diverse array of voices leaps from the pages ...with stunning force. They are authentic voices, and the stories they share are dramatic, gripping, poignant, uplifting and empowering.
MARIA GITIN, CIVIL RIGHTS VETERANAUTHOR & SPEAKER
Maria Gitin worked with SCLC and SNCC on voting rights in rural Wilcox County, Alabama, after the Selma to Montgomery march and before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Learn more about the last large integrated Freedom Summer of the Civil Rights Movement.
More about Maria Gitin.