The Author Events Series presents Marcia Chatelain | How Bright the Path Grows
In Conversation with Dr. Tiffany M. Gill
There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”
In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.
How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.
MARCIA CHATELAIN is a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Dr. Tiffany M. Gill is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry, which received the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians, and the co-editor (with Keisha N. Blain) of To Turn This Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism. An award-winning teacher and an internationally recognized expert in African American History, Professor Gill has received support from various foundations, including the American Association of University Women and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Gill has served as an advisor to international beauty brands, a consultant on film and television productions, and has provided expert commentary for various news outlets and documentaries. Currently at work on a book about the history of Black leisure and its role in African American liberation movements, Professor Gill received her B.A. in American Studies at Georgetown University and her doctorate in U.S. History at Rutgers University. Originally from Brooklyn, she now resides in Philadelphia.
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