Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights
Lynda Blackmon Lowery
Dramatic footage, photographs and news accounts have burned the brutal story of Bloody Sunday into the consciousness of anyone engaged in the human rights struggle. Dramatized in movies that focus on the day Alabama State Troopers and their club-wielding associates mercilessly attacked peaceful Civil Rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, there are still stories to be told by those who were there. Lynda Blackmon (Lowery) and her sister were teenagers among the thousands menaced, tear gassed, beaten but determined to fight for the right to vote in Alabama. Lynda’s perspective – as the youngest person to complete the march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King, John Lewis and others – gives a rare and raw look at what it was like during the march that took freedom activists from tragedy to triumph. This memoir has earned commendation in literary circles, winning A Sibert Informational Book Medal Honor Book, Kirkus Best Books of 2015, Booklist Editors’ Choice 2015, BCCB Blue Ribbon 2015.