Marcia Chatelain at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes Marcia Chatelain —Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise —for a discussion of her new book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington. She will be joined in conversation by Christian Hosam —Assistant Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate of the Albright Institute at Wellesley College.

About How Bright the Path Grows From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington. 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.