The Georgia Center for the Book is hosting an event with Charlie Cobb tonight. Cobb is the author of a magnificent new travel guide to the American civil rights movement, On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail. What makes this book special, in addition to Cobb’s great writing, is his own insider history as one of the unsung heroes of that movement.
Cobb was a student at Howard University when he was drawn into the black freedom struggle. He ended up taking a few years off from his studies in the early and mid-1960s to organize rural blacks and register voters in the Mississippi Delta. His analysis of the situation African Americans faced in that part of the world helped convince the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (the group with which he was affiliated) to invite privileged white students into the state as volunteers for the monumental Freedom Summer project.
Cobb was the first to suggest the creation of the Freedom Schools, the parallel institution that taught a value system diametrically opposed to the one taught in Mississippi’s segregated public schools. The Freedom Schools were the enduring legacy of the Mississippi movement and only the most important development in American public education in the last half of the 20th century. But you won’t learn too much about the Freedom Schools, or about Cobb, from most American history books. (There are some exceptions: He has written about his story here, and a few historians of the Mississippi Movement, like this one have written about his organizing in some detail.)
The Georgia Center for the Book couldn’t be easier to find or get to. It’s in the Decatur Public Library, one block off the square and one block from the MARTA station. Tonight’s event features a great writer AND a significant historical figure. Two for the price of one!