How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Chatelain, Marcia
How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Chatelain, Marcia

How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists...
$42.00 USD
$42.00 USD
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Author: Marcia Chatelain
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $42.00
How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Chatelain, Marcia

How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

$42.00
How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Chatelain, Marcia

How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

$42.00
Author: Marcia Chatelain
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description
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.

"Chatelain lets us see the complexities of these women's lives, feel their pain, and marvel at their ability to cut through the thicket of racism and sexism."--Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage

"A powerful corrective to these women's erasure from civil rights history."--Anna Malaika Tubbs, New York Times Book Review

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.

Author: Marcia Chatelain
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 09/29/2026
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.28w x 1.41d
ISBN: 9780553387254


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 08/17/2026

About the Author
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.
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