J. L. Chestnut Jr. is a civil rights attorney, columnist, and radio talk show host in Selma. He founded Chestnut, Sanders and Sanders, the largest black law firm in Alabama.

Julia Cass is a freelance writer and journalism trainer who started her career in 1978 at The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is a 2002 recipient of a Knight International Journalism fellowship.

“The autobiography of J. L. Chestnut is the story of Selma’s first black lawyer and prodigal son, but it is also part of the history of the race, sweeping biblically from enslavement by segregation to freedom to the ambitious aftermath of redemption.”

 —New York Times Book Review

 

 “Unfolds with the richness that one expects in a nove. . . .Less about the famous civil rights figureheads like Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Stokely Carmichael (though the author has his say about all of them) than the grass-roots folks who lived in Selma before the era of freedom riders, and remained there, toiling for social change, after the national leaders and media left. [This book] brims over with the social texture and political life of a Southern town raised to the level of a national symbol.”