Defiant Growing Up in the Jim Crow South

Since my incarceration began, I hadn't seen anyone except police officers and several detectives who came to stare at me through a small window in the door of my cell. I knew nothing about the charges I was being held on. I was completely in the dark. It had been little more than five years since I'd left my home in Mansfield, Louisiana, to attend Southern University. It seemed so much longer. A lot had happened during those years. I wanted to be involved. I wanted to make my own contribution, take my stand for freedom, just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Daisy Bates, Stokely Carmichael, and Rosa Parks were doing. I wanted to fight back; I burned to do something about the evil that haunted my people. So, you might say that my experiences in Mansfield led me to this place. How I grew up there, how those impactful years shaped me, pointed me toward a future I had to embrace. Even it led me to jail. An unrelenting, honest, and inspirational memoir of a young man in the segregated South who became a championing voice in the ongoing fight for civil rights. Book jacket.