Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Marcia Chatelain discusses her new book How Bright the Path Grows in Conversation with NPR’s Michel Martin

The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington This discussion is part of Hill Center’s Benjamin Drummond Emancipation Day Celebration series, named in honor of the Naval Hospital’s first patient, African American seaman Benjamin Drummond 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. 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. MICHEL MARTIN is a host of Morning Edition. Previously, she was the weekend host of All Things Considered and host of the Consider This Saturday podcast,where she drew on her deep reporting and interviewing experience to dig into the week’s news. Outside the studio, she has also hosted “Michel Martin: Going There,” an ambitious live event series in collaboration with Member stations. Martin came to NPR in 2006 and launched Tell Me More, a one-hour daily NPR news and talk show that aired on NPR stations nationwide from 2007-2014 and dipped into thousands of important conversations taking place in the corridors of power, but also in houses of worship, and barber shops and beauty shops, at PTA meetings, town halls, and at the kitchen table. She has spent more than 25 years as a journalist — first in print with major newspapers and then in television. Tell Me More marked her debut as a full-time public radio show host. Books will be available for sale. A book signing will follow the discussion. Marcia Chatelain Photo Credit: Kainaz Amaria Michel Martin Photo Credit: Steve Voss, NPR