Jim Crow and Me: Stories From My Life As a Civil Rights Lawyer

by Solomon S. Seay Jr., Delores Boyd (With), John Franklin (Foreword by)

Overview

Civil rights lawyer Solomon S. Seay, Jr. chronicles both heartening and heartbreaking episodes of his first-hand struggle to achieve the actualization of civil rights. Tempered with wit and told with endearing humility, Seay’s memoir Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer gives one pause for both cultural and personal reflection. With an eloquence befitting one of Alabama’s most celebrated attorneys, Seay manages to not only relay his personal struggles with much fervor and introspection, but to acknowledge, in each brief piece, the greater societal struggle in which his story is necessarily framed. Jim Crow and Me is more than just a memoir of one man’s battle against injustice—it is an accessible testament to the precarious battle against civil injustice that continues even today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603061421
Publisher:	NewSouth Books
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Solomon S. Seay Jr. (Author)
In November 1957, SOLOMON S. SEAY, JR. (1931-2015), became the third African-American lawyer on the civil rights battlefield in Montgomery, Alabama, when he returned home with his law degree from Howard University. Seay For fifty years Seay braved the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the state of Alabama’s entrenched racism in order to desegregate public schools and public accommodations, to protect Freedom Riders and voting rights activists, and to ensure equal justice under the law to African American citizens.

Delores Boyd (With)
Delores R. Boyd practiced law for twenty-five years in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, before serving as a municipal court judge and a United States Magistrate Judge. Currently a mediator, Boyd is a product of Montgomery’s transition in the 1960s from a Jim Crow society. Her high school experience with desegregation is profiled in Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories.

Editorial Reviews

The tone is lively, to appeal to a broad audience—stories that “have some meaning, yet while being entertaining.” For this reason, it’s a good book for schools and should keep the attention of young people.

First Draft - Fred Lippincott

Alabama civil rights lawyer Solomon S. Seay presents his memoir of practicing law during the turbulent civil rights era in Jim Crow and Me: Stories From My Life As A Civil Rights Lawyer. Raised by a preacher father whom Martin Luther King Jr. himself would cite as mentor and inspiration, Seay studied hard and was one of only ten black lawyers in all of Alabama when he began his professional practice in 1957. His story is not a uniformly flowing narrative, but rather a series of intense vignettes, evoking the power and difficulty of challenging the old order and bringing a new standard of equality to America as a whole and the South in particular. Highly recommended.

Midwest Book Review