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One man’s fight for justice. One town’s reckoning with history.

Born in Selma in 1930, J. L. Chestnut left home to study law at Howard University in Washington, DC. Returning to Selma, Chestnut was the town’s first and only African American attorney in the late 1950s. As the turbulent struggle for civil rights spread across the South, Chestnut became an active and ardent promoter of social and legal equality in his hometown. A key player on the local and state fronts, Chestnut accrued deep insights into the racial tensions in his community and deftly opened paths toward a more equitable future.

Though intimately involved in many events that took place in Selma, Chestnut was nevertheless often identified in history books simply as “a local attorney.” Black in Selma reveals his powerful yet little-known story.

In the 2014 film Selma, director Ava DuVernay takes audiences to the climactic confrontation between civil rights advocates and the state’s security forces of March 1965. Readers looking for a deeper understanding of the events that preceded that epic moment, as well as how racial integration unfolded in Selma in the decades that followed, will find Chestnut’s story and memories both a vital primary source and an inspiration.

Witness the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of two children.

Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965. He came to organize non-violent demonstrations against discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events from that turbulent winter of 1965--events that changed not only the lives of these two little girls but the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979, award-winning journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Webb and West, weaving their recollections into this luminous story of fear and courage, struggle and redemption that readers will discover is Selma, Lord, Selma.

Exploring the people, politics, and events that shaped Selma from 1815 through the twentieth century.

In 1989, Alston Fitts published a brief history of the city of Selma, Alabama, from its founding through the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Selma: A Bicentennial History is a greatly revised and expanded version of Fitts’s history of the city, replete with a wealth of new, never-before-published illustrations, which further develops a number of significant events, corrects critical errors, and, most importantly, incorporates many new stories and materials that document Selma’s establishment, growth, and development.

Comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and nonpartisan, Fitts’s pleasantly accessible history addresses every major issue, movement, and trend from the city’s settlement in 1815 to the end of the twentieth century. Its commerce, institutions, governance, as well as its evolving racial, religious, and class composition are all treated with candor and depth. Selma’s transformative role within the state and the nation is fully explored, and most notable is a nuanced and complex discussion of race relations from the rise of the civil rights era to modern times.

Historians, scholars, and Alabamians will find great use for this updated and fully developed exploration of Selma’s rich, complex, and significant history.