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    How Bright the Path Grows

    The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

    Author Marcia Chatelain On Tour
    Hardcover
    $35.00 US
    Knopf | Pantheon
    On sale Sep 29, 2026 | 400 Pages | 9780553387254
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    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington

    “Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses

    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.

    How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.
    MARCIA CHATELAIN is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015) and Franchise (Liveright, 2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award, the Hagley Medal for Business History, and the Lawrence 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. View titles by Marcia Chatelain
    "Chatelain has done what I didn’t know was possible. She has rendered, with clarity and care, the lives of women who shaped the March on Washington but have been relegated to the margins of its memories. How Bright the Path Grows is more than a corrective. It is as much revelation as it is instruction. Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget."—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses

    "Marcia Chatelain brilliantly reframes one of the most enduring images in American memory through the women erased from its frame. How Bright the Path Grows is far larger than a corrective to a single day. It is a devastating, deeply felt account of how Black women carried freedom struggles through Jim Crow terror, labor wars, church organizing, political humiliations, private grief, and impossible public courage, only to be reduced by history to atmosphere at the very moment they were helping bend the nation toward itself."—Alexis Coe, New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First

    About

    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington

    “Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses

    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.

    How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

    Author

    MARCIA CHATELAIN is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015) and Franchise (Liveright, 2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award, the Hagley Medal for Business History, and the Lawrence 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. View titles by Marcia Chatelain

    Praise

    "Chatelain has done what I didn’t know was possible. She has rendered, with clarity and care, the lives of women who shaped the March on Washington but have been relegated to the margins of its memories. How Bright the Path Grows is more than a corrective. It is as much revelation as it is instruction. Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget."—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses

    "Marcia Chatelain brilliantly reframes one of the most enduring images in American memory through the women erased from its frame. How Bright the Path Grows is far larger than a corrective to a single day. It is a devastating, deeply felt account of how Black women carried freedom struggles through Jim Crow terror, labor wars, church organizing, political humiliations, private grief, and impossible public courage, only to be reduced by history to atmosphere at the very moment they were helping bend the nation toward itself."—Alexis Coe, New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First

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