CRADLE OF FREEDOM: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America by Frye Gaillard

Publisher University of Alabama Press, March 2004

CRADLE OF FREEDOM puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s.

From the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Bloody Sunday, and the Black Power movement in the Black Belt, this history tells how ordinary people rose to the challenges of an unfair system with a will and determination that changed their times forever. It is a fascinating and extraordinary story that Gaillard tells with the dramatic flow of a novel, yet it is based on meticulous research.

"Gaillard’s work achieves a level of balance and fairness that all professional historians and journalists aspire to but seldom realize… In trying to do justice to this universal tale of events that brought out the best and worst in people, Gaillard displays an uncanny eye for telling detail and an ear for Southern voices… The epic story is driven as compellingly by the cast of thousands on both sides of the racial divide as by their leaders."
-- John Egerton, author of Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South

"This is a thoughtful and well-researched history of the modern civil rights movement in Alabama, but it is no ‘just the facts’ account. Frye Gaillard writes with the grace and craft of a first-rate novelist, and Cradle of Freedom is a welcome reminder that good history and good storytelling can go together."
-- Dan T. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage

Frye Gaillard is a freelance writer and author of 19 books, including The Dream Long Deferred, Becoming Truly Free: 300 Years of Black History in the Carolinas, and Race, Rock, and Religion: Profiles from a Southern Journalist.