How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington | Washington Independent Review of Books
Book ReviewinNon-Fiction,
History,
United States
How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington
- By Marcia Chatelain
- Pantheon
- 416 pp.
- Reviewed by Robert Beauregard
- October 27, 2026
A worthy corrective to the historical record.
Histories of the Civil Rights Movement invariably feature men: Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, and A. Philip Randolph, among others. Less often mentioned — the exception being Rosa Parks, whose arrest on a Mongomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 triggered one of the most successful boycotts in American history — are the women, including Daisy Bates (“an icon of the movement,” according to author Marcia Chatelain, and instrumental in bringing about school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas), Gloria Richardson, who led anti-segregation efforts in Tennessee and Maryland, and the highly accomplished, lifelong political organizer Anna Hedgeman.
Chatelain, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, seeks in her new book, How Bright the Path Grows, to re-balance the historical record: Black women were more than “appendages to movement leadership.” She profiles Parks, Bates, Richardson, and Hedgeman, along with voting-rights activist Prince Estella Melson Lee; Myrlie Evers (widow of the slain Medgar); Freedom Riders organizer Diane Nash; renowned singers Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, and Odetta; well-known choir director Eva Jessye; and cabaret performer Josephine Baker, a questionable inclusion given that Baker lived in France and had little direct involvement in civil-rights activities in the United States.
What led Chatelain to write about these women
What led Chatelain to write about these women is that they were all invited to the 1963 March on Washington, attended by an estimated half-million people and “one of the most significant events in the story of American democracy.” Their inclusion in the program, however, was achieved only after standing up to the men who conceived and planned the march.
Initially, these men proposed simply acknowledging the women from the main stage. Under pressure, they eventually agreed to a tribute during which Jackson and Anderson would sing and a few women would make brief remarks. On the day of the march, unfortunately, Randolph bungled his tribute. As Chatelain comments, this “did nothing to retire any of [Hedgeman’s] criticisms of the sexism still in the movement,” while Richardson considered the “nod to the women” embarrassing and insulting.
And although the march included a pre-program at which Odetta and soprano Camilla Williams performed and Baker briefly spoke, it was held early in the day and far distant from the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Chatelain notes the disparity in the fame
Chatelain notes the disparity in the fame and fortune achieved by some of the men in the movement compared to the women. Frequently in debt, Parks, for example, lived a precarious existence despite being “the unofficial patron saint of the Black struggle.” And Myrlie Evers, whom Chatelain describes as “a true voice and face of the movement,” had to decline her invitation to the March on Washington for financial reasons.
How Bright the Path Grows is a book with an outspoken feminist agenda. Chatelain wants historians to acknowledge the brave and talented women who gave so much to the pursuit of racial justice and received so little in return. Consequently, this is history less academic than popular, one devoid of nuanced debate and heavy on individual stories. Its goals are to provoke and inspire, as well as to inform, and the author does all three quite ably.
I was disappointed, though, that Chatelain portrayed these women almost solely as activists. They were manhandled by police and racist counter-protesters; insulted and ostracized in public; targeted by anonymous threats; underappreciated by the men with whom they worked; and ceaselessly in search of a decent job. Their lives were fraught with anxiety, fear, and disappointment. Missing from the profiles — and, seemingly, their lives — was laughter, delight, and intimacy. I wanted these women to be more than symbols of moral steadfastness; I wanted them to be people.
(The words of early-20th-century activist Emma Goldman come
(The words of early-20th-century activist Emma Goldman come to mind: “I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful idea, anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. If it meant that, I did not want it.”)
Nonetheless,this booktells a sobering, all-too-familiar story of women whose accomplishments were attributed to men or relegated to historical footnotes. Chatelain deserves considerable praise for doing her part to resist and correct the “impulses that regularly shunt women from the center frame of history.”
Robert Beauregard is emeritus professor at Columbia University writing on politics, postwar U.S. history, social theory, and current events.
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