Concord, Massachusetts
Two weeks of talks, readings, and discussions celebrating the written and the spoken word.
Nathaniel Philbrick
Gish Jen
Andrew Bacevich
Pauline Maier
How You Can Participate
- Attend: Most events are free. All events are open to the public. Events that require a ticket are so indicated and include information about how and where to obtain tickets.
- Donate: The festival is produced by a non-profit foundation and depends greatly on individual support. Tax deductible donations in any amount are encouraged and can be made online.
- Sponsor: Corporate sponsorship is welcomed and is available. For information please .
Andrew B. Lewis
Events: The Civil Rights Generation
Book: The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
Andrew Lewis teaches history at Wesleyan University and is a specialist in the history of the American civil rights movement. His books include Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: A Documentary History of the Civil Rights Movement, with Julian Bond.
Through the lives of Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Bob Zellner, Julian Bond, Marion Barry, John Lewis, and their contemporaries, The Shadows of Youth provides a carefully woven group biography of the activists who challenged the way Americans think about civil rights, politics, and moral obligation in an unjust democracy. It unearths the cultural currents that turned a disparate group of young adults into skilled freedom fighters and establishes the centrality of their achievement in the movement’s accomplishments.
The teenagers who launched sit-ins across the South in the summer of 1961 became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists and veterans without whom the civil rights movement could not have succeeded. In the trajectory of their lives is visible the entire arc of the most decisive era of the American civil rights movement.