Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers featured in USA Today
Spriggs' new book keeps history alive
Bill Cotterell, Democrat correspondent
We don't grasp the importance of history as we're living through it.
To us, it's just current events. We hope everything turns out all right, as it happens, and then decades later we look back and think, "Hey, that stuff really changed our lives."
Tallahassee attorney Kent Spriggs, who was in the thick of the civil-rights movement as a young attorney, has compiled a fascinating series of essays of that era.
Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers, newly published by the University Press of Florida, tells first-person tales from the front lines of struggle.
Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South, 1964-1980
The Most Important Slave Revolt That Never Happened
Olivia B. Waxman
How do you prove that something happened when the only testimony about the event comes from people who weren't directly involved, and who may have been under duress at the time of their testimony?
That's a question that confronts historians who study the story of Denmark Vesey, a black carpenter who bought his freedom after winning the lottery and then secretly plotted a slave rebellion in Charleston, S.C., in 1822.