A High Price for Freedom - by Clyde W Ford (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about Black history.

History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.

What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?

In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver--a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.

Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, "Sister, isn't this a high price for freedom?"

Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew.

Review Quotes

A gifted and erudite storyteller, Ford illuminates connections running through the centuries until the "Black Freedom Struggle," as he prefers to call what is better known as the Civil Rights Movement--the genius, courage, and strength of an unjustly oppressed people with an acute awareness of the world around them and a hunger to make things right...A thought-provoking chronicle that speaks to our times. - Kirkus Reviews
"A High Price for Freedom bravely excavates untold history that is not only important to the Black Freedom Struggle, but to American history at large." - Susana Morris, Author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
"In his engaging and robust retelling of this vital part of African American history, Ford reminds us that history is alive and dynamic... Whether he is amplifying the voices of lesser-known historical figures or he is disclosing lesser-known aspects of the lives and works of more well-known figures, Ford has added informative and enlightening strands to the tapestry of African American history. ... A High Price for Freedom is a bridge from the past to the present, cataclysmic moment. It is an existential space wherein ancestral voices commune with contemporary humanity." - Deborah G. Plant, author of Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Justice For All