My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement

Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, debut author Willie Mae Brown crafts an unforgettable memoir about growing up amidst the civil rights movement in a town at the crossroads of history.

As the civil rights movement and the fight for voter rights unfold in Selma, Alabama, many things happen inside and outside the Brown family’s home that do not have anything to do with the landmark 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yet the famous outrages which unfold on that span form an inescapable backdrop in this collection of stories about the everyday and the extraordinary. In one, twelve-year-old Willie Mae takes it upon herself to offer summer babysitting services to a glamorous single white mother--a secret she keeps from her parents that unravels with shocking results. In another, Willie Mae reluctantly joins her mother at a church rally, and is forever changed after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a defiant speech in spite of a court injunction.

Infused with the vernacular of her Southern upbringing, My Selma captures the voice and vision of a fascinating young person--perspicacious, impetuous, and resourceful in her ways of seeing the world around her--who gifts us with a loving portrayal of her hometown while also delivering a no-holds-barred indictment of the time and place.

Willie Mae Brown left Alabama at the age of seventeen in 1970 to start a new life in Brooklyn, New York, where she worked for the New York Telephone Company until 2003. A visual artist as well as an author, she began writing stories about her childhood in 2012 and reading them in public in 2015. Known for infusing her personal narratives with the vernacular of her Southern upbringing, Brown has read at numerous public events including Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations at Brooklyn Borough Hall, as well as at many special events across the city, in her home state, and beyond. My Selma is her first book.