📍Troy, Pike County, Alabama, USA
1940 – 1957“I grew up on my family's farm outside Troy, in Pike County, Alabama, the third of ten children of sharecroppers who saved to buy 110 acres of their own. We grew cotton, peanuts and corn, and at harvest time I had to leave school to help in the fields. I did my best to talk my way out of picking cotton. My job was to look after the chickens, and I would preach to them every evening, baptising the young ones and holding funerals for those that died. I believe I was practising for my life's work. The Jim Crow South surrounded us. I saw the signs saying White and Coloured, and my parents warned me not to get in trouble. I went to Dunn's Chapel School and then to the Pike County Training School, knowing full well that the white children's schools were better. When I was sixteen, my brothers, sisters, cousins and I went to the public library in Troy to ask for library cards, and we were told the library was for whites only. I never forgot it. On our radio I heard the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott, and it changed my life. I went to college in Nashville, joined the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, led the Selma march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and served in Congress for more than thirty years. I never stopped calling it good trouble. In 1998 I went back to the Troy library to sign copies of my memoir, and they gave me a library card at last. Pike County now honours me with a historical marker.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today