Selma

In 1989, Alston Fitts published a brief history of the city of Selma, Alabama, from its founding through the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Selma: A Bicentennial History is a greatly revised and expanded version of Fitts’s history of the city, replete with a wealth of new, never-before-published illustrations, which further develops a number of significant events, corrects critical errors, and, most importantly, incorporates many new stories and materials that document Selma’s establishment, growth, and development.
 
Comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and nonpartisan, Fitts’s pleasantly accessible history addresses every major issue, movement, and trend from the city’s settlement in 1815 to the end of the twentieth century. Its commerce, institutions, governance, as well as its evolving racial, religious, and class composition are all treated with candor and depth. Selma’s transformative role within the state and the nation is fully explored, and most notable is a nuanced and complex discussion of race relations from the rise of the civil rights era to modern times.
 
Historians, scholars, and Alabamians will find great use for this updated and fully developed exploration of Selma’s rich, complex, and significant history.

Selma: A Bicentennial History is a sweeping account of the history of the city of Selma from its founding to the present and is a wellspring of new information about every facet of this storied city, including a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement there and its continuing effects to this day.

Alston Fitts III is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who earned a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1964 and a PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 1974. A former English teacher, Fitts served for decades as the director of information and principal fundraiser for the Edmundite Missions, a Catholic organization based in Selma.

List of Illustrations