Marching in Montgomery

John J. Hartman offers a personal memoir and a historical account of his part in the protest demonstrations in Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. His book shows how peaceful civil disobedience was answered with police violence sanctioned by the state, and how that confrontation eventually brought meaningful social change.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came directly out of the Selma to Montgomery campaign. It also set off a reaction of White grievance and backlash that is still plainly visible in American politics today. Archival photographs of the key figures, the protests, and the police violence accompany the text, and the author appears in some of them. A final chapter surveys how the question of voting rights for all citizens remains unsettled, since efforts to undo the gains of the civil rights movement continue in Alabama and across the country.

John J. Hartman, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Florida Psychoanalytic Center in Miami and a member of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society and the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Center. He has taught at UCLA, the University of Michigan, and the University of Tampa, and is currently Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the University of South Florida.

He co-wrote the book Analysis of Groups and has published over 35 articles and book chapters on psychoanalysis, small groups, art, propaganda, and the Holocaust. He also founded and directs Remembrance and Reconciliation, Inc., a nonprofit foundation devoted to remembering the Jews of Galicia and healing the wounds of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe.