It was the summer of 1962. Howard University student Charles Cobb Jr. was passing through Jackson, Miss., on his way to a civil rights leadership training conference in Houston.

He stepped off the bus and made his way to Jackson's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee office, which it shared with the Congress of Racial Equality, the group that invited Cobb to participate in the Texas conference.

Cobb introduced himself to members of the local SNCC and told them where he was headed.

"Civil rights workshop in Texas!" piped up Lawrence Guyot, one of the students involved in Jackson sit-ins. "Tell me, just what's the point of going to Texas for a workshop on civil rights when you're standing right here in Mississippi?" Guyot asked.

With that statement, Cobb said Guyot had challenged him to not only learn about the civil rights movement, but to do something about the inequality that was all around them. It was a challenge Cobb took on for five years in what he calls one of the "hot spots" of the civil rights movement.

"Mississippi was like some alien universe," the Washington, D.C., native said. "I knew police brutality in an entirely different way."

Cobb said civil rights organizer and educator Robert "Bob" Moses summed it up best: "When you're in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn't seem real. And when you're in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn't seem real."

Cobb, who served as an SNCC field secretary while in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, has had great success in his career. A founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, Cobb has reported for National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service's "Frontline," National Geographic and WHUR Radio in Washington, D.C. He currently works as a senior writer for AllAfrica.com and co-authored the book "Radical Equations" with Moses.

So it's no surprise that the civil rights veteran and writer has completed another project that takes readers on a tour of the U.S. civil rights movement. His new book is titled, "On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail."

Cobb said "On the Road" was born out of a 2003 article, "Full Circle," published by AARP: The Magazine. That article attracted the attention of Algonquin Books Publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt, who encouraged Cobb to delve deeper in his topic and write a book.

"As a writer, I wanted to get the story of the movement out, as I understand it, and I think place kind of pulls you into the movement," he said of why he chose to write "On the Road" as a travel book, complete with street addresses for historic markers, first-person interviews, speeches, maps and photos.

"Like many in my generation, I found myself in a situation that wound up requiring deeper involvement than I had planned," Cobb said of his time working in the civil rights movement. He said prior to Feb. 1, 1960, "civil rights was always something grown-ups did."

On that day 48 years ago, four North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students challenged a local lunch counter by sitting in after being refused service because of the color of their skin. There was a place they could order food and sodas, but black customers were expected to carry their purchases out of the store.

So the students came back to F.W. Woolworth Department Store's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., every day for nearly a week, bringing more and more protesters with them each time. While it wasn't the nation's first sit-in, the students' actions managed to light a fire in the movement, and sit-ins sprang up in cities across the South.

In his narrative, Cobb visits cities like Greensboro and talks to people who were a part of the civil rights movement. "On the Road" gives readers a tour of the American South of the 1940s, '50s and '60s, starting in Washington, D.C., and traveling south through Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Readers will see first-hand accounts of marches, sit-ins, bus rides and church gatherings, retracing the s.jpg of the pioneers of the civil rights movement and the ordinary folks whose contributions paved the way for change.

Telling the everyday stories alongside the extraordinary ones "gives you some insight into the fact that it was really ordinary people that made the movement," Cobb said.

"There was far more material than I realized starting out the book," he said of the three-year project. "There is such a wealth of material, and I had to make some hard decisions. I spent a long time on each chapter and always felt guilty when I concluded a chapter and left something out."

He describes "On the Road" as "very much a travel book dedicated to the 'modern' civil rights movement." Recurring themes include the role of women in the movement and the challenges made to black people during the civil rights era, Cobb said.

Closer to home, Cobb said there were many acts of resistance to the way blacks were being treated in South Carolina. From black school teacher and Charleston native Septima Poinsette Clark, who fought for equal access to education and civil rights for black Americans, to Orangeburg's black parents petitioning for desegregated schools and losing their jobs in the process, Cobb said blacks were not willing to back down from their fight for equal rights.

Orangeburg, Cobb writes, was home to the state's first White Citizens Council, which attempted to put pressure on black businesses by preventing the delivery of goods because of the fight for school desegregation. But in 1956, blacks turned the tables, boycotting 23 white-owned businesses and providing a relief fund to assist black businesses hurt by the council's pressure.

Sit-ins broke out in Orangeburg on the heels of those in Greensboro, and in 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed, and white restaurants began, albeit reluctantly, to serve their black customers.

Cobb said Orangeburg had a very strong sit-in movement in the 1960s, thanks to S.C. State and Claflin universities. He said prior to what has become known as the "Orangeburg Massacre," most of Orangeburg and the U.S. had desegregated.

In February 1968, All-Star Triangle Bowl in Orangeburg became the focal point of civil rights protests over its whites-only policy. The unrest led to the night of Feb. 8, 1968, when highway patrolmen opened fire on a protest at then-South Carolina State College, killing three students and wounding 27 others.

"It's an oddity," he said of the event. "A lot of racism was still left. By that time, it was almost a throwback to the earlier days of white resistance."

Cobb said his book is different from many written about civil rights history. It is not an autobiography, but rather a concise book about the people and places of the movement, he said.

"Part of the reason I wrote it as a story has to do with making the book as appealing and interesting to young people as I could," Cobb said. "It's written tight. It's not the whole story, or even most of the story."

In the future, Cobb said he plans to write more books about the civil rights era.

"It's a deep well you can keep dipping into," he said. "There are other stories to tell. I have other ideas in my head, and some of them will become books.

"The Barack Obamas, Colin Powells, Condoleezza Rices, Bakari Sellerses really do tell you there's been a profound shift in the U.S., as to what black people can aspire to in the U.S., but it doesn't mean all the problems have been solved, that racism has been obliterated."

In addition to his work with AllAfrica.com, Cobb is a visiting professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he teaches a course titled "Organizing traditions of the Southern civil rights movement."

T&D Features Editor Wendy Jeffcoat Crider can be reached by e-mail at wjeffcoat@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5546. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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