For daddy and "Uncle Martin".

The momentous March on Washington. The tragedy of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The inspiring march from Selma to Montgomery. These are all very poignant and significant moments of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as American history. These events are particularly memorable for actress Donzaleigh Abernathy, who not only witnessed them but also actively participated in them as a youngster, on the front lines along with her siblings. The youngest daughter of civil rights leader Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, she was raised with a responsibility to help humanity and serve others.

In Partners to History, Abernathy chronicles this history through photographs and excerpts from speeches, sermons and journal entries from her father and Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. The book is a documentary from a child's viewpoint. In fact, the children in Abernathy's family were one of the major motivations for this book, which is dedicated to her nieces and nephews. "I want them to know who Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were and what they did," she says. The first person accounts from Rev. Abernathy and other heroes in the movement provide an excellent reference for future historians and readers of all ages.

The idea came to Abernathy following a speech she delivered in Los Angeles three years after her father's death in 1990. She spent hours researching the newspaper archives at the Library of Congress, and the book contains more than 350 stirring black-and-white photographs. Her research, she says, enabled her to see her father and "Uncle Martin" in a different light. According to Chris Jackson, a senior editor at Crown, Partners to History "allows you to see people who have become larger than life and brings them back to a human scale ... you see them as men with families. By bringing them down to a human scale, they become more heroic."

--Reviewed by Trevy A. McDonald

Trevy A. McDonald is the author of Time Will Tell and coeditor of How We Got Over: Testimonies of Faith, Hope, and Courage.

Partners to History: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and the Civil Rights Movement by Donzaleigh Abernathy Crown, October 2003 $29.95, ISBN 1-575-44047-4