Judith Wright and Tom Fels

Judith Wright was born in 1939 and is an artist living in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  She became a Freedom Rider and was jailed in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1961. Later, in 1964, she spent a year in Meridian, Mississippi working with her husband Sib in the Civil Rights Movement.

Acts of Resistance; A Freedom Rider Looks Back on the Civil Rights Movement  is a memoir telling the story of my personal journey from a teenager longing for a meaningful life and continues through my experiences during the height of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi.  It covers the Freedom  Ride, my arrest in Jackson, and my time in Parchman State Penitentiary.  Some of the many incidents I faced three years later in Meridian, Mississippi, both heartbreaking and uplifting, fill the later chapters.  The despair, the joy, the victories and the failures—-they all are at the heart of my narratives.  The reader will encounter some of the people I worked with along with accounts of their bravery and suffering.  At the same time, my own feelings fill these pages: I am telling the first hand story of what it was like for one person who was there.

Late in the summer of 1970 Tom Fels embarked on a voyage of discovery and self-exploration as befitted a 24-year-old in search of purpose and meaning in a world of political chaos and social disarray. At the time, he was temporarily on leave from the farm commune in western Massachusetts at which he then made his home. He decided that he needed to find his personal bearings, and set out to discover them on his own. A Tree With Roots is the story of that voyage. It takes the author to Paris, Scotland, and then again to Paris, ending with the prospect of a happier, more meaningful path ahead. The transcribed journal with its personal entries and letters is accompanied by explanatory text and enhanced with illustrations from the pages of the original journal. It is a book that is meant to be read and enjoyed, a goal to which its large format is intended to contribute.

Tom Fels is a curator, writer, and artist whose ties to Cape Ann go back more than fifty years. In May 2013 he was writer-in-residence at the Writers Center, when he read from his second book on the era of the 1960s; A Tree With Roots is his third.

His art is represented on Cape Ann by the Jane Deering Gallery on Pleasant Street. Fels has worked as consultant and guest curator to a number of museums. His exhibitions have been shown at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 1986 he was named a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1998 a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow of the Huntington Library. He has written widely on the arts. Since 2005 he has focused his research and writing on the era of the 1960s and its repercussions. Farm Friends was published in 2008, and Buying the Farm in 2012. A Tree With Roots appeared in 2018. He is also the author of numerous articles and reviews on the era.