About the Author

Tracy Sugarman, born 1921 in Syracuse, NY, was a renowned American illustrator with an active career spanning more than sixty years. He did commercial art for magazines, made over 100 record album covers, and illustrated dozens of childrens' books.

He was politically engaged, becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement in the early sixties, and was inspired after hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at a local Connecticut synagogue, joined the Freedom Summer program in 1964, where he documented the work of young community organizers and the people they worked with in Ruleville, Mississippi. The work he did during two summers in the South was turned into this book, Stranger at the Gates, published by Hill and Wang in 1966.

Tracy was actively engaged in progressive political work for the entirety of his long life.

In his later years, he published several books of writing and art, including My War, which documented his time in the US Navy during WWII and We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns, which is a first hand account of the early years of the civil rights movement. His first novel, Nobody Said Amen was published when he was 91.