This movie is based on the memoir "Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days" by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson, as told to Frank Sikora, first published in 1980.
The schoolteacher Miss Bright was played by Yolanda King, the first born child of Dr. Martin Luther King JR. and his wife Coretta. Yolanda was a civil rights activist born in Montgomery, Alabama & passed away in 2007 at the age of 51.
This is the first TV movie about the Civil Rights movement that depicts Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that has one of his children paying an acting role in it. In this movie, the Kings' first-born child, Yolanda King, plays Miss Bright. The second was 2002's The Rosa Parks Story, in which Dexter King, the third-born child of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, plays his own father.