The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi

The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi PDF Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617039330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, these twelve essays tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. Wesley Hogan, Françoise N. Hamlin, and Michael Vinson Williams raise questions about how civil rights organizing took place. Three pairs of essays address African Americans' and whites' stories on education, religion, and the issues of violence. Jelani Favors and Robert Luckett analyze civil rights issues on the campuses of Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi. Carter Dalton Lyon and Joseph T. Reiff study people who confronted the question of how their religion related to their possible involvement in civil rights activism. By studying the Ku Klux Klan and the Deacons for Defense in Mississippi, David Cunningham and Akinyele Umoja ask who chose to use violence or to raise its possibility. The final three chapters describe some of the consequences and continuing questions raised by the civil rights movement. Byron D'Andra Orey analyzes the degree to which voting rights translated into political power for African American legislators. Chris Myers Asch studies a Freedom School that started in recent years in the Mississippi Delta. Emilye Crosby details the conflicting memories of Claiborne County residents and the parts of the civil rights movement they recall or ignore. As a group, the essays introduce numerous new characters and conundrums into civil rights scholarship, advance efforts to study African Americans and whites as interactive agents in the complex stories, and encourage historians to pull civil rights scholarship closer toward the present.

The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi

The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi PDF Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617039330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, these twelve essays tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. Wesley Hogan, Françoise N. Hamlin, and Michael Vinson Williams raise questions about how civil rights organizing took place. Three pairs of essays address African Americans' and whites' stories on education, religion, and the issues of violence. Jelani Favors and Robert Luckett analyze civil rights issues on the campuses of Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi. Carter Dalton Lyon and Joseph T. Reiff study people who confronted the question of how their religion related to their possible involvement in civil rights activism. By studying the Ku Klux Klan and the Deacons for Defense in Mississippi, David Cunningham and Akinyele Umoja ask who chose to use violence or to raise its possibility. The final three chapters describe some of the consequences and continuing questions raised by the civil rights movement. Byron D'Andra Orey analyzes the degree to which voting rights translated into political power for African American legislators. Chris Myers Asch studies a Freedom School that started in recent years in the Mississippi Delta. Emilye Crosby details the conflicting memories of Claiborne County residents and the parts of the civil rights movement they recall or ignore. As a group, the essays introduce numerous new characters and conundrums into civil rights scholarship, advance efforts to study African Americans and whites as interactive agents in the complex stories, and encourage historians to pull civil rights scholarship closer toward the present.

Local People

Local People PDF Author: John Dittmer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Traces the monumental battle waged by civil rights organizations and by local people to establish basic human rights for all citizens of Mississippi

The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964

The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964 PDF Author: James P. Marshall
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168750
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
In the early 1960s, civil rights activists and the Kennedy administration engaged in parallel, though not always complementary, efforts to overcome Mississippi’s extreme opposition to racial desegregation. In The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964, James P. Marshall uncovers this history through primary source documents that explore the legal and political strategies of the federal government, follows the administration’s changing and sometimes contentious relationship with civil rights organizations, and reveals the tactics used by local and state entities in Mississippi to stem the advancement of racial equality. A historian and longtime civil rights activist, Marshall collects a vast array of documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and excerpts from his own 1960s interviews with leading figures in the movement for racial justice. This volume tracks early forms of resistance to racial parity adopted by the White Citizens’ Councils and chapters of the Ku Klux Klan at the local level as well as by Mississippi congressmen and other elected officials who used both legal obstructionism and extra-legal actions to block efforts meant to promote integration. Quoting from interviews and correspondence among the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members, government officials, and other constituents of the Democratic Party, Marshall also explores decisions about voter registration drives and freedom rides as well as formal efforts by the Kennedy administration—including everything from minority hiring initiatives to federal litigation and party platform changes—to exert pressure on Mississippi to end segregation. Through a carefully curated selection of letters, interviews, government records, and legal documents, The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964 sheds new light on the struggle to advance racial justice for African Americans living in the Magnolia State.

Spies of Mississippi

Spies of Mississippi PDF Author: Rick Bowers
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426307365
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The Spies of Mississippi is a compelling story of how state spies tried to block voting rights for African Americans during the Civil Rights era. This book sheds new light on one of the most momentous periods in American history. Author Rick Bowers has combed through primary-source materials and interviewed surviving activists named in once-secret files, as well as the writings and oral histories of Mississippi civil rights leaders. Readers get first-hand accounts of how neighbors spied on neighbors, teachers spied on students, ministers spied on church-goers, and spies even spied on spies. The Spies of Mississippi will inspire readers with the stories of the brave citizens who overcame the forces of white supremacy to usher in a new era of hope and freedom—an age that has recently culminated in the election of Barack Obama

Mississippi Praying

Mississippi Praying PDF Author: Carolyn Renée Dupont
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814708412
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South. Carolyn Renée Dupont is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY.

Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country

Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country PDF Author: Roy DeBerry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496828852
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country is a collection of interviews with residents of Benton County, Mississippi—an area with a long and fascinating civil rights history. The product of more than twenty-five years of work by the Hill Country Project, this volume examines a revolutionary period in American history through the voices of farmers, teachers, sharecroppers, and students. No other rural farming county in the American South has yet been afforded such a deep dive into its civil rights experiences and their legacies. These accumulated stories truly capture life before, during, and after the movement. The authors’ approach places the region’s history in context and reveals everyday struggles. African American residents of Benton County had been organizing since the 1930s. Citizens formed a local chapter of the NAACP in the 1940s and ’50s. One of the first Mississippi counties to get a federal registrar under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Benton achieved the highest per capita total of African American registered voters in Mississippi. Locals produced a regular, clandestinely distributed newsletter, the Benton County Freedom Train. In addition to documenting this previously unrecorded history, personal narratives capture pivotal moments of individual lives and lend insight into the human cost and the long-term effects of social movements. Benton County residents explain the events that shaped their lives and ultimately, in their own humble way, helped shape the trajectory of America. Through these first-person stories and with dozens of captivating photos covering more than a century’s worth of history, the volume presents a vivid picture of a people and a region still striving for the prize of equality and justice.

I've Got the Light of Freedom

I've Got the Light of Freedom PDF Author: Charles M. Payne
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520207066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.

The Freedom Schools

The Freedom Schools PDF Author: Jon N. Hale
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Created in 1964 as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Schools were launched by educators and activists to provide an alternative education for African American students that would facilitate student activism and participatory democracy. The schools, as Jon N. Hale demonstrates, had a crucial role in the civil rights movement and a major impact on the development of progressive education throughout the nation. Designed and run by African American and white educators and activists, the Freedom Schools counteracted segregationist policies that inhibited opportunities for black youth. Providing high-quality, progressive education that addressed issues of social justice, the schools prepared African American students to fight for freedom on all fronts. Forming a political network, the Freedom Schools taught students how, when, and where to engage politically, shaping activists who trained others to challenge inequality. Based on dozens of first-time interviews with former Freedom School students and teachers and on rich archival materials, this remarkable social history of the Mississippi Freedom Schools is told from the perspective of those frequently left out of civil rights narratives that focus on national leadership or college protestors. Hale reveals the role that school-age students played in the civil rights movement and the crucial contribution made by grassroots activists on the local level. He also examines the challenges confronted by Freedom School activists and teachers, such as intimidation by racist Mississippians and race relations between blacks and whites within the schools. In tracing the stories of Freedom School students into adulthood, this book reveals the ways in which these individuals turned training into decades of activism. Former students and teachers speak eloquently about the principles that informed their practice and the influence that the Freedom School curriculum has had on education. They also offer key strategies for further integrating the American school system and politically engaging today's youth.

Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

Beaches, Blood, and Ballots PDF Author: James Patterson Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604735932
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened by court order, documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's secret files enhance this riveting memoir written by a major civil rights figure in Mississippi. He joined his friends and allies Aaron Henry and the martyred Medgar Evers to combat injustices in one of the nation's most notorious bastions of segregation. In Mississippi, the civil rights struggle began in May 1959 with "w

Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi

Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi PDF Author: Tiyi Makeda Morris
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820347302
Category : African American women
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Morris provides the first comprehensive examination of the Jackson, Mississippi-based women's organization Womanpower Unlimited. Originally instated in 1961 to sustain the civil rights movement, the organization also revitalized black women's social and political activism in the state through its diverse agenda and grassroots approach.