Lying just south of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were murdered during Freedom Summer, Clarke County lay squarely in Mississippi's--and America's--meanest corner. Even at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when the clarion call for equality and justice echoed around the country, few volunteers ventured there. Fewer still remained. Local African Americans knew why the movement had taken so long to reach them. Some spoke of a bottomless pit in the snaking Chickasawhay River in the town of Shubuta, into which white vigilantes dumped bodies. Others pointed to...
Lying just south of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were murdered during Freedom Summer, Clarke County lay squarely in Mississippi's-...
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the "southern way of life" through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites...
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled t...
At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) compiled hundreds of statements from activists and everyday citizens who endured police abuse and vigilante violence. Fifty-seven of those testimonies appear in Mississippi Black Paper. The statements recount how white officials and everyday citizens employed assassinations, beatings, harassment, and petty meanness to block any change in the state's segregated status quo.
The testimonies in Mississippi...
At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the Council of F...
At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) compiled hundreds of statements from activists and everyday citizens who endured police abuse and vigilante violence. Fifty-seven of those testimonies appear in Mississippi Black Paper. The statements recount how white officials and everyday citizens employed assassinations, beatings, harassment, and petty meanness to block any change in the state's segregated status quo.
The testimonies in Mississippi...
At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the Council of F...
