Contributions by Chris Myers Asch, Emilye Crosby, David Cunningham,
Jelani Favors, Françoise N. Hamlin, Wesley Hogan, Robert Luckett, Carter
Dalton Lyon, Byron D'Andra Orey, Ted Ownby, Joseph T. Reiff, Akinyele
Umoja, and Michael Vinson Williams
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.
