The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi

Abstract

Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, this book’s chapters tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. Chapters raise questions about how civil rights organizing took place. Three pairs of chapters address African Americans’ and whites’ stories on education, religion, and the issues of violence. These chapters analyze civil rights issues on the campuses of Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi. Further chapters 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, the text also 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. One chapter analyzes the degree to which voting rights translated into political power for African American legislators. Another studies a Freedom School that started in recent years in the Mississippi Delta. A last chapter details the conflicting memories of Claiborne County residents and the parts of the civil rights movement they recall or ignore.