“A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg — from A Stone That the Builders Rejected”: Black and White in Mississippi David Chalmers (bio) Nicolaus Mills. Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 — The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. 222 pp. Notes and index. $22.50 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). John Dittmer. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 530 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Charles M. Payne. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 525 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $28.00. Eric R. Burner. And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi. New York: New York University Press, 1994. 294 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95. Kay Mills. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Dutton, 1993. 390 pp. Notes and index. $24.00 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Seth Cagin and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Bantam, 1988. 613 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $5.95. Jack Nelson. Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. 287 pp. Illustrations and index. $22.00. Adam Nossiter. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. 303 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $22.00 (cloth); $12.00 (paper). Doug McAdam. Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. x 333 pp. Notes and index. $11.95. At a 1994 Freedom Summer anniversary reunion in Jackson, Mississippi, SNCC staffer Chuck McDew described the showing of an advance print of the film Mississippi Burning to the students at Jackson State University. When the students applauded and cheered the movie’s story, which was, as McDew described it, about “the bonding of two heroic FBI guys who had come down to Mississippi to save the poor darkies,” it was clear that there was a lot of history that needed learning. Perhaps it was because the condition of black people seemed more hopeless and the struggle more brutal in Mississippi that it became the ultimate 1960s test of youthful courage and social justice in America. The first SNCC and CORE, volunteers, mostly black, rode the buses into Mississippi in the summer of 1961. With a solidarity forged in jail, they provided the shock troops of the movement. Led by Robert Moses, a twenty-six-year-old New York City math teacher, they turned to voter registration. Joined by black Mississippi students and teenagers, they faced unremitting violence. As they commented ironically about the national government that gave them no help or protection, there was a town in Mississippi named “Liberty” and a Department in Washington called “Justice.” Three years later they brought in the summer volunteers, mostly young upper-middle-class northern whites, and with the volunteers came the national media. Altogether, the SNCC and CORE staffers in Mississippi numbered perhaps half a hundred, plus approximately 650 volunteers who worked during some portion of the 1964 summer, some 80 who stayed afterward, and another smaller group who came in for a reduced program the next summer. In addition, various groups of doctors, nurses, lawyers, ministers, priests, rabbis, educators, and psychologists offered some support for the volunteers and activists. Within two years more, most of those who had come from outside were gone, leaving the local folk to fight on. The struggle produced martyrs, legends, controversy, and a continuing flow of books, which until now have focused on those who came from the outside. 1 In the 1990s, as the focus of civil rights history has shifted from national leadership, organizations, laws, and institutions to what David Garrow calls “locally based understanding,” 2 the Mississippi story has increasingly come to focus on “local people,” the title of John Dittmer’s history of the Mississippi struggle and the subject of Charles Payne’s equally fine study of the organizing tradition. Other recent books include investigations of the Ku Klux Klan Neshoba County...
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Jan 1, 1996
John Dittmer + 1
