Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of
the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully
realized. Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard
Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the
landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the
critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the
Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably
his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to
1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New
York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville,
Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political
science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his
wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented
a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment
toward racial justice. Ball, with breathtaking historical
authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish
outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape
contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs
and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening
message: "No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome." From refereeing
football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls
integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to
life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night,
from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before
a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in
the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly
became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on
to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more
diverse, equitable, and just society. Ball's story is one of an
imitable advocate who didn't just observe as a passive spectator
but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the
list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter
movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book
will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its
depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville's Jewish
community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very
fundamentalist Protestant South.
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