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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 Black Paper come from well-known civil rights heroes
such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Rita Schwerner, but the
book also brings new voices and stories to the fore. Alongside
these iconic names appear grassroots activists and everyday people
who endured racial terror and harassment for challenging, sometimes
in seemingly imperceptible ways, the state's white supremacy. This
new edition includes the original foreword by Reinhold Neibuhr and
the original introduction by Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter
III, as well as Jason Morgan Ward's new introduction that places
the book in its context as a vital source in the history of the
civil rights movement.
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 Black Paper come from well-known civil rights heroes
such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Rita Schwerner, but the
book also brings new voices and stories to the fore. Alongside
these iconic names appear grassroots activists and everyday people
who endured racial terror and harassment for challenging, sometimes
in seemingly imperceptible ways, the state's white supremacy. This
new edition includes the original foreword by Reinhold Neibuhr and
the original introduction by Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter
III, as well as Jason Morgan Ward's new introduction that places
the book in its context as a vital source in the history of the
civil rights movement.
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 aggressors dumped bodies.
Others pointed to an old steel-framed bridge across that same muddy
creek. Spanning three generations, Hanging Bridge reconstructs two
wartime lynchings -- the 1918 killing of two young men and two
pregnant women, and the 1942 slaying of two adolescent boys -- that
propped up Mississippi's white supremacist regime and hastened its
demise. These organized murders reverberated well into the 1960s,
when local civil rights activists again faced off against racial
terrorism and more refined forms of repression. Connecting the
lynchings at Hanging Bridge to each other and then to Civil
Rights-era struggles over segregation, voting, poverty, Black
Power, and Vietnam, Jason Morgan Ward's haunting book traces the
legacy of violence that reflects the American experience of race,
from the depths of Jim Crow to the emergence of a national campaign
for racial equality. In the process, it creates a narrative that
links living memory and meticulous research, illuminating one of
the darkest places in American history and revealing the resiliency
of the human spirit.
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 mobilising 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 held in the South. As Ward shows, years before
""segregationist"" became a badge of honour for civil rights
opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every
turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social
order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown
decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics
and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the
coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal
era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s,
Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that
mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises
troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's
defenders.
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